A Look Inside My Midori

Well here we are – another planner post. I have a ‘thing’ about planners and stationary – strange I know – but I do. I love to have a system that is ‘just right’ for me and am constantly tweaking my system so that it works as a great support tool rather than be burdensome.

I’ve been using my Midori for a little over a week now and have to say I love it! Initially I felt a little bit guilty about moving out of my Filofax and into my Midori. However, my Filofax is still in use but it now fills the purpose of my Home keeping Journal – another post completely! Not everything has been moved out of my Filofax, just the daily diary section.

What I’m loving about the Midori is that it is significantly lighter and much easier to carry around with me. It is so slim that it fits beautifully into my handbag without ‘taking over’.

I have played about a bit with various inserts over the week and think I have found my perfect combination. 

I prefer to keep it to just three notebooks and a craft folder to hold flyer’s, sticky notes, and other little stationary bits and bobs.

I tried 4 notebooks but it just was too bulky for me.

The first notebook I have is my daily diary – covered in some pretty scrapbook paper.

I have used the Midori 002 insert – which is the grid notebook – and am drawing in my own diary pages based on the Midori diary insert. I chose to do it this way instead of buying the insert because I love the grid-block pattern of the page and I like that I have the flexibility to mark it up any way I wish.

I have done a bit of photo editing for privacy purposes 🙂

I have to say that this daily diary set up is working so much better for me than the Filofax diary. I was finding that I never had enough space to write all the things that I need to keep track of during the week. I was adding little note pages and sticky notes to my Filofax diary pages but that was beginning to make it rather bulky. I now have one page for a week to view diary and the facing page is for notes. On the notes page I have my ‘To Do’ list, Prayer List, the weeks meal plan, a colour-code key (just until I know it by heart), a little note on tracking my grocery bill and the little heart is to track ‘no spend’ days. That is spending money outside of the months set budget. I like to see how long I can go without spending on something unnecessary 🙂

Behind my diary is a little pocket folder that I made to hold sticky-notes and bit’s of paper that I might need for the week.

Currently I have sticky notes, a flyer about a ringing competition that the girls are in on Saturday and my youngest daughters rather detailed dance rehearsal schedule for the next 3 weeks.

I’m not hugely sold on this pocket system. I think I am going to get the Midori plastic zip pocket insert from The Journal Shop instead.

Behind the pocket insert I have my journal. I showed you a few pages from my ongoing journal a few weeks ago. I have left off in my last journal and continued journaling in this notebook. I have used insert 003 which is the plain paper with no ruled lines. I have covered my journal notebook in a page from Country Living and decorated about 10 pages so far. My journal is the place where I record thoughts, happenings, observations, ideas, dreams – just about everything. It’s a place where I can just get whatever is in my head and many small daily observations and happenings that I don’t want to forget down on paper.

Behind that notebook (not pictured) I have my last notebook – again I have used insert 003. This notebook is my Frugal Sense notebook. In here I have our financial goals for the future and a bit of a plan on how we are going to achieve those goals. 

I will be using this book to capture any frugal tips I read about that would probably work for us and our lifestyle and any recipes for cleaning products, natural remedy’s, preserving etc will be popped in here too. I also have a page where I can track our savings. I’m thinking that a visual on watching the savings balance grow is encouraging.

So there we have it, my daily paper world is largely all in one place, is lightweight, and a pleasure to carry around with me.