Filofax College - Week 2 - Upsizing - Guest Lesson with Paperlovestory!

Here is week 2 of Filofax College, as I am away in London this week for two days I arranged for a very special teacher for you all!!! Paperlovestory!!! She will also be teaching you next week as her lesson is split in to two! I hope you enjoy it and learn lots!

Welcome to another lesson at Filofax College :) Imy has very kindly allowed me to do a lesson Upsizing and Downsizing. This is split into two parts so first, we will look at the easier option: upsizing. In this lesson, we will look at why it may be necessary, how to do it and also real life examples.

So, firstly, why?

Well, life is ever-changing. For life at university, you may have found a mini or a pocket sufficient for your planning needs but when your working or family life begins, you may find yourself planning other things; work tasks and projects are a few career examples and in terms of family life planning, often you'll have to plan for other people too. This is when the extra size or capacity can be beneficial.

Ways of upsizing include going up a size. This could be as simple as personal to A5 or pocket to personal but I have seen some Tweeps talk about jumping from pocket straight to A5! However, upsizing an also include increasing the ring capacity. For the personal alone, there is the Slimline (11mm rings), the Compact (15mm rings), a standard personal (23mm) and also a larger personal with 30mm rings (though these are few and far between).

The one negative about upsizing is the increased weight you will inevitably lug around with you. Back in August, I took my stuffed personal Osterley on a day trip to London and the next day, I woke up with bruises on my shoulder from where my bag's straps had been! I took everything out of my bag and the thing that was heaviest was actually my Filofax. So, upsizing to an A5 may have its perks (increased ring size in some cases and increased space in every case) but bear in mind that the weight can increase dramatically! Join the Filofax Heavyweight Contest

To end the first part of this lesson, I have some real life examples of upsizing.

Josh @JoshuaLaPorte

I tend to horde in my Filofax, and consequently find myself exceeding the capacity of my binder quite easily. When you take a day-per-page diary, add copious notes, extensive reference information, and a comprehensive contacts section, a few card holders and top opening vinyl envelopes, you quickly find a standard 23mm ringed personal Filofax overstuffed. There are a three main options at this point; you can remove some part of your planner setup, you can swap to an A5 size binder, or you can search out a personal sized binder with larger rings. In my case, I found that there were really no functions I was comfortable with removing from the planner setup, so I was left with the latter two choices, and tried both.

Filofax has made a few personal sized binders with the larger (30 mm) rings. The “5/4” Winchester, Portland “Grand”, Cavendish personal, and Cuban zip all have the large capacity 30mm rings. 30mm rings are usefully larger than the more standard 23mm rings offered in most personal size binders, but are not so large as to make the planner less portable. For many, this is an ideal size. I was lucky enough to find a Cavendish in Navy which I’ve used for most of this year. The 30mm rings allowed me to carry my wallet contents, all my contacts, a very comprehensive collection of essential information, notes, and about six weeks’ worth of day on two pages diary setup. By placing most of the reference information and contacts at the front and rear, I put the pages which get written on most fairly close to the center of the binder, which helped prevent the rings from being an encumbrance when writing in the binder.

After several months of this setup, I found my binder reaching the bursting point again. I decided to try upsizing a second time, and moved into a US half letter size binder, roughly equivalent to A5 size. This binder had massive 1.5 inch rings, measuring roughly 38mm inside diameter. This huge binder allowed me to carry far more of my day on two pages diary and the ease with which I could add work documents meant that many new items were added to the setup.

Imy (pocket to compact to personal)

I was so in love with my regency but there was just something a little wrong with it, it was getting too small, it was becoming time to upsize! I just couldn't take the small size any more. The rings were too full, the binder was hard to close (not just stuff on the rings but the pockets were overly full). I took the plunge and knew I needed to upsize and get some bigger rings before I broke a Filofax, I tried to move into an old Filofax so many times but there just was not enough love there! I knew I had to buy a new binder, and so I did. I bought the Osterley, and upsized to that. The best part about going from Compact to Personal is that you do not need to make new inserts, reprint anything etc... you just can take it out and move up!

Stay tuned for part II: downsizing. The second part is where the homework will be so keep your eye out! :)

Thank you very much for this post on upsizing and I look foward to reading your post next week on downsizing!