Chapter 4: Organised Time

Philofaxy is a website dedicated to the use of time planners and organisers.¹ Written by enthusiasts, it collates advice on how to use planners, reviews of different makes, models and printable inserts, and a brief cultural history of the planner. Its name references the most widely known brand of organiser, the Filofax. Filofaxes are cultural artefacts associated with a specific social group in a particular place at a specific point in time: the yuppie² working in a global city in the 1980s. In an iconic episode of the classic British sitcom Only Fools and Horses entitled ‘Yuppie Love’, originally aired on 8 January 1989, its central character, Del Boy, a happy-go-lucky chancer from London’s East End played by David Jason, endorses his ambition to be upwardly mobile by brandishing the required artefacts: a black Filofax and an outsized mobile phone. Though Filofaxes were cult items in the 1980s, the practice of time organisation is not simply a fad of that time.