Kenny (AKA Shane Jacobson) was spot on in his 2008 mockumentary of the same name.

Since retiring my Filofax about a decade after most regular people did, I’ve been road-testing foolproof methods to stay on track with events at the pointy end of the year when family birthdays and other spring flings collide.

To try to stay on top of everything my husband and I synced our iPhones a few years ago.

But with alerts from his appointments as well as mine, the beeping was non-stop.

It was also anxiety-inducing when unexpected things cropped up.

Calendar: “You have a tooth extraction at 3.30pm today.”

Me: “That can’t be right!! I just had a check-up and clean and polish last month. Arrrgh! It’s not my tooth.”

With so many events surfacing, I avoided the iPhone like the plague; in protest I stopped entering any appointments at all.

This approach brought me undone when I booked last-minute tickets to Matilda in Melbourne on the second weekend of November last year, only to realise it clashed with the school fete.

I love Roald Dahl but I’d committed to the cake stall! (I had a fete stomach ache and I hadn’t even got through the school gate!!)

After reading all of the Ticketek fine print about the importance of checking and re-checking your dates due to the monumental pain of re-issuing tickets, I phoned an operator and pleaded my case.

She happily exchanged our seats in the second back row of the theatre for seats in the second back row of the theatre two weeks earlier.

Since then I’ve taken better note of key dates in school newsletters.

Only this week I filled in the order form for school sushi and raised just enough coin by checking down the back of the couch when I discovered a second note.

It read: “You have just wasted 10 minutes because your child will be away on an excursion on school sushi day. On the bright side, you now have enough change for the vending machine at work!”

I have improvised a bit, but the effect was the same-same.

Then I wanted to book tickets to the Victorian Opera’s production of The Snow Queen in Wodonga coming up in November.

My husband and I were both on the same page because we knew we had to book the Friday night show to avoid clashing with the Midnight Oil gig on the Saturday night.

With only a few tickets left for the opera weeks ago, I smugly booked straight away.

Just this week we discovered Midnight Oil plays on that Friday night too; the tickets were sitting on top of our desk all along.

Now I’m headed to the opera with my mum and my husband is off to The Oils solo. (You might think it was a cunning plan by him to skip the opera but if you’d seen him dance like Peter Garrett in the ‘90s, you may say I’d orchestrated it one better!) 

However, the bottom line was that we were out of sync again.

While he googles calendars to link all of our devices yet again and checks forums to find out where others have failed, I have gone back to paper.

I have just filled in the Leunig calendar – which my mum gave us for Christmas even though I had forewarned her that we only used an electronic calendar now – right up to mid-December.

See you on the other side!