I enjoyed this article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine: The Demise of Datebooks, 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?

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…

I feel the same way. When I was younger, I wished I had more things to put in my datebooks. Now that I’m older, I have at least 15 meetings a week to keep track of, plus social plans and other appointments and tasks– I’d go insane if I couldn’t keep them in an electronic calendar, but something is definitely lost.

When I used Palm OS handhelds to stay organized, my favorite app was a calendar replacement called DateBk6, because it allowed you to vary the fonts, show things as crossed out, highlight text with background colors, and add customizable icons to appointments. For a few years, I used a Sony Clie, which offered the ability to overlay freehand drawings and jottings on the calendar, though the feature didn’t work well enough to be truly useful. These little things helped make an electronic calendar feel a bit more paper-like, and I really miss that about using an iPhone now– the calendar app has a lot of flaws.

I’ve seen some people print out their electronic calendars into sheets formatted to fit in a Filofax– this seems a bit cumbersome, but it’s probably the best solution for people who need the best of both worlds. And it allows a hard-copy archive to be saved. Heffernan’s article concludes with her realizing “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.… You never know what you’re going to miss.”