Guest interview

My 'experienced user' interview is published over at Philofaxy today, in which I share my thoughts on using a planner over the long term.

Any thoughts or comments would be welcome, either here or at Philofaxy. 

Personal change with your Filofax

Your Filofax can work harder for you. Yes it can. It is already busy helping you sort out your day-to-day life. It is your external memory. It gives you quick access to information you need, whenever you need it. But you’re in charge; you have to do all the work.

Maybe it’s time to ask your Filofax to take the strain and to help you out with a special project. If there’s a personal change you want to make, a habit you want to lose or develop, you already have in your hand or on your desk the key to achieving it.

Do you want to stick to a diet or exercise regime? Do you want to read more or cut down on TV or video games? How about getting in the habit of writing a journal every day? Whatever it is you want to change about your life, your habits or your behaviour, you can get your Filofax to be your very own coach and your personal cheerleader. Here are some ways you can set up your Filofax to make the dream come true.

Don’t break the chain 

This is Jerry Seinfeld’s method for developing a daily writing habit. Using a year-to-a-page calendar, put an X over each day that you work on your project:

Look at the calendar above. I’ve built up a chain of 15 days in a row when I’ve kept to my diet, or where I’ve written at least a page in my journal. Do I really want to break a 15-day chain by failing today?

Anchor your motivation

When you start out and commit to a change, you will usually have clear, strong reasons for doing so. Days or weeks later when you’re struggling with your commitment, those can become obscured.

You need to be continually reminded of your original motivation. So on a blank page, before you start working on your change, write yourself a question, such as, “Why do I want to exercise daily?” and then answer it. Make sure you capture all the reasons you can think of. You’ll end up with a page like this:

Make sure this is right at the front of your Filofax. You want to see this whenever you open it up. You can add to the list, too, if you discover additional motivations along the way.

Set up milestones 

Work out some sensible milestones on your journey: one, two, three, four weeks; two, three months and so on. Locate these dates in your diary and write them in now, adding check boxes, like this:

Write these in now, as far ahead as you want to look. Later, when you reach each milestone, tick the box with pride and if there is room in your diary, write a few words about how you feel in reaching the milestone.

A letter to yourself 

Write yourself a letter. Tell your future self why this change is important to you and how much you hope that you can make it work. Make it like a proper letter. Give it a date, a salutation and a signature. Seal it in an envelope and write on the front:

Now put the sealed envelope in the back pocket of your Filofax. When you get to the point of quitting, open the letter. Carefully read what your earlier self wrote. Remember the optimism, the determination, and use these memories to strengthen your resolve.


So get your Filofax working harder. What personal change do you want to instigate?

When did you last ask, "What's on my plate?"

I do it all the time. I get all sorts of things I have to do, things I have to think about, conversations I have to have whizzing around in my head. At the start of a work day, I can cope with that; at the end of one, it can stop me properly enjoying my evening or even inhibit good sleep.

When I get in that situation, I've found a way to calm down the noise and relax. It's simply to get a piece of paper and write it all down - just as single words or short phrases. Once I've noted down everything that's on my plate I can put the list where I will see it tomorrow morning and instantly a weight seems to lift from me. Because now I know it will all be attended to and it doesn't have to keep flying around in my head, bothering me all night.

Now, you can do this with any old piece of paper, but I like the idea of visual metaphors. The trouble is, I'm no artist. Fortunately, though, I know a really talented one: Raine, who maintains the wonderful Lime Tree Fruits blog. I shared my concept with her and she got it straight away.

Raine's perfect design - this is the A5 version

Raine has produced a printable in a range of sizes that you can download for free and start using right away. I hope you will.

Indexing your notebook content

If you use a bound notebook rather than a loose-leaf system it can be tricky to locate a particular note just when you need it. Your notes are likely to have been accumulated in a chronological order and unless you maintain multiple notebooks the information won't be organised to make retrieving it always a simple matter.

