On Organization

In the informal world of e-cards, email, and text messaging, it is easy to get carried away with not being personal with greeting cards, especially birthday ones.  It has become so easy to just send someone an email telling them “Happy Birthday” or sending them a text message before you go to bed, but this really takes all the feeling out of wishing them that “Happy Birthday”.  There are even services now where you can enter birthday dates ahead of time and the web sites will send the e-card on the birthday, so you do not even have to think about it any more.

I think this trend has picked up for obvious reasons (some of the same reasons this blog exists), because people feel like they do not have enough time anymore and they want to make things as easy as possible.  The good news is that I have a great system that you can use to still be personal in birthday cards (or any other type of greeting or communication) without spending a lot more time and energy.

Lets say you are just bad at sending birthday cards, or even calling people on their birthday, I think there are probably 2 reasons this can happen:

1. You just forget about the birthday until it is too late
2. You are too “busy” to buy a card, write something in it for 30 seconds, and send it

Here are some simple solutions to each of those problems:

1. Forgetting about the date of the birthday
   • Store everyone’s birthdays in your calendar, and repeat it from year to year (if you use a calendar like Outlook or on your phone, put a recurrence on it for every year on that date.  Put the reminder for 5 days before so you can send the card and then put a reminder the day of so you can call) (if you use a paper calendar, keep all the birthdays on a note in the back and on the date of the birthday, and when you get a new year’s book, just look at your note.  Also a good idea to put a reminder note for about 5 days before so you can send the card)
   • Use an online service that can help remind you of upcoming birthdays.  Birthday Alarm is a great one.  It lets you put in everyone’s birthdays or lets you email everyone you know and asks for birthdays (just the date, not the year) so you remember them.  This service also emails you about 5 or 6 days before the birthday so you can send a card and then on the birthday so you can call.
2. Being too “busy” to send a card
   • I put “busy” in quotations because if you are truly too busy to send someone a card (about 1 minute of total effort) or to call them for 5 minutes and talk, you might need to readdress your priorities.
   • Here is the key to this entire system: look forward for the next 6 months of 1 year of birthdays (or more) and go to the store and buy all the cards at one time.  If you are really brave, just buy them for a few years and buy a few extra generic ones for new birthdays you find out about or new friends you make.
   • When you get home with the cards, put a sticky note on each card listing who it is for, date of the birthday, and date to put it in the mail.
   • Keep them in a place you can remember in chronological order.
   • Do not fill out the card right away, something might happen in the future that you want to note in the card, so it will be more updated and personal.

So, that is the entire system.  Use a reliable system to keep track of birthdays and remind you a few days ahead of time, and buy the cards ahead of time so you do not forget about them when the birthday comes. 

I know I have missed lots of birthdays because of these poor excuses, and I hope this new system can help everyone to become more personal again.

If you like this idea, please share it.  How about on Twitter?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.