Use case
The people in your life, on one list
Remembering at nine in the evening is worse than a message that arrives at nine in the morning. By then the message has to apologise for itself before it can say anything else.
The problem is not the date. It is the hour.
You almost never forget a birthday outright. What happens is that you remember it late — at 21:00, after a day in which two different things could have reminded you and neither did.
A message sent then arrives as an apology with a greeting attached. Everyone involved knows what happened. The person reading it knows you remembered because something prompted you at the end of the day, which is a slightly worse feeling than not hearing from you at all.
The fix is not a better memory and it is not a bigger list. It is a prompt that arrives early enough that you can still do the thing you would actually have wanted to do: ring them, send a card that arrives on the day, or order something that needs three days of postage.
A birthday is a person, not a date in a calendar
Timelee has a Life Event reminder kind for the things that come round every year. You add the person's name, their photo, your relation to them, and — if you know it — the birth year, which is what lets the reminder tell you the age they are turning.
One default time applies to all of them, so you set the hour you want to be told about birthdays once rather than choosing it thirty separate times. Birthdays and anniversaries live together in the same place, which is right, because they are the same kind of obligation with the same failure mode.
Add their phone number and you can call them straight from the reminder. That is a small thing that changes behaviour: the gap between remembering and ringing is usually a search for a number, and the search is where the intention dies.
- Name, photo, relation, and a birth year that produces "turns 34"
- Birthday, Anniversary, or anything else yearly
- Their number attached, so calling is one tap rather than a search
Building the list once
This is a one-evening job that pays out for years. Do it in one sitting rather than adding people as they come up, because adding people as they come up is what you are doing now.
Start with the ones you would be embarrassed to miss
Parents, siblings, partner, children, the two or three friends who would notice. Fifteen entries covers most of the actual risk. A list of ninety is a list you will stop trusting.
Add the year where you know it
It is the difference between a prompt that says a name and one that says somebody is turning thirty. The second one tells you what kind of birthday it is and therefore what it needs.
Set the anniversaries too
Wedding anniversaries, the date someone died, the date a friend moved away. The last two matter more than the first and are the ones nobody has a system for.
Give the big ones a warning
For anything that needs a card, a booking or an actual present, add a pre-alarm so the prompt lands while the post still has time to work. The day itself is too late for anything other than a message.
Set the default time to morning
One time applies to all your life events. Make it early. A reminder at 08:00 leaves you the whole day to do something; a reminder at 20:00 leaves you the apology.
What holds the list together
Life events
Birthday, Anniversary or Other, with a photo, a relation and an age that comes from the birth year.
Pre-alarm
A warning before the reminder itself. The point is to arrive while a card can still be posted.
Call from the reminder
Attach their number and the prompt arrives holding the way to act on it.
Share the household ones
Assign the present-buying to the other adult in the house. They accept or decline, which settles who is doing it.
A bucket for the present list
A list reminder built by searching a catalogue and tapping items, that rings as one reminder.
Yearly repeats
It comes back next year without you rebuilding it, and Repeat ends is there when something should stop.
The list people usually forget to include
- Parents-in-law, whose birthdays you have historically been told about rather than known
- Godchildren, nieces and nephews, whose ages are the entire point of the message
- The friend who always remembers yours
- Wedding anniversaries of the couples you are close to, not only your own
- The anniversary of a death in a family you are close to, which needs a quiet message and no fuss
- The colleague who is leaving, whose last day is a one-off rather than a yearly event
A card that arrives on the day was posted on a Tuesday by somebody who was reminded on the Monday.
Everything about remembering people well is upstream of the date itself.
Put fifteen people in tonight
Sign in with Google, add the ones you would be embarrassed to miss, and set the default time to the morning.