There's no good reason for it. I wrote my first "Hello World" back in 1974 and I've lived elbow-deep in computers ever since, yet when it comes to organising my own life, me and digital tech simply refuse to get along.
What brought this on was a lady I follow on TikTok. She has ADHD, and she's vibe-coded herself an app that swallows an astonishing slice of her life and hands it back, neatly organised. The database behind it holds her sleep, meditation, exercise and calorie figures from Oura and Muse; her morning notes on mood, energy and focus; her to-do list and calendar; automatic screen-time tracking from the Timing app; voice diaries transcribed by WhisperMemos; the emails that need a reply; and an entity layer underneath, stitching the whole lot back to the people and projects involved. All of it answerable to an AI assistant she's named Assari, Finnish for assistant.
I struggle to put into words how much this impresses me. Not the coding, I should say. The coding is well within my compass and holds no mystery for me. What impresses me is the human side of it. The woman has developed a relationship with a machine so complete that it has become a sort of external nervous system. Her phone and computer are not merely places where information goes to die beneath a pile of browser tabs. They are an extension of her memory, habits, commitments and self-knowledge.
She can ask Assari, presumably, something like: “Why have I been grumpy all week?” and it can rummage through her sleep data, calendar, voice notes, work patterns and personal reports before replying: “You have slept badly for four nights, done no exercise, spent seven hours arguing with spreadsheets and have three overdue emails from a person you dislike.” This is next level p.a. territory.
Compare that to me. I have always kept a paper diary. I picked up the habit from my father, who carried a pocket diary everywhere in his job as a school caretaker and was forever jotting something down in it. His diaries didn't survive the move to Spain, but I remember that one of the more significant bequests of his meagre estate was a cardboard box stuffed full of them. He recorded his horse-racing bets in there with great devotion. There were, I couldn't help noticing, an awful lot of seconds.
I became an office worker myself and kept a desk diary, which here in Spain I'm obliged to call an agenda. I have those going back decades too, and I print a monthly wall-planner to glance at for appointments. There's something about putting pen to paper I find safe and comforting, and I've never quite managed to shake it.
I left the Civil Service in 1995, so it must have been before then that I first watched a colleague tapping away at a handheld gadget with an electronic calendar on it. He wasn't even in the technical department, which was where I sat, so there was a certain irony in him making the digital leap before I did. I can't recall the device. It predated the mobile phone, I think, and had a fiddly little keyboard for typing. Here's the thing, though. Whatever he typed into it is almost certainly long gone, while I could still rummage through a box and pull out my diaries from the early nineties. For all its cleverness, electronic data turns out to be a remarkably ephemeral business.
Things have thawed a little since. I do, technically, own a Google calendar. Every so often an app on my phone offers to set an alarm so I don't forget some looming appointment, and I'll let it. That is roughly the full extent of my digital calendar adventures. When I actually want to note something down, I would far rather scribble it into the diary by hand than wrestle with windowing systems and an interface I didn't design and fully expect to let me down eventually. Paper lets me do as I please. I can write big or write small, carve up the day's slot however suits me, and cheerfully ignore whatever line-height the printer decided I wanted. And the writing itself is an event. The act of committing something to the page lodges it in my head in a way that typing into a calendar simply never has.
My father's box of diaries outlived him, every second-place horse still there in his own hand. With a bit of luck mine will outlast me in the same way, still legible long after today's clever apps have dissolved into some forgotten cloud. I'll have to start jotting down my online poker winnings!