Yes, you may now commence hating me.
But wait! I can help you do the same thing next year!
Wishpot lets you add products on the web to one central list. I started using it for my own wish list, and then realized how incredibly handy it was for gift ideas, too. You can make your lists public, visible only to your Wishpot friends, or only viewable by you, so it's easy to set up a private list just for gift ideas for other people.
Wishpot has a special button you add to your browser, so whenever you're looking at stuff online, you can just click that button to add that item to one of your lists. Simple.
So throughout 2010, whenever I saw something cool and thought, "Oh, somebody I know might like that," I would just add it to my gift ideas list on Wishpot. By the time Thanksgiving came around, I had approximately 30 gift ideas in there, all of them easy to buy online from the comfort of my own couch.
The other trick up my sleeve that makes Christmas shopping painless is a simple spreadsheet I created in Google Docs for Christmas gift-planning. (You could use any spreadsheet program, like Excel, but I find Google Docs helpful because I can access it anywhere - like if I get a random idea at work, for example.)
The columns in my spreadsheet are:
Name
Relationship
Budget
Gift idea 1
Gift idea 2
Gift idea 3
Gift Purchased
Gift cost
Shipping cost
Purchased?
Wrapped?
Shipped?
Then I just fill it in with all the people I'm planning to buy things for, and track the status of the gift with the final three columns.
Finally, I also discovered a great website this year to find fun gifts: PerpetualKid.com. Lots of fun stuff to be had there, and a flat, $5.99 shipping rate, no matter how much you buy. Love it!
So save yourself some agony next year - start planning early by having some web tools at your disposal, so Christmas shopping is a breeze.
Happy holidays!
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