Today wanted to talk about my Filofax Pocket experiment. Sometimes form over function has its benefits and previous mindsets that you have regarded as truth get changed.
For a long time, I was an A5 size person and I used the Moleskin journals mostly and I enjoyed them. Until I started to experiment with ring bound planners.
I started off with the Filofax Domino in A5 and although this was great I found the physical size of the planner just too big and bulky compared to the journal so I switched back.
Over a period of time of back and forth, I thought to myself let’s give the personal size a try. The whole Filofax personal size is the same size as an A5 journal and on the pages, you still have enough space to write on and the added benefit of adding, removing and repositioning pages as you wish because of the rings.
For a while, this worked but I ended going back to the journal as it was easier to write without the rings getting in the way. But I started to miss the ability to add and remove pages and have sections to store my notes. The journal is very limited in this regard as the pages are in order and cannot be added to or removed. You can work around this limitation by creating collections and threading the page numbers but this becomes cumbersome especially when you move into a new journal. As I prefer to start each day on a new page this wasted pages as there was often 3/4 to 1/2 a page left from the previous day.
I have workbooks with questions and answers that I like to work on daily for my faith. A section might have 20-30 questions, I don’t do all the questions in one sitting and do 5-6 questions a day. With my journal, it was a mission to keep this ready at hand and not have to flip around the journal and try to find the info I was looking for. With the ring binder, I just add a page to the section of my planner.
Recently I started to contemplate using a pocket planner more after seeing how the creative planner crowd got around the small pages with various size foldouts. I noticed there seemed to be more foldout type pages for the pocket-size compared to the personal and A5 sizes.
When I got my pocket-size planner I repurposed some of my Moleskine XL Cahier pages into pages for the pocket size. The normal pocket size page is 81mm wide by 120mm long. Just a bit smaller width wise vs the Personal size which is 95mm wide by 171mm long. What I did was to cut the Cahier pages to 120mm wide and 150mm long. I then punched and put them into my planner, see below.
Writing on this new size for my workbooks is fantastic and I find the extra width very handy and like the length. It is not too short or too long.
For the rest of the sections, I left the pages as standard and am getting used to writing on the smaller 4mm lines. When the paper is finished will just use up the pages from my Moleskine Cahiers, I can get 4 sheets or 8 pages from 1 sheet of the Cahier. The nice thing is the quadrille is 5mm so it is the same size line as the Filofax Personal pages. The good thing is I can repurpose my personal pages I have to fit the pocket with minimal effort. For now, I have tons of paper to use.
Once the pages are used up and I need to empty my section in the planner all do is scan the pages. I then save them into a pdf and save onto my OneDrive.
I am really enjoying my Filofax Pocket and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a small planner. With the fold-out pages, you definitely don’t feel like the pages are too small.
Let me know in the comments below what type of ring planner you use.
Craig's Musing's 