When you think of of a diary you may hark back to the days of sumptuous, leather-bound monsters sitting on your desk. Or maybe you’re old enough to remember to 1980’s craze of bulging filofaxes. Both were, in their own way, things of tactile beauty. Today we don’t use desks in the same way and we certainly aren’t cramming fat filofaxes into our non-existent briefcases so we’re kind of stuck with whatever system the company gave you, or came on your smart phone – sadly, these are not very pretty and on the whole not so useful. In fact, Outlook, Google Calendar and even the standard iPhone calendar app aren’t great place to centre our lives around.
That’s changing. Take a look at apps like Sunrise or, better still, Mynd and you’ll see how beautiful and useful a diary personal organiser can be. The calendar element is just one part of the diary experience and these apps are designed to integrate the diary with your phone contacts, LinkedIn, Facebook and even cloud-based note solutions such as Evernote.
The diary is growing up and, judging by these early attempts at next-generation diaries, beginning to feel like they could easily be the centre of your working (and social) world.
The old:
The new:
Thankfully, organisation are also waking up to the need for useful and usable calendars so we’re starting to see clean diaries and calendars appearing on the web, such as myBookingWizard.
