My new diary

I like gadgets. Honest I do. I like my GPS that I take when I go walking, and I like my Palm PDA. I like my ipod, especially when I have to wait around in airports. But I also like pens and pencils and paper. i like having different notebooks for different jobs. I have notebooks with ruled white paper and one with yellow paper. I have a tabbed notebook for sermon ideas and outlines. I have a nice new plain paper notebook for doing hand drawn mind maps. And I have a paper diary. More to the point I have a new paper diary.

For what must be the better part of 25 years I've used a Filofax diary system. I started out with the slimline version but very quickly moved to the larger ring system in the personal sized binder. I've worn out two binders and have been using my third for some time now, but it was time for a new experiment.

On Monday a bright new A5 Filofax binder arrived on my door step. The bigger size is more awkward to carry but it looks more flexible and easier to manage than the smaller version. I've already printed out my address book from Outlook using Clickbook to format the pages into A5. And I also created some diary pages to take me through this year.

I like the size of the diary because the notepaper and other pages are easy to use. I've created a section for Actions/To Do and one for notes. My actions are printed from Thinking Rock via a two column Word document. I just find it easier to work with the two column format. Again Clickbook is the easy way to resize and print the pages back to back.

So, overall I'm happy with my new diary. We'll see how it performs over the next few weeks as I use it day by day.

If you're interested, I got my new binder from The Organiser Store and I opted for the Metropol binder. There's also a website full of templates for Filofax style diary systems at DIY Planner.