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Life events

Birthdays and anniversaries, pulled from your contacts

You did not forget the birthday. You remembered it at 22:40, when the card shop had been shut for six hours and the only thing left was a message that reads like an apology. A birthday reminder app is only useful if it reaches you while you can still act.

Start with GoogleSee how delivery works
Hands writing a birthday card at a kitchen table

Birthdays do not fail on the day. They fail the week before.

Every one of these is a normal year. In each of them you knew the date perfectly well.

  • You remembered on the day itself

    A present needs two days. A card needs three. A table at a restaurant needs a week. Knowing at breakfast on the actual morning is knowing too late to do any of it.

  • It was in a calendar you do not open

    An all-day event sitting quietly at the top of a day you never scrolled to. It was there. It never made a sound.

  • You typed it in once and it never came back

    A one-off reminder set in a hurry three years ago, marked done, gone. Birthdays are annual by definition, and a single-shot reminder is the wrong shape for them.

  • You could not remember the age

    Thirty, or thirty-one? The difference between a nice message and a slightly wrong one is a number you never wrote down.

Start from the people you already have

Most of the birthdays you care about are already sitting in your phone's contacts, attached to the person rather than to a date in a list. Timelee can bring them in, so you are not retyping names and dates you have stored twice already.

Each life event holds the person's name, their photo, their relation to you, and the year if you know it. The year is the part people skip, and it is the part that does the work: with it, the reminder can tell you the age they are turning instead of leaving you to count.

  • Birthday, anniversary, or anything else that comes round yearly
  • Name, photo, relation, and the birth year if you have it
  • One default time applies to all of them, so you set it once
  • Add their number and you can call them straight from the reminder
Someone scrolling through the contacts on their phone

Setting one up

Four things, once, and then it comes back every year without you touching it again.

  1. Add the person

    Pull them from your contacts or type the name yourself. Add a photo if you want to recognise the reminder at a glance rather than read it.

  2. Pick the kind of event

    Birthday, anniversary, or something else annual — a death anniversary, a first day at a job, the date you adopted the dog. Timelee treats all three the same way.

  3. Put in the year

    Optional, but do it. It is what turns "Priya's birthday" into "Priya turns 34", which is the version you can actually use in the message.

  4. Add a pre-alarm

    A heads-up five hours or a day ahead of the event itself, so the reminder lands while the shops are open and a card is still a realistic idea.

What a life event reminder carries

The same controls as every other reminder in Timelee, because a birthday is not a lesser kind of thing to remember.

  • Turns {age}

    Enter the birth year and the reminder does the arithmetic on the right day, every year, so you never have to work it out in the message itself.

  • Annual by default

    It is not a dated task that disappears when you mark it done. It comes back next year, in the same shape, with the age moved on by one.

  • A warning shot first

    Stack a pre-alarm — or several — so you get one ring a week out to plan and another on the morning itself to send the message.

  • Escalate the ones that matter

    Most birthdays deserve an ordinary alarm. A parent's seventieth might deserve a real phone call. Delivery is set per reminder, so you decide which is which.

  • Call them from the reminder

    Save the person's number with the event and the reminder becomes the shortest route to actually ringing them, rather than a prompt to go and find them.

  • Kept out of the work list

    File life events under Personal, or a category of your own, and your Monday morning work view stops being interrupted by your cousin's anniversary.

One time setting covers all of them

Life events share a single default time rather than each carrying its own. Set it to something civilised — 08:00 works for most people, because it lands before the day starts rather than after it has ended — and every birthday and anniversary you add from then on uses it.

Where life events work

Where life events work
FeatureAndroidiOSWeb
Create a birthday or anniversaryYesYesYes
Import a birthday from your contactsYesYesNo
Attach the person's photoYesYesYes
Alarm and in-app call on the dayYesYesNo
Real phone call to a verified numberYesYesYes

You can build the whole list from a laptop. Your phone is what rings.

Nobody minds a late message. They mind that it was obviously late.

A reminder that arrives with time to spare is the difference between a thing you did and a thing you caught up on.

Put the next twelve months of birthdays in once

Add the people, add the years, set one default time. After that the list maintains itself and tells you the ages.

Start with GoogleHow to remember birthdays

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