A Paper Calendar? It's 2011

Electronic calendar users can be dismissive of their paper forebears. “You lose a paper calendar and it’s gone,” said Ayelet Waldman, a novelist who syncs her iCal among her husband and five children with the zeal of the converted. The night of her wedding she lost her Filofax, and “It was so traumatizing that as shortly as there was an electronic option, I switched over.” Paper, she said, “is horse and buggy.

“There’s thoroughly nothing anyone could say to get me to switch,” said Dany Levy, founder of Daily Candy and a faithful Filofax keeper since high school. “People are shocked. Here I am a dot.com entrepreneur, I should be on the bleeding edge of hip research, but I use a form of scheduling that dates to the dinosaurs.”

Three years later, the study is already a relic, according to one of its authors, Manuel A. Perez-Quinones, an associate professor of computer science. “That was previously smartphones, previously Google calendar, back when you after all had to plug in your PDA to sync,” Dr. Perez-Quinones said. “It was a whole different monster.” Paper hasn’t totally disappeared, he said, “however the desk and office calendar is on its way out.”

This kind of prediction strikes terror in paper people. But there isn’t necessarily a correlation between a commitment to research and a choice of calendar. “I’ve got an iPad, an iPod, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and I’m talking on my BlackBerry now,” said Nelson George, a cultural critic, filmmaker and producer, in a phone interview. “Nevertheless that’s enough. I’m an old-school paper calendar person.”

Mr. George uses a datebook that fits in his back pocket. “People make comments about it,” he said. “They show me their little research. But at the time they sit there tapping on their device, and by the time they’ve gone through all the log-ins and downloading, I’ve already flipped the page.”

The yawning gap between work

The yawning gap between work and home can be welcome. Even electronic aficionados concede that the lines blur on a networked system. When Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Innovation, conducted a study of how people balanced their lives, two objects had significance: keys and a calendar. “People who merged their home and work keep all their keys on one chain and all their home and work commitments on one calendar.”

The study led Ms. Nippert-Eng to examine how calendar use affects privacy. “Electronically managing everything — friends, communications, information — is a good way to break down the boundaries between the different parts of your life,” she said. “Some people are O.K. with blurred boundaries. They’ll ‘friend’ anyone. Nevertheless it makes it harder to keep aspects of your life separate.”

Part of what raises the paper team’s hackles about electronic systems is that others may become privy to an afternoon’s haircut or a therapy appointment. However electronic calendar users often thrive on the convenience that comes from synchronicity. Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington, shares an electronic calendar with her husband. “He’s always inviting me to meetings that I don’t need to be at yet need to know about in order to schedule myself around them,” she said. “It’s totally distracting, nevertheless it works.”

Of course, not all couples are on the same system. “That’s all my wife and I do: argue about her paper calendar and my electronic one,” David Shenk, a Brooklyn-based author, said in part in jest. Mr. Shenk is in the process of converting his wife, at least partly, to his system. “However if she doesn’t input information in the right account or the Internet is down, it may not sync,” he said. “I get mad at her for not doing it right, but clearly it’s not her fault: it’s a very complicated process.”

The divide between paper-

The divide between paper- and digital-calendar people is partly unbreachable. Mr. Doonan’s husband, he said, calls him “a geriatric lunatic with relentless regularity.”

Ms. Neff, who studies how innovation and communication affect people’s lives, calls this “messy talk.” At times, she said, “digital technologies can short-circuit necessary discussions.”

The slow creep of clean

The slow creep of clean and efficient innovation and the managed life into the domestic sphere has multiple consequences. “We’re not compelled to go to a social event just because someone set it up for X o’clock in our calendar,” Ms. Neff said. “Just because we’ve figured out these time strategies in the office, doesn’t mean we should always adopt them in our social lives.”

Makers of old-fashioned calendars are trying to keep up with the electronic march. Letts, a diary company based in Britain, sells personalized inserts for Filofaxes and other diaries that incorporate birthday and anniversaries so users don’t have to laboriously write them in each year. In 2009, Day-Timer introduced calendar apps for the iPhone.

Uphill battle

It may be an uphill battle. According to Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Experian Simmons, a unit of Experian Marketing Services, a market technology firm, the use of electronic calendars is growing. “Among online Americans, 22 percent of online adults maintain a calendar on their cellphone or their tablet, and 34 percent of tablet owners maintain an electronic calendar on their tablet,” Mr. Tatham said, citing his company’s data. “I would imagine those numbers will go up as the adoption of smartphones and tablets continues to increase in the U.S.”

As for me, it would take cold hard cash to make me cross over. Clearly, I said that about the cellphone and Facebook, too. Now, how to explain all this in 140 characters or less. ...