My first ring bound notebook

Sorting through an old box of 'stuff' the other day, I came across an old ring bound notebook of mine that dates back to the 1970's 

The two rings are spaced by 80mm and they are 13mm internal diameter. 

The page size is 162x100mm so shorter but wider than Filofax personal size. 

It's not particularly high quality, its made from thick card, but it was used quite a bit when I was in my 'younger years' 

I can date it by the notes on some of the pages. 

These scribbled notes are a very rough design for a hi-fi cabinet that was building at home at the time! The numbers would be inches for the length of the parts for the frame. I didn't discover metric until I started work in 1975.

I've looked for details of who might have made it from the internal label, but so far I've not found any reference to this type of ring binder. 

I think I most probably bought it in W.H. Smiths sometime in the early 1970's. It was most probably my first encounter with a ring binder!! At the time we only used normal exercise books at school, nothing as sophisticated as a ring binder at my school! 

May be it was this that planted a seed of using a Filofax years later.... who knows! 

Note taking in your Filofax

Laurie dedicated her 'Free For All Friday' last week to note taking. 

Should you use a notebook or your planner or another organiser for this is up to you. There is no right and wrong at all. We all have different requirements. 

For me, I sometimes dedicate a notebook to a long term project and pick it up as and when I need to add some notes. But like everyone I will often end up with bits of paper with notes when I'm 'away' from my organiser/planner that need to be added to my planner. 

One example is when I go to my French class on a Monday, I don't take my A5 organiser with me to that class, I have a big A4 folder with class notes and other books etc. I have tended to use an A6 organiser with some simple lined paper in it for notes, I would then transfer the notes to my A5 when I got home. 

Laurie's post on Friday got me thinking about this a bit more, could I improve my note taking arrangements when I didn't have my A5 to hand? Was there a better size I could use instead of A6? 

Obviously I could use another A5, may be one with smaller rings with just some lined paper and a year planner for lesson dates. However, I wanted to consider other sizes as well. 

I decided to look at all of the common sizes to see what options there was. I thought this might benefit anyone else as well. 

Here is a table of my findings, explained in more detail below.

Download a higher resolution version of the table here. 

If you are using an A5 organiser, then as a satellite obviously another A5 will work, but so will Pocket and Mini, they both fit on to the rings without any re-punching or folding of the page. Personal will fit, but the bottom or top inside corner will need trimming or folding to clear the bottom or top ring. If you use Mini, you will be able to fit two Mini pages on to an A5! See this post for details. 

With Personal size as your main size,  Mini will fit the rings but with a small fold or trimming the inside corners to avoid the inner rings

If you are using A6 then again Pocket and Mini will fit without any adjustments being required. 

Or if you use a Pocket then Mini will fit this easily. 

Using larger pages in a smaller organiser sadly leads to having to re-punch and fold the pages, not ideal. I do use a normal A4 page in my A5, but not punched for A4, just plain A4 paper in landscape, punched for A5 and then folded in 'Z fold' to fit the A5 organiser, a slightly different solution though. 

Not included in the table is M2, these pages are similar in size to Mini, but landscape not portrait. They also only have 3 holes punched. M2 will fit A5 and A6 perfectly, one M2 on each set of rings in fact. M2 also fits on to Personal, except M2 is wider than Personal, you might be able to tolerate this for occasional notes. M2 will fit in to Pocket and Mini as well, but it will require to be folded to reduce the width. 

Additionally Deskfax has ring spacing perfectly set for using Personal size pages. 

My own preferred solution:

After putting together this post I dug out my 'stash' of pocket inserts to assemble a set-up to try this out. 

Judging by the old diary inserts that I've kept, I was actively using Pocket size for a number of years. I have quite a few pocket ring organisers, but in the end I settled on this unknown brand one to use. 

It has small 11mm pocket rings, which will be enough for some note paper and a year planner and a pen. It is made from a soft leather and as well as card pockets it does have a full width back pocket and a generous size leather pen loop. 

Pocket in A5 fits perfectly!

Pocket of unknown brand, there's no makers name on it anywhere!

Small rings but they are perfect for my application. 

I'm set to try out my new portable note-taking/note keeping organiser. I will let you know how it works out. 

Have you ever 'mixed' sizes in your Filofax before? What sizes have you used? 

Ring bound and bound planners/notebooks?

I see an awful lot of people in our community that have changed from ring bound planners to the travellers notebook style notebooks for planning and note taking.

I use quite a combination myself. Here are my daily planners/organisers On the left is my Quo Vadis Daily 21, which I use as my journal with my Van der Spek pen case, I only write in fountain pen in my journal. Then my Van der Spek A5 Manager custom which is my main stay planner and tool for organising tasks and appointments. And then on the right is my Van der Spek Nomad regular size travellers note book, this is purely used for notes for each episode of the podcast.

As they say... it is pen and paper so does it matter how it is assembled and how it functions? Not really.

For those of you who also have a 'foot in both camps' I also host the 'Travellers Notebook Times' blog which mainly features a once a week 'Web Finds' post just like here on Philofaxy but for Travellers Notebooks. I have done some reviews as well and we feature new product announcements too.