That's where an index can be very useful. When you set up a new notebook for the first time, reserve the first six pages (or the last six - the choice is yours). Divide each of those pages into four sections, like this:

Do this to all six pages and you will have 24 sections in all. You need to assign each to a letter of the alphabet, combining X, Y and Z in the last section. If you want to combine a few more letters (P and Q, or W and V, for instance) you might be able to get the index down to 4 or 5 pages. Write the relevant letter in each section:

Now, as you go about filling the rest of the notebook, take some time, perhaps weekly, to review the new content and index it. If, for instance, page 3 of your notebook contains a list of the books you want to read, create an entry in your index section for the letter "B":

 If later you should list more books you want to read on page 16, you can add this to the same entry:

Here's how your opening index page might look after a couple of weeks of use:

This is a really practical way to get the advantages of a bound notebook and still be able to find specific content quickly when you need to.

The Thousand Books Project - happy ending time

Remember my Thousand  Books Project? Well, I made it. Nearly two years early, I have just finished my thousandth book since I began logging my reading in July 2005 and set myself a ten-year objective.

I went to a bookshop to choose number one thousand. It had to be a special book and I entered Waterstones with no idea what I was going to buy. And then I saw the perfect choice.

Neil Gaiman is a wonderful writer and an exceptional blogger so I knew this would be good. And it was. I can't possibly do it justice with a summary or a review. If you are in any way creative or aspire to be creative, read the book. It will speak to you.

So, what shall I read next...?

Thousand Books Project - update

I introduced my Thousand Books Project four weeks ago, and shared the exciting (to me) news that I was nearing my target after nearly eight years.

Well, now I'm even closer:

Only twenty more books and I'll have reached my goal.

The Thousand Books Project

I have always read books. I cannot remember a day in my life when I didn’t read at least a page. Other interests have come and gone, but reading has been my one constant leisure pursuit. My reading was disorganised, though. I would have several reading piles, and sometimes get caught out, picking up books from the library I had already read, knowing there was perhaps one book in a ten-book series I hadn’t read but having no idea which one it might be.

Many times, I considered starting a proper record to list the books I read, but always I discounted the idea. What about the hundreds of books I’d already finished? How would they end up getting catalogued?

In late July 2005 I was in a hotel in Mumbai, India on business. July 2005 saw a world record broken in Mumbai:

When 944mm of rain fell on the city in one day I suddenly found I had time on my hands. No planes were flying, no business was going to be done and I had to be patient. Leaving the hotel was not advised. Fortunately I had a pile of books with me and decided that the time had come to start logging what I read.

I knocked up a quick Access database on my laptop, and entered the details of a few books into it as I finished them. Over the years since, I have entered details of every book I have read, as I finished it. I’ve built queries and reports that can show me the data in different ways and track my progress through the several book series I am in the midst of.

A couple of years after I started recording my reading, I printed off some reports and analysed what I had read. It was an odd mix. There was fiction – mainstream and genre – as well as biography, self-help, business, history and an eclectic mix of general non-fiction. I noticed that there was very little in my reading that could objectively be judged ‘worthy’. The occasional Jane Austen was the exception rather than the rule. I wondered whether I should seed more of the classics into my reading. I decided not to. Indeed, I set myself a rule that would largely keep me away from the classics. It was simply this:

Only read books you want to read.

I decided that committing to this rule should be coupled with an ambitious goal. I resolved to read a thousand books within ten years of July 2005. This wouldn’t be easy; at the time I was reading around seventy books in a year. A young family meant I had a limited amount of time to devote to reading, but my target meant I would have to make much better use of the time I did have. And I have never skim-read a book. I have to read every word on every page, and I am not a particularly fast reader.

But what I could do then (and can do much better now) is focus on what I’m reading without getting distracted and having to go back and re-read a paragraph because I have no idea what I just read. I could also find ten minutes here, an hour there that might have been wasted had I not been carrying a book with me. I now always carry a book (or my Kindle) with me. It gets many hits each day.

