My Domino

My planner is a personal size Filofax Domino in a color that I can't quite remeber the name of which seems to have been discontinued - I didn't see it on the either the US site or the UK site. I first saw Filofax binders on my honeymoon while we were in London. I think the one I saw was an A5 Classic, a leather binder with a hefty price tag. The leather felt so super soft! It looked so fancy! But it was over £100 and I didn't know what I'd do with it at the time.

My Domino

I went with the Domino (a non-leather binder) when I bought my planner about a year ago since I was preggers and didn't want to worry about a kidlet mucking up a nice leather one. I'd worry about the leather getting beat up in my purse, too. But I wouldn't mind having one some day, maybe an A5 that would live on my desk.

Even though I've had the Domino since last January, I didn't use it for much other than the "diary" (a.k.a. calendar, in American English) last year. I read David Allen's Getting Things Done and enjoyed it, but fell off the bandwagon when it came to actually implementing the strategies in the book. A few weeks ago, I reread it from my new stay-at-home mom perspective. Obviously most of my day is spent taking care of little E, but when I have an hour or two to myself in the morning while he's still asleep, it's great to have organized lists of all the things I could be doing.

I knew I wanted to use the Domino for implementing GTD, but I wasn't really feeling the love for my binder. I recently figured out the two reasons why. First, I wanted to use my fountain pen with it, but my pen had skipping problems right out of the box that made it very frustrating to use. I was ready to give up on fountain pens before I'd even really gotten started! I finally asked about it on the Fountain Pen Network, and the nice people there told me to try washing the nib with just a little bit of dish soap. That did the trick, one problem down! The second thing holding my binder back was the bland manila-envelope color tabbed dividers that come with it. I realized this was when case when I saw this post that mentions making your own tabs from card stock linked from Philofaxy (a blog for Filofax fans!). Things have been smooth sailing since I put the new tabs in:

Purdy tabs!

This is getting pretty long already, so I'll have to save my other thoughts on GTD as well as what goes behind each tab for another day!

Here's Mr. Tiny looking out the front window. The clingers are a snowman scene, not Christmas, so they can stay up since it's still winter! (Not that you can tell from the weather, it must have been close to 50 degrees yesterday! In Chicago! ZOMG!)