A Richer Experience Of Time

Virginia Heffernan, The Demise of Datebooks

In 1994, Nicholson Baker published an essay, “Discards,” lamenting the destruction of library card catalogs. “Nobody is grieving,” he wrote. I know I wasn’t. Even when he compared the card catalog to a literary agent’s Rolodex — bulging with cards that should be entries in literary history — I was unmoved. Catalogs and address books seem made to be digitized. But now that I’ve shelved my Filofax in favor of a calendar program that seems somehow to flatten existence, I realize that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail. Nobody is grieving. Well, I’m grieving now, Baker. You never know what you’re going to miss.

I know that a technoweenie like me sees an opportunity in the mewlings of Heffernan, and her desire for a more rich calendaring of life, not just the passing of something. 

I also migrated from paper — Filofax — to Google calendar, although my experience is tightly bound up with the sloppy and inconstant integration of Remember The Milk — a task list service — which provides some of the forward-looking, aspiration aspects of calendaring that I learned with Filofax.

But there is a strange and jagging disconnect between my use and sharing of ‘events’ on Google, and the constant stream of essays and one-liners that make up the macro- and microstreams of my blogging and Twittering.

Why is there no stream-based calendar solution? Obviously, this shouldn’t be a fully open model — and therefore not something I’d expect in Twitter — but more likely something Google should be working on… if they can stopping fooling with Buzz, and build me something I actually want based on what they already have in place.

What I am really looking for is a richer, stream-based experience of time, and that it should be normalized over all the major activities that I invest in.