the zeitgeist of zoe

Finally here I am at Zoe’s blog!

Back in the days when the PhilofaxyAllStarTeam released we both agreed to exchange posts about our Health/Fitness Filofax.

Great idea, huh? You probably have read her guest post here on my blog. It was a very popular one and I keep receiving visitors on that one 🙂

Well, two months passed by and here I am with my Fit-o-fax, right?

Nope!

My orange Domino is still looking at me waiting for those exercise trackers and food logs. I am just not into getting healthy these days! 😀

Seriously, I need to get to it, but as it may happen after the Holiday splurge *any excuse* I thought I should get going on something different for sweet Zoe.

So here I am following my journey of bouncing around Filofaxes. As we do, ya know? 🙂

My latest update on that can be found at Vanjilla’s blog, and to pick up where I left, I present you my Filofax Swap 5 – A Classy Attempt starring Almond Slimline Amazona:

Very classy isn’t it?

Yeah, I pet it, opened/closed, and played with it a lot! I mean way too much. and at work!

One of the days I literally had to “put it away” like an addicting candy box just so I could stop poking it and concentrate on getting stuff done.

At work, inside a drawer to help me “behave”

Well, although I had a great time touching and sniffing at it, I managed to get even further into my planner fail while we were hanging together.

So, let’s talk about it! (when a relationship doesn’t work, you need to talk about it, right?)

As you can see, for a slimline it was holding quite a lot:

But it didn’t really hold what I needed.

I could fit tabs for blog, notes and possibility – as you can obviously read:

 Than the next row I managed to add 5 more tabs.

First one for journaling (the smiley face) for when I am not home and don’t have my gorgeous Baroque with me. Second one (the check mark) for to-do lists, third one (circle) for health stuff…

  Fourth for movies, books and music (again when I am away from my Baroque – I usually transfer the pages or the notes when I get home) and fifth for shopping lists.

When I was using Chamomile it was a pain in the butt to be transferring over the weekly sheets as I run out of them so quickly.

Obviously the slimline wouldn’t make that process any easier, it rather became more frequent. Adding to the fact that I wasn’t even liking my layout AND the wonderful colorful post by Imy, I ended up with this:

 Writing by hand on the top of the page the current week and writing to-dos.

Not practical to plan ahead at all. I liked the color paper thou and kept on that “system” till…well today.

For daily thoughts and more detailed to-dos I would do exactly the same, a blank colored page.

And to find them I used a tab with an arrow:

 and for the month a grid:

Now, besides the fact that I can’t put a month’s worth of weekly pages inside the organizer, there are three more draw backs to it:

1- The left pocket is one of those loose ones (not sure how it is called), so every time I opened/closed it, the sticky notes would rub on that pocket and bend the corners. Here is the pocket:

with the sticker I got from Rori at our mini-MeetUp 😉

I then had to flip the flyleaf backwards so the sticky notes wouldn’t get damaged. Like this:

It is not handy, I tell ya.

2- The leather scratches very easy. There is a scratch from the zipped plastic envelope on the leather! I guess the leather is too delicate.

See, I carry the plastic envelope in the back of it all as I use the stuff in there just once in a while (receipts, stamps, etc). But, it made some marks on that sensitive Amazona leather:

The pic is not showing it well, but it is very noticeable in person! Really!
Not that I am picky or anything…. 😀

 So once I realized this was happening I folded and tucked in a paper in the back pocket so it would in between the zipper and the leather like this:

Not pretty, huh?

Well, moving on.

3- The Filofax curse: Pen Loop!

When I got this organizer, the pen loop was just like new, super flat against the cover.
I almost never put pens in the pen loops because I know they don’t fit but for some reason I decided to experiment on that one. I SO REGRET DOING IT!

First, as you can see just like Chamomile, once the pen is placed, it falls right on top of the tabs:

So to close it, I need to pull it to the side and then release the elastic:

It works, and somehow the pen finds its way around the tabs:

I used like that for a while but it got old as every single time I opened the organizer, the pen was stuck in a few tabs and I had to pull it out again.
I then decided to go back to no-pen in the pen loop and what happens?
The darn thing stretched out and now the organizer won’t close all the way even without the pen!

How annoying is that?

Ah! And that reminded me of another thing! So we are now into the is 4th issue already!

Ya know, I never really like the way clasp closures look. And by that I mean all Filofax clasp closures.  So  I have been always obviously drawn to slimlines and Dominos as they look like simple notebooks.

Shocking news is that I SO MISSED a clasp closure on this one! I now have a total different respect for that little leathered-button thingy.

Without that EVERYTHING got into my Filofax! Really, everything!
I always put the organizers with the “opened” side facing up as random papers that are not stored on pockets or the plastic envelope may fall off. In this case because there was nothing holding the whole organizer together EVERYTHING I carelessly toss into my purse  would fall inside of it! Pens, coins, other random papers and the worse – keys! I almost flipped when I saw my keys bending all my pages INSIDE my Filofax.

I now love clasp closure!

On a side note, just so I don’t offend my slimline feelings, I need to say that this organizer is totally GORGEOUS! the color, the texture… I really struggled taking my hands off it!  Only for keeping my life together, that beauty wasn’t of much help! 😀

Well, sweets….are you still there? Thank you for reading it all the way!

I have been in an open and shameless planner failure for a while now and of course, need to figure something out before the new year starts.  I can’t live off to-do lists on a day-to-day basis. Planning is crucial!

Keep your fingers crossed that my next update will be a much more organized one! Because that’s what this is all about, right? 🙂

Smooches to you all and thank you sweet Zoe for hosting me here! ❤

————————-> Keep tuned for Filofax Swap 6 – Never giving up! —————————>

Never give up indeed! Thanks to the glorious and illustrious Lime Tree for such a great post with such yummy pictures! I’m sure we all feel the pain of the ongoing planner conundrum…keep the faith girl…we all know you’ll come up with something epic : )

The fabulous and fantastic Kanalt has graciously allowed me to return the favor of doing a “What’s In My Bag” post on her blog, Well Planned Life : )

Check it out here:

Enjoy!!