Make your friends think you’re caring and organised - Birthdays
It’s my brother’s birthday in about 10 days time. I know this because my favourite website just emailed me to remind me.
Let me introduce you to Birthday Alarm A website that remembers and reminds you about upcoming birthdays.
Once you have set up an account and logged in you can start adding birthdays - you can either send out an email to your friends and family asking them to fill in a form for you, but I think that spoils the illusion we’re trying to create here, so we want to Manually Add birthdays - which is possible but the link doesn’t shout out at you.
Click on ‘My Reminders’ the ‘Add Birthdays’, the the add birthday reminders manually link at the bottom of the right hand column.
Then all you need to do is fill in what you know
Birthday Alarm will then email you before your friend’s birthdays - I have mine set up to send me emails 10 days before, then 3 days before as that gives me enough time to buy a pressent and post it if necessary.
You don’t need to sit down and fill in everyone at once, when ever you remember a birthday pop it into the list then, within a year you should have everyone you need in there.
Maximise your Cunning
- Add everyone to your list, you can always delete them in a years time if you don’t know them but remebering your co-workers birthdays or your mother’s friend’s daughter’s and saying ‘Happy Birthday’ to them on the day will earn you ‘brownie points’ and help enchance your images of she who knows all
- Add years as and when you can. The emails you receive will tell you how old the person is going to be, very useful, especially for children who never seem to be the age you thought they were
- Add anerversaries as well on the anerversaries tab, even if you don’t send your best friend a card on her wedding anerversary, she’s apreciate the fact that you remembered when it was.
You may think the above is all rather cynicle but the fact is, I at hopeless at rememebing dates but I want to! I would feel terrible if I forgot my brother’s birthday. This tool helps me remember and gives me time to think of a toughtful pressent and send it.
And for all your GTDers out there… think of this as a Tickler file!
How do you remember birthdays and anerversaries? Do you forget them year after year? Do you not care?
Tags: birthday, GTD, manage, reminders, tickler, tickler file
June 12th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I despise and simply don’t trust these sites. I can easily remember birthdays with my Nokia cell phone calendar or using Thunderbird’s Lightening add-on. I avoid giving such info to any 3rd party as I simply don’t trust them to NOT to spam me or my family/friends directly or via some seedy “partner”. For the same reason I always refuse LinkedIn and Plaxo requests; gone as far to just blacklist them on the mail server. Sometimes it is better to use private tools over some web service that claims to be honest.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Which is why I like the fact that they only have my email address and not my family’s one
Agreed, there are too many invites flying around the internet these days
June 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Great tip, I think and do the exact same, although I do not use a website to notify me nor do I really see the need.
I use iCal (calendar application for Mac OS X) which is integrated into Address Book (funnily enough, an address book application for Mac OS X) which I have all my contacts in. I just add the dates for people in my address book and use iCal to notify me as iCal automatically picks up the fact that my contacts have birthdays.
I then use iSync to sync across all my contacts and calendar entries to my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K850i) which notifies me of birthdays because they’re now in the phone calendar.
I then sync my iPod Touch with the exact same, blah blah, this comment is already way too long.
Get my drift?!
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Hmmm… I’m with Guarav on this one. iCal is great, syncs with my iPhone (obviously), and you can see those birthdays creeping up on you.
And, I really have to say, if this is your “favourite website”, you need to stay in more!