Facebook has been great as it helped me to keep in touch and know the happenings of my friends….. some of who I do not meet them in person anymore. It is also a tool that I rely on to help me remember birthdays of my friends because I can sometimes be quite forgetful.
Until I find that I am spending way too much time that I would like on Facebook. One of my goals is to build better blogs (I do have multiple blogs) and write more articles…. and I am not able to accomplish it if I am waste my mental energy on Facebook or watching television. I’ve already come up with a cheeky way to reduce the time spend on social media.
Of course if I do not access to my Facebook account, I may end up missing their birthdays. This happened recently with my former boss who I deeply respected (but I am ashamed as she reminder my birthday but I have forgotten hers).
The next thing is to remember birthdays of important persons in my life and to drop them a birthday message via their Facebook and/or send them a Whatapps message.
Friends who choose to keep their birthdays hidden in Facebook
I know I’m cheap… we are supposed to remember their birthdays by heart. I do remember but sometimes when we are busy and preoccupied, we may lose track of time.
Checking birthday via Facebook would not work as well if that friend kept the birthday hidden. I have a good friend who initially chose not to update his birthday. Because we have been friends for so long, I remember his birthday. I logged in to FB, expecting the notification to pop up and droves of people leaving Happy Birthdays on his timeline. But there was only a few old friends who left message. And the others did not follow suit because either they were not sure or that it did not pop up on their newsfeed (because birthdays made public will show up in the birthday announcement but posting on timeline does not show up).
I know some of my friends told me they do not wish to put their birthdays because true friends would remember the day. And then they may get hurt or offended when no one post any birthday wishes on their timeline on their birthdays (while other friends’ timelines are flooded with birthday wishes).
If a friend does not remember your birthday, it does not mean that the friend don’t care about you. During schooldays we may always remember each other’s birthdays- for me I definitely have no issue remembering birthdays of close to 20 friends then. However, as we grow into real adulthood, come out and face various work ups and downs, life challenges, juggling multiple roles… we may overlook. I know my friends are working hard trying to survive and manage their work and life. So I do include and each year, I would get nice wishes from friends that warm my heart.
With that, I was able to convince my friend to make his birthday visible. The following year, his timeline was flooded with birthday wishes from many of his friends.
How to remember friends’ birthdays
What I would do to prevent future mishaps of forgetting important birthdays is to spend a little down to list down the birthdays of those who are important to me in my physical table calendar. Somehow I prefer to do this than to have it on an app because I lose my records when I change phone and if I set the reminder time wrongly, the reminder disappears even before I see it.
Then when the new year comes and it is come to change the calendar, I would transfer the birthdays to the new calendar.
You would probably think this is redundant work- but this exercise would probably take you probably 15 to 30 minutes depending on the number of people whose birthdays you want to make sure you remember. And you only have to do it once a year to transfer the data over. There may be new names that you want to add or remove.
30 minutes once a year is better than going in each day to see upcoming birthdays and ending up wasting 30 minutes or more each day scrolling down the newsfeed for interesting news. A calendar also helps you to visually see the upcoming birthdays at a glance, giving you sufficient time if you wish to prepare and send a real birthday card/gift over to the person.