Forgetting a friend or a relative’s birthday can lead to some less-than-ideal situations. Luckily, in today’s digital age there are many ways to get reminded of a birthday. Most commonly, we get notifications on Facebook, but more and more people are trying to stay away from the social network — or simply don’t add a birthday to their profile — so there’s a risk that you might miss the important event. As an additional layer of protection against such mishaps, you can add birthdays to your Google Calendar as well. Adding a birthday to a calendar sounds like a pretty straightforward process but it’s not as intuitive as you might think. There are two main ways you can go about adding a birthday to Google Calendar. We’ll give you a step-by-step guide for each below.

Add a birthday to Google Calendar through your contacts

There’s one important caveat about adding birthdays through this method and it’s that Google Calendar currently doesn’t have native support for birthday notifications. This means that unless you use your Calendar regularly, there’s a good chance you might miss a birthday. Still, if having them on there is enough for you, continue reading. If not, skip to part two of this how-to.

Somewhat surprisingly, adding birthdays isn’t done on the Calendar app. Here’s what you should do instead:

Step 1: 

The same process can be used to add different important annual events connected to your friends and family. From the drop-down menu seen on Step 2, instead of “Birthday” you can select to add an anniversary to your Google Calendar or even a custom event of your liking.