Have you ever forgotten someone’s birthday? Maybe your mom, best friend, or an employee? The feeling you have when it first dawns on you that you forgot is really the pits, right? It’s not that you don’t love them, but maybe you didn’t plan appropriately. A busy month with work, kids, and life drama got in the way.
If you’re prone to forgetting birthdays, and have made a vow to do better, we’ve got you! Here are 5 ways to remember them!
1. Use Google Calendar
Many people already use Google Calendar for their work schedules. So, adding them to the calendar you already use makes sense, right? Be sure to add the event reminder for a week or two ahead of time to ensure you have enough time to order a gift and ship it to them if needed. You could even set multiple reminders if you need extra time to come up with the perfect personal or business present ideas.
2. Create a physical calendar with everyone’s photo
I personally love these calendars. As a former scrapbooker, I love the whole. process. I enjoy going through my photos and updating a few of the pictures with more recent photos. And companies like Shutterfly make it so easy to copy the dates from year to year. We keep ours in the kitchen, and honestly, we only use it for big days – first and last days of school, vacations, and birthdays. It makes it easy to separate those big days from the countless meetings in my Google Calendar. Not that my meetings aren’t important, but nothing tops my little girl’s birthday.
3. Download a birthday tracking app
With so much of our lives being digital, using an app to track birthdays probably seems so obvious. These apps offer serious birthday support! They can sync with your contacts, integrate with your Apple Watch, and some even offer personalized GIFs. HIP and Countdown are some of our favorite apps to keep track of these big days!
4. Create a spreadsheet with everyone’s birthdays
We acknowledge this is old-school, but there are some of you reading right now who are nodding at this one. Some people just need a simple list. This method can make it easy to tackle your personal and corporate gift purchasing monthly or bi-monthly since you can see all of the birthdays in a singular list. But, since this is not going to ping your Apple Watch to remind you, you’d have to remember to check the list frequently.
5. Display a perpetual calendar
If you’re not familiar with this, check out this example on Etsy. Perpetual calendars offer a great way to see the entire year’s birthdays in one place. It can also help you see any bigtime birthday months coming up. For my family this is June-July. We a have about 75% of our family’s (including extended family’s) birthdays between June 15 and August 10. It’s crazytown during that time. But with good planning, we can always find thoughtful and empowering gifts for everyone on our list.
So, now you have some ideas on how to keep track of birthdays, but is it really that big of a deal? Yes!
Unlike Christmas, Mother’s Day, or Admin Assistant Day, birthdays are singularly about the individual. It’s a time when the world revolves only around them. What a time to show your love and appreciation! If you’re giving employee or client gifts, birthdays offer you a time to acknowledge and encourage their passions outside the office. For personal gifts, it shows you are in tune with their life’s events. Even a small gift or card shows that you thought about them on their special day.
What’s your favorite way to track birthdays?
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