Help Desk
PURGE YOUR CALENDAR OF ACQUAINTANCES’ BIRTHDAYS
Social media has devalued the birthday by flooding our timelines with the felicitous anniversaries of people far beyond our close friends, family and colleagues. This is nowhere clearer than in your calendar, which you might find unexpectedly clogged with birthdays every day of people you might not even remember.
How does this happen? It’s a combination of legacy and modern synchronization and import, for most of us. In the past, Apple provided closer integration between Facebook and its operating systems. You may also have imported or synced contacts between Google and your Mac, iPhone, or iPad or have active sync still in place. If you’re like me, you may also have the detritus of contacts exported across many pieces of software across many computers, jobs and the like. I can hardly believe I ever knew as many people as are in my contacts list.
All of that can lead to many unneeded entries in the Birthday field in your Contacts database. The Calendar app across all of Apple’s platforms has a Birthdays calendar displayed by default that uses the Birthday field as its source.
I know that I have hundreds of birthdays imported from Facebook, and despite wishing all those people well, I have never celebrated the birthday of 99 per cent of them – maybe 75 per cent I’ve never even met in person.
The only way to remove birthdays selectively from your Calendar is to remove the Birthday field information or the entire contact card from Contacts.
You can create a smart group in Contacts that shows all entries that contain birthdays. Simply choose File > New Smart Group, and then select the criteria Birthday and the filter ‘is set’. Name the group something like Birthday Entries and click OK, and you’ve got a convenient list.
You can use the Calendar as a tool to find just the birthdays you want to remove:
1. Open the Calendar app in macOS.
2. Jump to January 1 (View > Go To Date) and show the weekly view (View > By Week).
For each birthday you want to remove, Control-click it
