Moleskine Notebooks v Filofax – Cost Comparison
UPDATE – I thought I’d bring this one back to the front page having just bought an A4 Logic Zip Portfolio – this appears to be the perfect solution to the cost problem of having an A4 filofax – especially with the offers on the Logic – my binder was around 25GBP. Buy a Logic, and then fill it out with forms from D*I*Y Planner. The binder is a big old brute, but there’s plenty of room for lots of bits and bobs. I’ll have a play and let you know how I get on. But for now, I’ll hand you back to Michael with his Filofax -v- Moleskine face-off…
If you’ve decided on paper, but you can’t decide if you’d be better off with a nice leather binder ( Filofax, Dayrunner or similar) or with Moleskine notebooks, you’ve probably figured that the cost of the Filofax option is pretty offputting compared to a Moleskine.
You may also have realised that the cost of Moleskines builds up as you keep buying them. So – which works out cheaper in the long run?
Lets start with a few assumptions – if you would do things differently, you’ll need to modify costs to fit…
- We’re going to use DIY Planner for our pages in the Filofax, so there’s no big costs with buying new forms and calendars each year.
- We’re going to look at A5 binders, so the cost of paper is fairly low, and can be handled by most desktop printers. Elsewhere in the world, availability may vary, but A5 is about the easiest to get and print in the UK (well, A4 is easier and cheaper, but it makes for a big binder).
- For the Moleskines, I’m looking at large sized ones – pocket ones are cheaper, but don’t give as much space for writing. Knock a bit off the cost of each notebook if you’d prefer the pocket versions, though.
- Costs are in UK pounds. If you’re elsewhere, the comparison should still work pretty well. Roughly double the numbers to get US Dollars or Euros, but prices probably vary too. They’re only estimates anyway, though, so don’t worry about it.
- To make ongoing usage costs, we have to make a guess at how many pages we’ll get through each month. I’m basing this on 100 pages a month, which is pretty heavy usage. If you’d use half as much, you could just double the times to get similar results – two years instead of the first year, for example.
- I’m assuming that you’d use both sides of a sheet in the Moleskine, but would only use one side in the Filofax. For me, the rings would get in the way for using the back of each sheet, so I wouldn’t, and if printing DIY Planner forms, using just one side saves you the hassle of printing on two sides. Using both sides of the paper in the Filofax would make relatively little difference (the cost of paper is minimal), but if you would only use one side of the Moleskine pages, you’d double the costs for Moleskines, which would make a big difference.
OK – let’s cost them up…
Initial Purchase
Moleskine
- One Moleskine Notebook – £10.
Actually, they’re a little more at list price, but it’s not far off (currently £11.50 at Mojo London). All you need to get started is a single notebook.
Filofax
- Binder – various, starting from around £30 up to £100 or more. Let’s assume you’re going for something reasonably nice, and estimate this at £50
- Paper – we’re doing this the cheapskates way, with a ream of A5 plain paper – we’ll print our own templates to get the system we really want, rather than whatever Filofax packaged. £5.
- Hole Punch – this is a bit of a shock – £30.
The hole punch is actually £32 directly from Filofax.
Comparing
So at this point, the Moleskine route is well ahead.
- Moleskine – £10
- Filofax – £85
I should note at this point that the initial cost of the Filofax system could be trimmed a bit. There are binders for less than £50, and you don’t have to buy the hole punch straight away. It will let you use cheap plain paper, though, which brings the costs down in the long run – keep reading…
First Six Months
To work out usage costs, we have to estimate how many pages we’re going to get through. That’s tricky, and it will vary a lot. As I mentioned, I’m working on 100 pages per month here. That’s fairly heavy use – you may well get through a lot less.
Moleskine
- 600 Pages needed – so you’ll need three notebooks – £30. This includes the initial costs.
The large Moleskines have 240 pages, so three of them is 720 pages – well over the 600 we need for six months of use.
Filofax
- 1 Ream of paper – £5.
We’ve finished our first 500-sheet ream, and just bought another. Unfortunately, we’ve not included the inital costs of £85.
- Initial costs plus six months of supplies – £90
Comparing
At the end of six months, our Moleskines have cost us £30, and the Filofax has cost us £90. Those notebooks are way ahead.
