Are you one of those people who always forgets the birthdays of loved ones? Maybe you always end up stressed at the last minute trying to think of something good?
Well, this used to be me… My friends and family used to see me as “kinda flaky” but now it’s more like “super thoughtful and organised” which is a win-win!
The reason behind this turnaround is system which not only reminds me that there’s an important birthday coming up but tells me when to send the gift and then also prompts me to call the person on their birthday.
It’s a completely free system and you can even get the prompts if you’re miles from a PC.
This article explains step-by-step how to get the same system working for you.
My “system” is just a well-configured Google product called Calendar. You’ll need to get Google Calendar working on your PC (Get a Google account (by signing up with any Google service e.g. Gmail) and then click on My Account and then click on it in the list.)
To set it up for reminding you of important birthdays you will need to do the following:
1. Get your list of important dates.
2. Scroll to the day in the calendar and then click on it to Create Event.
3. Fill in the What (e.g. “Muriel’s Birthday”) and the Repeats (Yearly).
4. Now for the clever bit. In the Options box to the right under “Reminder”, select “email” from the drop down box, and then how many days before you would like to be reminded. I usually have one for 10 days before which is about how long I need to come up with a gift idea and buy it. The I add another one for 3 days before, which is as long as I need to ensure the gift will arrive by mail.
5. Finally, if it’s someone that I want to make sure I call on their birthday then I also set an SMS reminder to remind me 0 minutes before the event occurs. In this case it’s a good idea to set the time of the event to something like midday (i.e. make it so that it’s not an “All-day event”) and this way you won’t get an SMS in the middle of the night!
And that’s it, simple isn’t it? I’d recommend you do a trial run with a test date a week or so in the future so you can test it all works fine with your mail and your phone, but essentially you now have a system, with built-in redundancy, that reminds you when to buy a gift, when to send it and then when to call someone special.
I hope you found this useful and that if you have has a less than perfect score when it comes to remembering birthdays that this easy-to-implement systems can turn things around for you!
