Birthdays and reoccuring yearly events

[indigodreaming]

Does anyone have any tips for the best way of handling these?
does a perpetual calendar work (seen one on time/design)?
Notes in a tickler file?
one long reference list in month order and transfer them over at the weekly check list?

What do you find the best way?

[sarahg]

I used to use a palm pilot to do this and found digital storage of recurring events is fantastic - it never misses a beat.

Sadly the old palm moved on and the new ones weren't reliable enough to keep me with them; so I've moved to a paper calendar. What I do though is keep recurring events in a google calendar (and I subscribe to a few other online calendars via that also including one for work); and in my weekly review I copy over the coming few week's events from one to the other. A manual "sync" :)

[Oogiem]

What do you find the best way?

I put both people and major animal birthdays all into my Palm OS Treo cell phone as recurring items. The only thing I have to change is when someone dies it's a bit upsetting to delete the future ones. I see no way around it though. The reminders often occur months after the loss so it can be an emotional whammy to handle them.

[ellobogrande]

My favorite way to handle recurring events by far is my Outlook calendar, which synchronizes to the Palm. I set a reminder alarm to go off a week before such events to trigger reminders about them.

However, if I was using a paper based system, I would probably make a series of reference lists that would contain things of this nature. One list would be birthdays by month. So that I remember to review them regularly, I'll drop a note that reads "review birthdays by month list" in my tickler file at the appropriate intervals, and take the appropriate action when I see it again.

As an aside, let me offer a tip that applies to Outlook users. We all have recurring tasks in our lives--housekeeping and maintenance that needs to be done on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. I track these items by setting up recurring appointments on my calendar that read "Add [monthly/quarterly/July, etc] action items to Tasks". Inside the notes field, I attach Outlook tasks (they appear as icons with subtitles) that represent these recurring items. When these days arrive, I open the calendar entries and drag the tasks into the Tasks folder. They then show up in the appropriate lists. It's a really elegant solution that has worked well for me.

Best of luck.

[kewms]

As an aside, let me offer a tip that applies to Outlook users. We all have recurring tasks in our lives--housekeeping and maintenance that needs to be done on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. I track these items by setting up recurring appointments on my calendar that read "Add [monthly/quarterly/July, etc] action items to Tasks". Inside the notes field, I attach Outlook tasks (they appear as icons with subtitles) that represent these recurring items. When these days arrive, I open the calendar entries and drag the tasks into the Tasks folder. They then show up in the appropriate lists. It's a really elegant solution that has worked well for me.

When I used Outlook, I took advantage of the repeating tasks feature--you can set a task to regenerate itself at regular intervals, either some number of days after completion or at the same time every week/month/year.

Katherine

[ellobogrande]

When I used Outlook, I took advantage of the repeating tasks feature--you can set a task to regenerate itself at regular intervals, either some number of days after completion or at the same time every week/month/year.

Katherine

I'm not saying this is a bad suggestion, but while recurring calendar entries work well for me, I've never been able to get recurring or regenerating tasks to work right for me; they cause synchronization issues with the Palm.

Additionally, I may not always need to have every one of those recurring tasks added to my list. For example, I have "Clean humidifier" embedded in the "Add weekly action items to Tasks" event on my calendar, but in the summer I'm not using the humidifier so I don't need to clean it.

By attaching these task objects to a calendar object, I have the ability to pick and choose what I want to add each time one shows up.

[Brent]

I use the Tickler for this.

[MarinaMartin]

I have a recurring Google Calendar event that sends me an email on each birthday (or, for people that I send cards to, one week before). This way I don't have to worry about synchronizing or looking at my calendar ahead of time and remembering ... I get the email and I can then send a birthday note in under two minutes, on the spot.

[jesig]

I was going to post exactly what Marina just posted--Google Calendar is a godsend for this. You can set up a separate calendar just for Birthdays and anniversaries and set its default to whatever notification you'd like. My calendar is set to e-mail me two weeks in advance in case it's someone like a sibling or niece that I need to send a gift to, otherwise when I get the e-mail I snooze the event until the day of so that I remember to send them an e-mail.

[MarinaMartin]

I also want to mention that there is a Facebook application that lets you import a dynamic calendar of your Facebook friends' birthdays as a Google Calendar.

I use Facebook loosely as a networking tool, and this was very convenient for me.

FbCal (http://www.fbcal.com/)

[Thor]

I take the additional step of putting the year next to the name or the couple so I can figure out how old they are or how many years the anniversary represents.

On my calendar it looks like this:

First Name Last Name 1967
Man & Wife Last Name 1988

If I don't know the year, the next time it comes around I ask. I've got the typical reminder set up too, via email as a recurring event on my Yahoo calendar which is excellent by the way.

[DrJoe]

I put both people and major animal birthdays all into my Palm OS Treo cell phone as recurring items. The only thing I have to change is when someone dies it's a bit upsetting to delete the future ones. I see no way around it though. The reminders often occur months after the loss so it can be an emotional whammy to handle them.


I use a Palm T3 with Datebk6, which uses icons for birthdays, and which takes them from the birthday field in the Contacts database. In this case, I remove the birthday from the contacts database (move it into a spare field), so future birthdays no longer appear (in fact they all disappear from the calendar, even the 'past' ones), and put in a yearly-recurring item with a candle icon, as an 'in memoriam' reminder. I have this now for both my parents. It stops those painful reminders.

DrJoe