One Year
Another Six Months on…
Moleskine
- 2 Moleskine Notebooks – £20.
We had 120 pages left from the first half of the year, so we only needed two more notebooks this time.
- Running total for Moleskines – £50.
Filofax
- 1 ream of paper – £5.
We had 400 pages left, so we’re just 200 pages into our next ream.
- Running total for Filofax – £95.
Comparing
The Moleskines are starting to cost us now, whilst the Filofax is pretty cheap in ongoing costs. Good job we’re using DIY Planner, or the paper would be costing us a fortune.
Another Year
We’ll just jump right ahead and add a second year…
Moleskine
- Five Notebooks – £50.
We ended the year out of pages, so we’ve had to buy a full year’s supply.
- Running Total for Two Years – £100.
Filofax
- 2 reams of paper – £10.
We had 300 pages left, so we needed another 900 – two reams.
- Running total for Two Years – £105.
Comparing
Give or take a little (and these are only estimates at costs, remember) we’ve just about broken even after two years. From here on, the Moleskines will keep costing us £50 a year, and the Filofax around £10 or £15 a year.
Long Term Savings
So for long term savings, the Filofax will work out cheaper, but the up-front costs are higher. We’re hoping here that the binder and hole punch will last for more than two years, but that shouldn’t be a problem – they’re pretty well made things.
Even with heavy use, though, it still took over two years for the binder to start saving us money. That’s a fairly long term ‘investment’.
I think what this proves in the end is that the cost differences are pretty much negligible – you’re probably better off choosing what you prefer.
Non-financial Comparison
So what’s the difference without worrying about the costs? Well, they both have their advantages…
Moleskine
- Smaller to carry. Even the large notebooks are smaller and lighter than an A5 binder.
- Archiving is good – just line them up on a shelf, and they look good. With the Filofax, you’ll have boxes of old notes on loose sheets of paper.
- Easy to switch sizes and styles. If you decide after a few months that a smaller size would be better, or you’d prefer a reporter-style notebook, just start buying the new type. With the Filofax, you’d have to replace an expensive binder, and all of your inserts.
- Hipster Credibility. Creative types everywhere will recognise your Moleskine and respect you.
- Back Pocket – the folder bit in the back won’t hold a lot, but it will keep a few receipts, and maybe some money and cards.
Filofax
- Removable sheets – some designs of Moleskines have some perforated sheets in the back, but you can take out all of the sheets in your Filofax.
- Re-orderable – you can pop sheets out of one section, and move them elsewhere to keep them organised, making it much easier to keep project notes together.
- Use lots of types of forms – you can download all sorts of forms from DIY Planner, and print what you need. Need something different? Make it yourself.
- Quality feel. There’s something about a good quality leather binder that really feels good. Maybe a bit more traditional than hipster, but nice.
- Easy removal of mess. Messed up a couple of pages? Remove them and bin them. Much easier than with a Moleskine.
- No rewriting when finished – because you never reach the end of a Filofax, you never need to rewrite notes from one to another. You might need to rewrite lists when running out of space on a sheet, but with a Moleskine, you could have a lot of notes to copy over when you run out of space.
Conclusion
The costs are, well, inconclusive. In the long run, the Filofax will probably be a bit cheaper, but there’s a big cost up front. The Moleskines are cheaper to start with, and don’t cost much more in the long run. So your choice is probably going to be based on other things. If you are making notes of the sake of thinking, the Moleskine will be just fine, but if it’s lists of things you need to keep handy, the Filofax may be more practical.
I think it comes down to a question of simplicity against capability. If you value the simplicity more, the Moleskine is the way to go. If you prefer capability, those moveable sheets and range of forms will be something no notebook could match.
Either way, pick one and go with it – now you can spend weeks trying to find the ideal pen.
This is very helpful as I’ve used an A5 Filofax for the past couple of years, fairly happily, but am thinking of switching to a large Moleskine notebook and the large Moleskine planner. The cost of the Filofax refills can really start to get prohibitive if you work your system hard. Even finding A5 paper is hard, and I’m not sure I want to spend more money on a Filofax hole punch. It seems really, really expensive for what it does. Just buying the ream of A5 here in the US, a 2008 calendar and the Filofax punch is going to cost me $71–I could buy the Moleskine notebook and planner for the whole year and it costs half that. Granted, Moleskine is not as flexible, but I sort of like paging back through my old Moleskines–can’t do that with the Filofax.