So, cutting an already lengthy story short, it turns out I am nearly there. I have finished 962 books in the (almost) eight years since that monsoon. Another 38 will see me meet my target. That will happen in late July or early August if I maintain current rates.

How have I done it? Well, the decision to read whatever I want helped keep me motivated. Keeping the record and analysing the numbers introduced a competitive element, too. Every year I have beaten the previous year’s total. Last year I finished over 150 books, which was more than twice the number I was reading just five or six years earlier. This year I believe it will be nearer 175. Can I make it to two thousand books by 2020? Let’s see!

The accidental benefits of carrying a Filofax

I have twice in recent weeks been approached by people who – noting my Filofax – have struck up a conversation with me about it. One of those people reminisced at some length about how she had used one herself and how much more organised she was when she did. The other was a fellow user who had believed he was in a minority of one.

These conversations would never have happened had I not been carrying my Holborn at the time, and this thought made me reflect on what else might have happened purely because I carried this binder around with me.

For one thing, I tend to quickly create in new circles a reputation for being organised. I think the Filofax is a very visible signifier of organisational skills. This is odd really. The Filofax is a device to support organisation in the same way that glasses are a device to support vision, but do we congratulate glasses wearers on their excellent eyesight?

So by bestowing the aura of organisation, owning a Filofax gives us a perhaps unfair advantage, as well as a stand-by talking point. And this is on top of all the more tangible benefits it confers on us, like having important facts always to hand, being able to capture ideas instantly and being able to access appointment details irrespective of internet or power availability.

And there’s more too. The average wallet layout and capacity hasn’t changed in perhaps fifty years or more, despite the profusion of credit cards, loyalty cards and other essential items. Transaction counterfoils also need to be stored, whereas in past years the cheque stub would mean no counterfoil was necessary. With so much to carry, the typical wallet is close to breaking point. With a Filofax to share the load, however, two important benefits come to light: I can carry far more loyalty cards than would otherwise be the case, thereby scoring more freebies and discounts, and the line of my suit will be unspoiled by excess wallet bulge.

Planners don't fail

You learn nothing when you buy a book; learning only comes when you actually read it. Planners are like that too. Planners don't fail, people do. A planner is an inert bundle of paper and binding. It is completely useless except to the extent that you write in it and read what you have written.

No planner can possibly be perfect for everyone. You need to meet the planner half way sometimes and change what you do to get the most out of it. Even if it's totally perfect for your needs you still have to do stuff like carry it around, consult it, write in it until it becomes what the GTD crowd call your 'trusted system'.

Whenever you make a change - and adopting a new planner or planning system is a change - you need to persist until it becomes a habit, until you can't even think about not doing it. This will take some time.

Some people have trouble because they're not terribly organised. Just having a planner won't fix that. Some people have trouble because they are organised and disciplined enough not to need a planner, so the planning is just additional overhead for little gain.

Work out if and why you need a planner. If you do, and you know why, work to find a routine that gives you the planning support you need. Force yourself to use it until you don't need to force yourself any more.

Filofax or Midori?

My recent purchase of a Midori Traveler's Notebook has made me consider my views on the Filofax, and ponder on the relative merits of the two systems.

Let me say right now, if forced to choose between them, I would pick the Filofax, purely on instinct. After all, Filofax has been my daily companion for a long time. It's true that there was a time when I turned away from it to explore the attractions of electronic organisation. But I came back when the novelty wore off and the limitations of the electronic platforms became tiresome.

So why am I now turning to something new? Well, because the distant grass is always greener - while it remains distant. People whose opinions I trust were raving about the Midori. It was gaining a web presence. There were pictures, beautiful pictures. The grass looked very, very green. I had to see if it genuinely was that green; if I hadn't I'd have found no peace. I think this is a feeling that serial Filofax buyers know well. The new binder in the range probably won't be an improvement on your current favourite, but the thought that it might be gnaws away at you and denies you peace until you purchase it.

