The planner and bullet journal community is a wonderfully sharing place.  A little while after Christmas, Laurie @lakc1120 posted an offer on her Instagram account. She offered three people the chance to try out one of her Fauxdori covers.  I volunteered and thought nothing more of it, until some happy mail dropped through my door!

The package contained this personal sized Fauxdori.   It has a black and white photographic image of a flower on the outside and a pinstripe interior.

To begin with, I was unsure about how I would use it, but I realised I had a need for a notebook system for work.  I tend to keep a notebook on my desk at work to jot notes from meetings and ideas for lesson planning, but I get really annoyed that the two parts of my job get mixed together.  This system would solve that as I could have separate notebooks within the fauxdori for each part of my role.

The Inclusion notebook contains notes from meetings and tasks that I will transfer to my bullet journal after the meeting.  As the pages are fairly small, I don’t feel like I’m wasting loads of paper when I start a new page at the beginning of each meeting.  I do this for confidentiality reasons.

The teaching notebook contains notes for planning lessons, ideas from staff meetings and notes about the members of our class ready for writing annual reports.

Each notebook contains dotted paper which I copied and bound into a notebook.  I decided not to buy inserts initially as I wasn’t sure if I would use this system in the long term. I think I will continue to use this system, but I think I may have to move into an A5 size as I fill the pages up incredibly quickly when on courses or in staff meetings which means I spend lots of time flicking back to find particular notes.

The fauxdori seems well made.  I had worried that the laminated card wouldn’t stand up to being carried around in my bag, but it’s done well in the 6 weeks that I’ve been using it.  The elastic closure was a similar concern, but again it’s survived daily use.  I think I’ll continue using this one until the end of the academic year in July but, as they seem a fairly easy set up, I think I may make one of my own in a larger size ready for the new academic year.