This article is part of a series on how to become better at remembering to send cards and presents. Join my email list to get access to free tools to help you, and receive links to the other articles in the series.
Gathering birthday dates together in one place
You’ll likely have birthday dates in several different locations:
- Online calendar
- Paper calendar
- Diary
- Phone contacts
- WhatsApp/Text message chats
- Emails
- CRM system for clients
- Your mind
- Your Mom’s mind
- Your significant other’s mind
- More places that only you can think of!
We need these in one place if we’re going to maximise our chances of remembering to send a card or present. That one place will be a spreadsheet. If you want my spreadsheet to use as a template, join my email list and I’ll send it to you.
You might need to adjust the following steps to suit you, depending on where your birthday dates are stored.
Almost all of my birthday dates are on Facebook or in my Google Calendar, so I’m going to start there.
Extracting birthdays from Facebook
I’m going to use a Chrome Extension called the Birthday Calendar Extractor for Facebook. This step could be done manually, just by scrolling through your Friends’ birthdays and writing down the important ones.
If you’re not able to use the Chrome plugin described below, join my email list, reply to the ‘welcome’ email to let me know and I’ll find you another way.
Search for ‘Birthday Calendar Extractor for Facebook’ and you’ll find this:
Add the extension to your browser.
Now, login to Facebook using your web browser (not the app).
Is this is starting to feel like a pain the bum? Join my email list for access to the tool I’m building which will do all this for you. If not, let’s crack on…
Take a look in your extensions bar and find the icon that looks like a birthday cake. Click it!
If you can’t find it, click on the icon that looks like an unfinished jigsaw. This will show you all your ‘pinned’ and ‘unpinned’ extensions. Scroll down to the Birthday Calendar Extractor and click on it.
This popup box will appear. Select the “Generate Excel file — CSV” option and click “Generate”.
You will then see a ‘Success’ popup appear to confirm that the extraction is complete:
Please give some feedback to the extension’s creator, Peter. It’s free and very useful. How nice of Peter to make this easy for us :)
In Chrome, your download should appear in the bottom left-hand corner of your browser window. In not, go to the three vertical dots on the right-hand side of the Extensions toolbar and select ‘Downloads’.
Click on the ‘birthday-calendar.csv.’ file to open it.
You’ll see all your birthdays from Facebook listed. Now we need to get it into a format that we can use to generate reminders.
First, expand column B so that you can view all the dates clearly. If any of your dates look like this: ########## they may not copy properly.
Select all the data in columns A and B, except the title row. In other words, select cells A2 and B2, then drag down to the bottom of your data.
Copy the data to the clipboard by pressing Ctrl and C simultaneously.
If you’ve joined my email list and have received the template spreadsheet, open it now. If you haven’t, open a new spreadsheet using Google Sheets.
Paste this data into cell A3 by pressing Ctrl and V simultaneously.
Finally, we want to be able to look at this list chronologically to see who might be missing. To do that, we need to sort our table:
- Select everything in your table except for row 1
- Click on the ‘Data’ menu
- Select ‘Sort Range’
- Select “Data has header row”
- In the dropdown next to “Sort by” select “Birthday Month” and then “A -> Z”
- Click “Add another sort column”
- In the dropdown that appears next to “then by” select “Birthday Day” and select “A -> Z”
They’ll now be in chronological order for a calendar year.
Now we need to compare this list to other sources of birthday dates to see who’s missing.
Getting birthdays from elsewhere
Most of my important birthdays are stored in Google Calendar.
I’m taking a low-tech approach here that you can replicate for the sources of your birthdays.
Keep your Facebook birthday spreadsheet on your screen. Then open your other calendar/diary/whatever.
Go through your calendar, week by week. Where a birthday is listed, check to see if it already appears in your spreadsheet. If not, add a new row and enter the name and ‘next birthday’ of that person. Continue until you’re at the end of your calendar.
Repeat for any other sources of birthdays you might have.
If, like me, you have a friend or family member who is great at remembering birthdays, ask them to go through their list of birthdays to see if you’ve missed anyone else out.
If you don’t have a super-organised family member, think about the people on the list below to see if it triggers your memory:
- Grandparents
- Parents (Including step and in-law)
- Siblings (Including step and in-law)
- Aunts
- Uncles
- Cousins
- Nieces
- Nephews
- Cousin’s children
- Work friends
- School friends
- Rock climbing friends (substitute for your own hobbies/friendship groups)
- Other friends/colleagues
- Clients
- SPOUSE!
- YOUR OWN CHILDREN!!
That should give you a pretty comprehensive list of birthdays.
Make sure they’re all in the spreadsheet.
You’ve now successfully gathered all your birthdays together in one place! Woohoo!
In the next article, we’ll move to step 2: Deciding in advance what action to take for each birthday.
If you want to receive the latest update on the steps, strategy and tool I’m building, join my email list now. Let’s smash this card-giving malarkey once and for all!