In these, the early days of my Midori ownership, the honeymoon if you like, I am enjoying the novelty. The leather is plain and dignified, the workings deliciously low tech and it's hard to see how these could suffer any kind of manufacturing defect (I'm looking at you, Filofax rings.) I particularly like how the binder's footprint is only very slightly bigger than that of one of its pages. It has to be said that I quite like the commitment involved in writing in a bound notebook, too. In the Filofax, when I can always toss a page, I don't feel so invested in making sure I write carefully.

But, how could I ever walk away from the Filofax again? The elegance of the loose-leaf system remains compelling. Pages can come and go and move from one binder to another whenever I like. Custom content is far easier to create for any size of Filofax than for the Midori (although that hasn't stopped me trying.) And the pockets - perhaps the best feature of modern Filofax binders - are way more functional and secure than any of the Midori approximations of a pocket.

I have been trying all the way though this post to avoid the awful, sexist metaphor that would see the Filofax as my wife and the Midori as a mistress. Quite aside from the questionable taste of the comparison, it doesn't work in the end, for one simple reason. I will never have to choose between Filofax and Midori. I can live happily with both. I can work out in my own time which system is best for which things. I can put one down and pick up the other free from angst or guilt. I am happy to report that the grass is green all around me. 

The Filofax and the five frogs

"Five frogs sat together on a log. One of them decided to jump off. How many frogs were left on the log?"

This was a question I was once asked on a training course.

My immediate thought was that four remained on the log, working on the basis of simple subtaction, but if that were the case the trainer wouldn't have thought it worth telling me the story. Then I started thinking of what would happen if the frog unbalanced the log when leaping off, tipping one or more of his fellows from their own perches, but there was really no way to make a guess from the information I had.

The trainer told me that there were still five frogs on the log. One of them decided to jump off, but he hadn't taken any action yet.

That made me think. How much time do we all spend sitting on the log, having decided to do something but not actually doing it?

It is here that we as Filofax users have the advantage. The Filofax is a facilitator of action. It helps turn dreams into actuality, goals into accomplishments, to-dos into have-dones.



Image credit: Bobbie Peachey, http://webclipart.about.com

Applications where paper beats software, and where software beats paper.

A few years ago, I wrote a short article for Moleskinerie, noting the backlash against  the trend to do everything on electronic platforms. At the time, I was making a move back to paper, too. I hadn't made my way back to Filofax by then, but it wouldn't be long. Here's what I had to say then:

Here are six applications we all undertake every day that work better with the traditional paper and pen solutions than with electronic tools. 

1. The task list. Web Worker Daily has an inspirational post on this subject. I have found that the paper task list is simply a more effective way to organise my work. I use a form of Bill Westerman’s great GSD system. My GSD book is portable, works anywhere, has never crashed and doesn’t need a help file.

2. The daily schedule. I use a Moleskine pocket diary, in which I use a pencil to note my various appointments, meetings and plans. I can quickly skip to any date and make changes easily whenever I like. When people in the corporate world invite me to meetings in Outlook, I write them in my paper diary when I accept the invitation. Other than that, the only syncing I need to do is to pick up my diary and put it in my pocket when I go out.

3. Meeting notes. For a while, I used Microsoft OneNote but despite the wonderful flexibility of the application, the truth is it still isn’t anywhere near as flexible as writing my own notes in a book or on paper. When I use paper, I can draw pictures, and highlight relationships between ideas without even thinking about it. Yes, OneNote can do that too, but while I’m thinking about the key and mouse actions to make that happen, I’m not concentrating on what’s happening in the meeting.

