Birthdays: Set and Forget

Quick Win

The best strategy for memorizing everyone’s birthday? Stop trying! Create automatic reminders with your phone’s calendar or an app.

Try This Today

• List your VIBs — very important birthdays. Write down the dates your nearest and dearest — and anyone else you want to celebrate — were born. When in doubt about the special day, ask! 
• Enter the dates. Using the calendar app on your phone, enter each birthday. You can often set a reminder for the day before and another a few days earlier, so you can send a card or gift. Set the “repeat” function to “every year.”
• Find an app. Don’t love your phone’s calendar? You can download a birthday reminder app and follow the instructions. 

Why

We’re living in the age of information overload: News, to-dos and plenty of noise compete for our attention every day. Birthdays sometimes fall through the cracks, even for the most conscientious folks. Using your calendar or an app to automate birthday reminders is a great use of “cognitive offloading,” a strategy that frees up your mind to focus on other priorities. Cognitive offloading may be useful for “daily information management,” according to researchers who led a study on the topic. In the study, published in the journal Memory in 2019, participants’ performance on a task improved after they saved unrelated information they had just learned on a computer, instead of trying to remember it. The 94 participants were college students, but we can all take a page from their book.