So do you use a combination of paper and pen formats like I do?

William Hannah - The Notebook/Planner

I was in conversation with someone in Toronto the other day and he was asking what it was I blogged about.... Oh no I thought what will they think... So I sent them the link to Philofaxy.

They came back with a link to a friend of theirs who had created a notebook/planner product. It is a customisable disc bound notebook/planner, but the way in which the discs are linked is different compared to the Arc disc bound books. So I went and had a look for myself and I was quite impressed with what I saw.

The brand name is William Hannah Ltd, they are based in England and their website is very detailed and I was able to message the company to get answers to one or two questions about the products and their responses came back very quickly.

The cover is made from Italian leather and is available in 5 different exterior colours and in total there are 15 different colour combinations of exterior/interior colour. The interior is in a suede finish. It looks well made and should last a life time.

The mechanism is based on a disc system but the discs are slotted on to a bar, this gives the system some rigidity not present in other disc binding systems and I think this is a definite improvement. The spacing is similar to the Staples Arc disc system but the holes in the paper are a slightly different shape. The discs are made with stainless steel so they won't rust.

The paper and inserts use good quality 100gsm paper. It is described as having a smooth finish, so it should accept fountain pen ink quite well. Naturally this will vary depending on the nib width and type of ink.

The number of inserts available include a week per page diary, undated week planners, lined paper, plain paper, graph and dotted pages, there is also a sample pack. These are all at very reasonable priced for A5 inserts on good quality paper.

Check out the launch video from last year. 

The website: http://www.williamhannah.com

The Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamHannahUK/

You Tube Channel:

Have you ever used a disc bound planner/notebook?

Thank you to William Hannah for permission to use their images in this post which are their copyright of course. 

Guest Post - Oxford International A5 Notebook - Jotje

During my visit at Staples today (one of the many bonuses of being self-employed is a company pass to Staples …), I discovered the A5 Oxford International Notebook. It immediately caught my attention, because it had pre-punched pages. Would it actually fit an A5 Filofax, I wondered? Luckily, I had mine with me and could check it out immediately. Bingo! Perfect fit!

Because the paper looked and felt so nice, I bought it for “investigation purposes”.

The notepad comes with 80 sheets of 80 gsm paper.

 

Upon opening I saw that it was multi-punched in order to fit a variety of A5 binders (Filofax being one of them). The page also has a very interesting grid layout. Ideal for taking notes during meetings or phone calls. The left-hand small column could be used to note down the date of a To-Do, then the right-hand small column for the date when the To-Do has been finished. Just a thought …

 

The top and bottom row has some sort of added grid, maybe to be able to add vertical lines? Here is a close-up of that grid:

 

The pages itself are micro-perforated and are easily removed from the notepad, without that typical “feathered” look of perforated pages. Nicely done!

The pages fit nicely in the rings of my Filofax. The page size itself is identical to the A5-Filofax pages.

However, the punched holes are a little bit off. Filofax have the holes punched more towards the edge of the paper. Therefore, the pages appear a bit narrower compared to Filofax inserts:

Honestly, I couldn’t care less!

Because next was the fountain pen test. Since the paper feels very smooth and substantial, I had high hopes.

Here is the result of my fountain pens:

Just delightful!

Curious how the reverse side is looking?

That’s right! Where the Filofax pages typically show major bleed-through, there isn’t even the slightest show through of the ink on this paper! I’m totally in love!

Here is the rear cover with information about the company:

They also produce a wide range of very nice bound notebooks in various sizes with 90 gsm paper! And even with purple lines …!

Thank you Jotje for another excellent review

Filofax as a Notebook.

If you don't have a diary refill in your Filofax, does it cease to be an 'organiser'?  Could it become a very versatile notebook?

How did I arrive at this idea or notion? Well looking at the Filofax I recently refurbished, I started to think about what I could use it for? Then I thought... notebook... put in some lined paper, some plain paper and bingo it would work I'm sure.

So then I started to refine the idea about how you could make it better than a 'bound' notebook. In a previous life as a project manager I was forced in to using bound notebooks with numbered pages.

They work ok if you can dedicate a notebook for each project you are controlling. But it becomes a headache at meetings when you turn up with five or six A4 notebooks and you have to go ferreting through them looking for the answer to a question or for some information.

So a Filofax 'Notebook' has the advantage of being loose leafed, so if you are doing more than one project you can use section dividers to separate out the different projects, and move pages in to their respective sections.

One technique I used when we moved house was to use different coloured pages for different topics, it reduces the number of section dividers you need and you can quickly get to the relevant section if you know the colour code you have used.

So if you have a spare organiser it wouldn't cost a lot to turn it in to a Filofax notebook. Just buy some more pages, some of which you might already have. The other great thing is you can transfer notes in to your main Filofax organiser very easily too.

If it doesn't work out for you, you can of course use the pages in your main organiser so nothing will go to waste. I think this represents quite good value for money, minimum initial outlay, if it works for you great, if not just use the pages in your other organiser... result!

I'm going to try this out with a Personal size organiser, but I think it would work with most of the popular sizes.

Would this work for you? Do you have any thoughts on how to improve on this idea? Lets hear your thoughts in the comments.