No doubt there is powerful trend for pushing calendars to the ether virtual world. Most people do that out of convenience which is hard to disprove. Once the calendar is set up online (eg. Google Calendar), you can access any time, anywhere. You can access it with your browser, or smart phone, even regular phone that has online access. You can expose your calendar to privileged few (eg. families and friends). Even in the pre-cloud days, when mostly corporate calendars reside on proprietary servers like emails do (Blackberry, anyone?), you can quite easily sync your PDA with servers. You won't have to worry about losing your Filofax, hence the whole year's worth of your life. No more writing; just typing. Sweet, right?
But of course, when there is push, there is always some pull. Although it's not easy found these days, there are still quite some people who hang on to their paper calendars and address books and alarm clocks, even though you can easily get all these functions in any basic smartphones. There is something to be said, about holding something in your hand, that you know it's real, that this is my calendar and it belongs to me and me alone (rather than some bits and bytes in binary on some no-name servers tucked in some dark corners of who-knows-where the datacenters might reside).
I have to tell you, I too have tried to hang on to paper calendars, for my private reasons. I have soft spots for leather bound journals and diary and address books. I love to touch and smell of leather. I like the physicality of writing in notes and entries with my pen. I really do.
Unfortunately, the goings with electronic calendars are just too strong to resist. I used to use leather-bound yearly calendars, and I hate to have to shelf them once the year is over. There's when I switch to using organizers. But I have to lug the deadweight of my 2-inch thick organizer (with address book, calendar, with journal papers and notes) with me everyday. I have to worry about losing it (yes, I've lost mine before, and it's a royal pain). It wastes papers (thereby, cutting down more trees) and money too for buying inserts. I don't share or expose my calendars to anyone, but now I can plan my calendar forever, rather than one year out. I can set up alerts and reminders of events. And although it takes longer to login and check calendars online than flipping pages, it's worth the efforts.
These days, I've decided to do my own haphazard version of mix-and-match of online and offline calendar for myself. I want the convenience of online calendars (eg. I don't want to have to copy and paste all the important birthdays and anniversary dates at the beginning of each year from one paper calendar to another), but I equally want to use my brain a bit more, lest my brain gets lazy with delegating all the remembering to computers. So, every day, I login to check my daily schedules, plus cursory check on how the weekly and monthly schedules in the coming weeks/months look like. Then, I would write down the daily things to do on a scrap piece of papers. At the end of the day, I can cross what I've done, and I can simply throw out the scrap paper to recycle bin. I can also jog down what's new on the paper, then transpose them to my online calendar at day's end. The semi-automatic calendar updates work for me because I want to force myself to remember some events, rather than delegating to computers totally.
I still miss my leather bound calendars, organizers, address books and all other stuffs that I have now rolled online or in one single gadget. I guess I'll have to live with it. Those previously used (and loved) journals and calendars on my shelf will simply become part of my relics for nostalgia, when I get the time for it.
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