Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Adding birthdays and events alongside your tasks

Having your birthdays separate from your other tasks can make it harder to organize. This week’s tip comes from alex1ua, who suggests putting all birthdays and events in your tasks. Then you’ll have all of them in one place and can keep track not only of birthdays but other “anniversaries” as well.

Since I am using Remember The Milk for managing all my daily tasks, I stopped checking my phone’s calendar for upcoming birthdays of my friends. I plan my tight schedule in Remember The Milk, and only in the evening see reminders on birthdays from my phone’s calendar, when it is too late even for a call.

The solution was found in a special task “birthdays and anniversaries”, which has subtask for each birthday or anniversary of my friends and colleagues. All tasks have the “repeat every year” setting, so they repeat next year.

I found two unexpected benefits from this technique: now there is a single place where I can see all upcoming birthdays, and I can have a list of special dates for each person - birthdays, anniversaries of weddings, birthdays of children, anniversaries of work etc - all of them have a separate task (the “contacts” application on my phone does not provide such flexibility).

Planning tasks in this manner helps all my friends to hear congratulations or get presents on time.

Thanks for sharing this tip, alex1ua! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.