Webupon

There is an undeniable appeal in the idea of keeping your appointments diary online. After all, you tell yourself, it will always be available, you will never lose it, and you can leave the question of backups to someone else. Problem solved? Well, not quite.

I have tried a variety of online calendars. These have included offerings from Yahoo and Google, as well as the much hyped Scrybe with its dazzling interface which I freely admit is a joy to use.

But after a year of working with calendar printouts, which I would take into meetings, and especially as a result of suffering repeated service interruptions by Scrybe (who would bring their servers off line at the least convenient time for me in the UK, a habit they promised to break) … I have gone back with some relief to just the kind of simple system I was using 30 years ago, i.e. a classic Filofax.

This works very well, is flexible, fast, portable, and reliable. It makes me wonder why I would ever have thought of doing anything else, and indeed I have no good answer to that question. Yes, even in this increasingly connected world, paper is the answer. For me at least.