Pam Alison Knits

On the whole, I am happy with my decision to use the Personal Filofax with a day-to-page insert this year. However, I have one huge bugbear with Filofax inserts: they are difficult to archive neatly (that “neatly” is very important in these parts). In fact, this was one of the factors which was strongly steering me towards using my William Hannah A5 notebook as the basis for my 2024 planning until, in the middle of last year, the Filofax website started to list a new version of their archive binders. This, and finding the personal-sized Holborn for a decent price in the summer sale at Jarrolds’ department store, made my decision for me.

Back in Filofax’s heyday, they sold both boxes and binders to archive your used sheets for posterity, and to house your yet-to-be-used sheets. The boxes fell by the wayside in the lean years, but Filofax continued to list their storage binders. These consisted of a basic black plastic cover with two fixed posts to hold the pages in place which also act as press-studs to fasten the front cover and stop pages falling out. The posts are spaced to work with the 6-hole puching which is, of course, the reason why it’s not possible to archive 6-ring binder pages in standard 2-ring binders – the spacing of the holes doesn’t work on any of the sizes. If you could find them, there were 3 sizes of binder to choose from – to suit A5, Personal, and Pocket sheets. The trouble was, these binders were rarely in stock when I looked for them, and I never actually managed to buy one. The new style binders are the same design, but a grey plastic instead of black. I’ve been frustrated to find that these new binders are also pretty much always out of stock, leaving me with that old problem of how I will archive my used pages.

Back in my opening paragraph, I mentioned that I want to archive pages neatly. It is, of course, perfectly possible to archive the sheets in a pile held together with rubber bands, or ribbons, or to simply place them loose in a box. I’ve tried, in previous years, storing them in slimline plastic multi-compartment wallets, and I’ve laboriously stuck them into notebooks. Nothing is really what I’d call neat; and the level of accessibility varies from okay to pretty rubbish. Short of investing in a whole new Filofax every year, possibly more than once a year depending on how much I want to archive, I’ve found myself stymied. And yet, I can’t deny that I am enjoying using the Filofax Holborn: it has fitted perfectly into my life as an everyday carry which is not too big and not too heavy, yet big enough for most of my needs.

Which brings me, by a long and winding road, to the solution I’ve decided upon. I will not pretend that it’s ideal, nor that it is the simplest of the ideas I pondered, but it is perhaps the one that pleases me the most and that is important. I am using one of the William Hannah disc-bound archive sets, plus their A5 week-to-page diary and, when it’s time to remove pages from the Filofax I’m re-writing the information into the A5 diary then disposing of the Filofax pages. Thus the personal size is my current and forward-planning tool, and the A5 becomes my archive; the filled A5 archive “notebooks” are neat and pleasing to my eye. My long-term plan is to move back to A5 entirely once I’m through with my formal working life, so I see this dual-size system as having a naturally limited lifespan. It’s early days yet, but I think it should prove workable.

The downside of all this is having to transcribe the entries, but that shouldn’t be too much of a task if I keep up with it. I am thinking of making it a Sunday-morning sort of activity, transcribing the previous week across into the archive. Of course, I’ve had to play catch-up with the first couple of months of the year so there’s been some more intensive copying going on the past week. It doesn’t take too long to copy across a week’s entries, though.

I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t indulging in a heavy dose of day-dreaming alongside the practical set-up of this system. I’m imagining a time when everything in my paper-based life can be held together in these disc-bound archive sets. Not only what we British call diary pages (the plans for the day or week, appointments etc), but notes and my journal pages, too. Will this ever come to pass? Perhaps not, but it’s such a nice dream that I don’t want to spoil it with pesky old reality.