Dad bought a Filofax in 1971 and still had that same one, its address pages printed from Word, a pencil tied to it on thirty centimetres of fishing line so he could never lose the pencil. He could find a phone number in it faster than you could unlock a phone. The book has vanished from most desks now. The job it did has not gone anywhere. It just moved into the glass rectangle in your pocket.
The contact book is now an app
The Contacts app on your phone is the Filofax, minus the six rings and the fishing line. It holds more numbers than Dad's book ever did, it copies itself to the cloud while you sleep, and you find a name by typing three letters instead of going flip, flip, flip through punched pages. It also rides along everywhere without you thinking about it, which is the one thing the paper book could never quite manage.
The flip side is that the app does nothing the Filofax could not do in principle. It stores names and numbers. The value was never in the binder, and it is not in the software either. It is in the names.
Dad was never precious about the brand
He thought spending hundreds of dollars on a Filofax bound in exotic leather was money thrown away. The cheap vinyl contact book from Woolworths, eight dollars and sometimes as low as two, was in his words "just as good". Note the two different books there: he owned the 1971 Filofax, and he pointed students at the Woolies one as the bargain that did the same job. The lesson behind both was identical. The cover is nothing, the contacts are everything.
That has survived the jump to the phone completely intact. A two thousand dollar phone and a two hundred dollar phone hold the same numbers. If you ever catch yourself believing the expensive tool makes you the better reporter, Dad's eight dollar Woolies book is there to tell you otherwise.
One rectangle ate the lot
This is the part that would have made Dad laugh. The Filofax was one tool on a desk that also held a phone book, a camera, a tape recorder and a notebook. Today a single phone is all of those at once. The address book, the White Pages, the camera bag, the cassette recorder, the diary, the street directory: every one of them has collapsed into the same slab of glass. Dad spent a career carrying a kit. A reporter today carries a phone and a charger.
What you gain, and what you have to watch
You gain search, backup and a copy in the cloud, so a lost phone is an inconvenience rather than the disaster a lost Filofax would have been. Dad's own safeguard was that his pages lived on his computer, so he could reprint the whole book if he ever mislaid it. The modern version of that discipline is to make sure you actually own your contacts. Export them now and then, keep them in an account you control, and do not assume a platform will hand them back if it ever locks you out. A contact book you cannot get into is no contact book at all, and a flat battery is just the new way of leaving it on the train.
What stays the same
The book, paper or glass, is only ever as good as the names in it. Editors told Dad that every reporter is only as good as his contact book, and no app has repealed that. You still have to meet people, take the card, write down the number, and keep the ones worth keeping. Dad set out how to build that habit in Contacts: building them, and the kit he thought a reporter could not work without is in Equipment Every Journalist Must Have. The original Filofax piece, fishing line and all, is here: The Filofax: A Journalist's Contact Book. The phone is just where the book lives now.