Another thought: I bought my Filofax 2nd hand on the fleamarket but it was as good as new. You can’t buy 2nd hand Moleskine notebooks though.
Because of “what I do” (or at least, what I’m known for), I tend to experiment a fair amount. I always keep a central hub of information, such as contacts, calendars and project info, but what I use for my day-to-day productivity will vary from month to month. One month I’ll use a Hipster PDA, the next my Day Runner classic, the next a pocket Moleskine, and so on. (And then there are the weird things I experiment with.) This is less for my own personal edification, and more for the “testing” of D*I*Y Planner projects. However, I’ve never really thought too much about costs. I’m glad you wrote this article, because it triggers some considerations that should be an integral part of the project.
Regarding costs, it’s a little different over on this side of the pond. A decent Mead or PlanAhead 3-ring “classic” binder (5.5″x8.5″, similar in dimensions to A5) will start at about $15 USD. A really good Day Runner one (such as the one I own) starts at about $45 USD, and that includes inserts like calendars and contacts. It’s thus a lot cheaper for the basic binder.
I purchased an inexpensive adjustable 3-ring punch for about $5 USD, and a decent guillotine for $35. Paper runs about $5.00 for 500 24lb 94 bright white letter-size sheets, which is very, very high-quality paper perfect for forms. This can be professionally chopped for $5 extra (or free, if you cozy up to a copyhouse clerk).
So, by the math above, let’s see….
$45 USD for good-quality leather binder
$12 for year of paper (and pro-chopping)
$15 for ink (depending on printer)
$5 for punch (assuming 3-hole, though 6- or 7-hole is about $25-30 USD)
…Which makes for $77 USD, which is about 44 UK pounds, only about 150% of the cost of the Moleskines, and that gets you a nice leather tricked-out binder with accordian pocket, card slots, portfolio area, tabbed dividers, about a hundred pages of inserts, and so on. Subsequent years would be $27 USD each, or about 15 GBP, or about 30% the cost of the Moleskines. So there’s some more cost savings over here, but the comparisons are similar.
However, there’s one thing I’d like to add to your list above with regard to pros and cons. You alluded to it with regard to forms, but I’d venture to push it a step further: structure. Many of us are inherently disorganised, and having a free-for-all structure like a blank Moleskine or notebook tends to amplify productivity issues. With the structure and “prompting” of the forms, it’s a bit easier to know what to put down and where, and finding things can be just as effortless. Any sort of unstructured notebook is great as a creative dumping ground, but using it as a productivity aid requires a lot of vigilance, dedication and strict methodology. Although, using one in combination with a Hipster PDA, especially one decked out with some (ahem) D*I*Y Planner hPDA calendars, action lists, project cards, and so on, can help overcome some of the difficulties that are naturally addressed by using a Filofax/Day-Timer/Day Runner.
That all being said, this article is great food for thought, Michael. I’ve always pushed the ‘Planner as a way of saving money, but it was always in comparison with the $0.20/page commercial forms. In all this time, I’ve never really thought about comparing it with other productivity methods.
all my best, dj
– D*I*Y Planner : http://www.diyplanner.com a million monkeys typing : http://www.douglasjohnston.net
Thanks for the extra info, Doug. I need to update the article a little, anyway, as I picked up my own Filofax for £17 – a fair bit under the £30 I said they start from. The higher-end Filofax ones are quite beautiful quality items, though – I’ve spent enough time in Staples fondling its soft leathery bits to worry that they’re going to ban me.
Fortunately, Staples over here sells blank A5 paper by the ream, so I think the A5 option is the best here. I hadn’t realised until reading it on DIY Planner after writing this that the classic size is half US letter. Over here, of course, all the standard paper sizes are half of something else – A5 is half of A4, which is half of A3, etc, and there’s A6 (half A5) and so on down in size too. That probably means that the classic size makes most sense over there.
