The Demise of Datebooks - NYTimes.com

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By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

I miss my Filofax datebook, with its six rings and dark red leather binder. I had a green one first, with a calendar that cast each week across two cream-colored pages. Back then, at age 30, I was not busy enough to need a whole page per day, which some Filofax calendars provide, but far too busy, or so I liked to imagine, to fit a week’s activities on a single page. I left that green one in a taxi and replaced it with a red one. Old reddie is still around, with my life during half of 2007 memorialized. Even when I started half-heartedly to use iCal, Apple’s personal-calendar program for the Mac, I lugged around the Filofax in case I needed — I don’t know — the address book? The dry-measure equivalent for “bushel”? The dialing code for Saudi Arabia? The size conversions for tailors (“Glove sizes are the same in every country”)? The centigrade temperature in Accra in May?

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Something, surely. Carrying a Filofax, with all the inserts that came standard with it, made me feel substantial, cliquish and secretive. British. Like a person who keeps close at hand many bankers’ private lines and Mandarin phrases and measurements for handmade shoes. The apparatus of the Filofax circumscribed and elevated my identity. It also liberated my imagination by allowing for such elegant expression of it; various sketches and coded notes-to-self, in blue ink, pervade the pages of the 2007 book. When I had time on a train or at Starbucks, I used to make lists, often plans for self-improvement.

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Google Calendar, the online scheduling tool that I turned to after iCal, does none of this for me. I share mine with my husband, whose calendar is now superimposed on mine, so that we can sync up our trips, meetings and doctors’ appointments. I find plenty of room for error and irritation in the entering of appointments and synching of devices. My appointments — or “events,” as Google Calendar calls them — are also freighted with reminders, so much so that the many e-mail prompts it sends me in the days before an event sometimes eclipse the event itself.

But I rely on the e-mail reminders because I dislike consulting the calendar itself. It shows, by default, a week per screen and requires, when I’m on my laptop, that I scroll down if I want to see the hours after noon. I find I’m not close to busy enough to pack those long hours with events. At a glance, then, my week looks like a wide gray sea with the odd piece of flotsam in it. It does not look — as did the Filofax week, which always had some things furiously circled or underscored like “deadline” or “birthday!!!!” — like a manuscript, a memoir, a diary.

As a committed user of the BlackBerry, Kindle, MacBook Pro and World Wide Web, I rarely get nostalgic for print — for broadsheets or magazines or even books. So I surprised myself by bridling at Steve Jobs’s boast, when introducing the Apple iPad in January, that the device has “a great calendar.” It never occurred to me that people liked digital calendars; these things lack personality, except as nags. As I discovered after trying the iPad, what Jobs must have meant was that you can get a horizontal view of the iPad calendar to see a whole week, no scrolling. You can also tap on an event to see it up close. As on the iPhone, you can also send information from an e-mail invitation straight to the calendar, and tap the name of a location noted on the calendar to bring up Google Maps, which promptly shows you where to go. I’m not sure all that “at your service” is personality, or maybe it’s the personality known as officious.

But what else can a calendar do? It’s hard to remember, surveying my dull Google version (“parents in town,” “book club”), that a Filofax was also a place for plot arcs, self-invention and self-regulation. It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs. The quality of the paper stock, the slot for the pen, the blank but substantial cover, the hints of grand possibilities that came with the inserts — all of these inspired not just introspection but also the joining of history: the mapping of an individual life onto the grand old Gregorian-calendar template.

In 1994, Nicholson Baker published an essay, “Discards,” lamenting the destruction of library card catalogs. “Nobody is grieving,” he wrote. I know I wasn’t. Even when he compared the card catalog to a literary agent’s Rolodex — bulging with cards that should be entries in literary history — I was unmoved. Catalogs and address books seem made to be digitized. But now that I’ve shelved my Filofax in favor of a calendar program that seems somehow to flatten existence, I realize that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail. Nobody is grieving. Well, I’m grieving now, Baker. You never know what you’re going to miss.

Points of Entry: This Week's Recommendations

LEATHER-BOUND APP
Beautiful Filofaxes — alligator-bound for $2,300! — chronicle experiences, not events. Why not undigitize one part of your life? Filofax.com.

DAY JOB
An Aztec calendar, engraved in ceramic tile, by woodbyderaud. An abstract one, quilted, by Cactus Rose Quilts. A Mayan one, hand-tooled on a purse, by Izachel. Watch your life pass by the handmade way: find a calendar on Etsy.com.

GETTING THINGS DONE
Organization fanatics love SmartTime Pro, which, while arranging scheduled events to your liking, can also “find time for your tasks” — including minor errands like, as SmartTime proposes, “unjam paper in copy machine.” Demo at leftcoastlogic.com.

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