Here’s Laurie with the fourth installment of The Comparison Project!
Hello again! – It’s Laurie with post 4 of the Comparison Project.
For the past 3 posts I’ve been comparing various types of diary and to-do inserts in an effort to find our what works best for me and furthers my twin goals of getting things done and avoiding distraction.
For the first week, I used week-on-two-pages diary inserts from Filofax. The first set had lines for each hour between 8am and 4pm Monday – Friday, with smaller spaces allocated to the weekends:
The second week’s inserts were also week-on-two-pages, but without lines and with equal space allotted to the weekend days:
What I learned from comparing the first two sets of inserts is:
• I prefer it when equal space is given to all days, including weekends;
• Lines are helpful to me since my handwriting is rather free-form (aka messy); and
• I don’t like the appointment times included on inserts – I don’t use them and think they just take up space – especially when the space per day is small.
This week, I stayed with the week-on-two-pages format, but switched things up by using a vertical instead of horizontal format:
I have never used the vertical format before – have never been drawn to it and had a preconceived notion that these were not for me. Well….I actually found a lot to like about seeing the week in this way – and saw my days more in blocks of time than I did while using the horizontal inserts. I don’t think I could rely on this type of insert without also using my various sets of to-do lists, which I wrote about in my second post, but – in tandem with the to-do lists I think this format could be very effective – particularly for getting a quick gestalt sense of what your week is like. Much to my surprise, I will definitely consider using these in the future.
For the final week, I wanted to use something very different. At first I considered the week-to-a-page inserts from Filofax:
But looking at them, I knew they would be an epic fail for me – no room for anything – a hot mess! The tiny spaces made me feel claustrophobic before I even wrote down a single appointment. So, rather than waste time on a format that was so clearly not for me, I went in the opposite direction and printed out Ray Blake’s (My Life All in One Place) day-on-two-pages inserts, which are lovely and elegant:
The file I downloaded was Ray’s 2014 calendar and, as I was not clever enough to figure out how to change the day of the week to correspond to this year, I have simply covered the days up here and will write the correct weekdays for 2013 in by hand.
These inserts have all the space anyone could wish for! You could do a The Hills are Alive twirl on the mountain on these inserts – they are that generous.
The left page has lines and times for appointments:
And the right page has spaces for tasks and notes:
I am really looking forward to using these inserts this week – and I think that with these I could eliminate my Must-Do-Today section and incorporate daily to-dos right on to these calendar pages. I’ll let you know how it goes. And a big thanks and shout-out to Ray Blake!
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