4. Mind maps. There are lots of PC mind mapping applications. I quite like MindManager. But after you’ve created a few mind maps on a computer, you start to notice they all look the same. They’re nice and shiny and professional looking, of course, but they aren’t memorable in the way a hand-drawn one is. When you draw a bad picture of a factory on your paper mind map, it’s more memorable that the perfect clipart one on screen. When your map ends up asymmetrical because you overestimated how far a topic would take you, it’s more memorable. The imperfections of the paper design create memory hooks that the perfect computer versions just don’t.

5. Your journal. I’ve written about the value I get from keeping a daily record of my life before, and I just can’t imagine doing this in any way other than in a book with a fountain pen. I write more slowly than I can type, and this allows me to record rather more fully-formed ideas that those my keyboard produces. The journal can accompany me anywhere and I can access it quickly in situations in which I’d hesitate to open a laptop. It’s lighter, too.

6. Personal letters and greeting cards. Compare the experience of receiving a hand-written note or card in the mail with that of receiving an e-mail or an e-card. Someone took the trouble not just to click a few keys, but to write you a personal message, put it in an envelope which they then addressed, stamped and posted. Is that not a more valuable affirmation of your relationship than a few on-screen dancing bunnies?

Although I didn't write about this at the time, there is another side to this coin. In the interests of balance, here are my six applications where software beats paper:


1. Contacts. The smartphone era has spelled for me the death of paper address books. My contacts are available to me anywhere, easy to keep updated and easy to use - to cut and paste into a document, for instance, or just to make a call - without any danger of dialling a wrong number. In fact, when was the last time you got a wrong number call? The phenomenon has all but disappeared. I keep a couple of blank address pages in my Filofax just to capture new details. Then I can key them into Outlook when I'm home rather than use the fiddly iPhone data entry system.

2. Financial planning. Excel, Money, Quickbooks or one of half a dozen other applications give everyone the freedom to rise above simple arithmetic and do instead the kind of financial planning that actually matters. Budgeting and keeping track of everything on paper is hard enough in itself, of course, but the type of planning the software does for you would take hours to do manually. Manual ledgers are now historical documents.


3. Reading. This might be a controversial one. I certainly never believed that I would prefer reading on the Kindle to reading a real book. I believed I would miss the tactile dimension, the smell of the paper, the turn of real pages. I believed all of that quite strongly, right up until I first read on a Kindle and found that despite all my fears it was a better experience than reading a real book. I can read every book with the font size and spacing that works best for me. I no longer have to carry a spare book around; an entire library sits in my pocket. And pretty much any book I don't have I can get and be reading inside a minute, wherever I am.

4. Maps. With a paper map, you have to do all the work. There's no 'where am I?' function, no way to zoom in and if you want to venture off the page, you need to be near somewhere you can buy another map. Electronic maps, whether online or device-resident are an enormous leap forward. When they are linked to GPS functionality, they are in a whole different league. And who can be doing with all that unfolding and refolding?

5. Transport timetables. Train and bus companies used to produce (and perhaps still do) enormous books detailing the running times of their vast fleets of vehicles. For most people, 99% of this book was superfluous, but for each person it was a different 99%. And of course, the information was static; it couldn't tell you about an unplanned change in service, about delays, and certainly not about what platform you needed to go to in order to catch the train leaving in five minutes' time. Now there's an app for that and life is so much simpler.

6. Phone directories. I'm talking here about the massive white- and yellow-paged slabs of paper that the phone companies still leave on my doorstep periodically. These list the address and phone number everyone in my close geographical area that hasn't opted out. In the Yellow Pages, business numbers are listed and companies can pay for advertisements and more prominent listings. Again, 99% of these are useless to me, but I don't know ahead of time which is the 1% I'll actually need. And even then, if I need to contact someone outside my area the books let me down. Online search can find the information more quickly, wherever I am (let's face it, those books aren't portable.) I can search the whole world, not just a 10-mile-wide area, and I can access the details of people who have opted out of phone company listing and thus don't appear in the directory.