Oh, and yes, the ink is something I conveniently ignored in my calculations, even though our printer is almost out of both of its black cartriges, and is going to cost us over £20 to fill up again.
Maybe PDAs should be in the comparison too? The initial cost is higher again, but the running costs are pretty low – it’s just the odd SD card and one or two Astraware games a month – ok, maybe not so low
My house is beginning to be taken over by punches. I have a single hole punch – a 99p electronicBay purchase, a standard (heavy duty) 2 hole, a 4 hole for the A4 Filofax, a 6 hole adjustable that does Pocket and Personal Filofaxes and recently a Rollabind turned up in the post with loads of discs. I have now reached critical mass on the punch front and really cant justify any more.
I had a look at the a5 filofax. It’s biiiig! So wide for just an a5 page. I’ll pass. But it makes me wonder why there aren’t more folders for a5.
An A5 Filofax is a big beast. Not far off A4. One of the reasons I’m trying out an A4 system at the moment is the fact that there are so many more options for binders and folders and such like available. I like A5 generally, but there is such a limited choice of accessories.
The empty binders are only available in A4. However, cheap A5 binders can usually be found on eBay. We’ve got a few we could do with putting up there ourselves, actually.
Thanks for the info about the punch!
Sam Randall
Ain’t Life Grand?
You can find 6 ring punches elsewhere: Rapesco, Mayfair Stationers
But I wasn’t aware that filofax now did A5 folders. I gave up with my 80s filofax (real and knock-off) because I couldn’t get paper to fit. A5 was too big, A6 too small. Anything else took so much trouble to cut up. But if the a5 six-ring rings are the same dimensions as the personal organiser six-ring rings…
Also, the above punch is adjustable, so you can slide the two sets of three punches close together for mini-filofaxes.
A5 rings are different again to Personal rings – different paper, different punches. At least with A5, you can use cheap paper, and print your own forms, but you still have to fight with the Filofax hole punch – I’d not seen other options available, so thanks for letting us know.
Yes, we have a single punch, and they work pretty well. The biggest problem for Filofax use is that Filofaxes use smaller holes, so the paper doesn’t ‘rattle around’ so much – keeps it in place a bit better. Should still work well enough, though. I’m just using the ‘real’ Filofax punch at the moment. It’s ok, but only five sheets at a time, and needs emptying far too often.
When I bought my A5 Filofax I also bought one of their portable punches for ten pounds, and the thing is absolute rubbish. It’s hard to line up, harder to punch, and covers you in little paper circles, so it takes ages to punch every sheet. So I bought myself a metal single hole punch in partners when I was on holiday (we don’t have one near where I live, worse luck), and I just draw round the holes in an old Filofax sheet and punch it with that. It’s way quicker than the Filofax punch, it cost me about three pounds, and it’s not so tiring to use, so I can do loads of sheets really fast. Big improvement!
The ones I’ve seen have all been standard 4-hole – nice and cheap and easy.
Every time I look up something on Google I end up here. PigPogPDA has taken on some sort of wild omnipresence!
I have just bought an A4 Finsbury Filofax on eBay. £53 inc insured postage – so much better than £87 in the shops! Does anyone know whether a standard 4 hole hole punch fits in with the ring spacing on the A4 filofaxes or is it time to sell a kidney to buy a hole punch? I want to use the http://www.diyplanner.com inserts.
I have a system based on a smooth combination using the best of both. I have a “classic” size (8 1/2 x 5 1/2) planner with DIYPlanner pages that I use for the core of my system. Here all of my projects and calendar live. For capture I carry a pocket Moleskine filled with notes, lists, and a small calendar drawn in the back. I keep the two in sync semi-daily and feel more organized than I have in years. I do appreciate the cost breakdown as I didn’t spend very much on my generic planner and doubt it will last two years. Looks like it will be worth a good one when it finally give out.
Thanks
CRuss
You no doubt get to enjoy the best of both worlds that way. I did something a little similar some time ago – kept my general day to day stuff in an A5 Finsbury and kept my journal in a pocket moleskine which lived quite comfortable in the internal pocket of the Finsbury.
As for the A4, I’m getting on quite well with it, but as I’m getting settled in to my new job I’m still tinkering with it.
Sam Randall
Ain’t Life Grand?