The Portable Life and Times of a Busy Exec

It used to be that professionals scrawled appointments in a calendar, phone numbers in a Rolodex and notes in notebooks. The result was a desktop burdened with clutter.

Then in the early 1990s came the Filofax and others like it--an appointment book-calendar-organizer-diary catchall that invited clutter without the shame. Bulk looks good in a Filofax. It shows that you’re busy.

Case study: the Filofax of Sharon Gelman.

She’s the overworked executive director of Artists for a New South Africa, a Culver City-based nonprofit group. Flip open Gelman’s Filofax, and it’s kind of like flipping open her cortex.

We see that she was in Johannesburg on Jan. 13, 1994, that she keeps time-zone and world maps, that she tracks her blood pressure and that she likes kids. (She keeps a few MTV “Road Rules” bumper stickers in case she makes teenage friends.) We also see that she likes to sketch and write poetry. It’s all right there inside her Filofax, along with her business notes.

“I literally write everything down in there and just forget about it,” Gelman says.

And if she should lose her Filofax?

“I would just have to move to a mountaintop in Colorado,” she says, “and become a potter.”