I have a confession. Sometimes I don’t feel like scrapbooking. (Gasp!) I know, right?
I think everyone can relate to a period of time when you just don’t feel creatively inspired, and it seems like pulling teeth to put a scrapbook page together.
However, I have come up with ways to document my life, so that when I AM ready to scrapbook, the details are there for me to remember and use in my scrapbooking.
Hand-Written Journal
This is a very low-tech and easy way to keep track of daily activities and thoughts. Just pick up a pen and write. I use my Moleskine daily planner. I have more than enough notebooks and pens to keep doing this for a very long time. I made it a habit to write in my journal each night right when I climb into bed. Sometimes it’s just bullet list of things we did that day, or stuff I ate. Sometimes it’s deeper and involves writing down my thoughts and feelings. But I make it a habit to write each night.
Oh Life
Oh Life will send you an email at a set time of your choosing every day (or less frequently if you choose). You simply reply to the email with your journaling and hit the "send" button in your email. I started using this regularly at the end of 2011, and haven’t missed a day since then. I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve copied and pasted this for my Project Life album, or for my blog posts. I love that it is part of my email and searchable if I’m trying to figure out what day I did something.
Momento
I bought the Momento app a few months ago and love it. You can write down little things during the day, directly into Momento. But the most powerful part is that it gathers all your photos from Instagram, your tweets, your Facebook updates, and your blog feed. So you have all that in one place and you can look at it by day on the calendar. It’s like a summary of all your social networking updates.
I don’t tend to share as much about my personal life on Twitter since I have a public account. But I do share a lot more on Facebook. I have used Facebook screenshots in my Project Life album, and I’ve also copied and pasted FB status updates onto my blog or Oh Life journaling. It’s yet another reservoir of my life that I can dip into for scrapbooking purposes later.
Blogging – this is my most-used form of documenting my life. I blog about daily life, big events, small events, stuff I ate, etc. I love the years of memories I’ve kept on my blog. I love that it’s searchable and I can find a specific blog post about some memory in a few seconds. I love the combination of photos + stories on my blog. Many of my scrapbook pages are inspired or based on my blog posts. I use the photos and stories as a jumping off point. And when I scrapbook digitally, it’s even easier since I can just copy and paste some journaling from my blog into my scrapbook page. It has been a fantastic memory-keeping vehicle for me.
As with all things, they are only useful if you use them. So if you would like somewhere to hold your photos or stories until later, I highly recommend the above methods. Even if you never get around to scrapbook them, you already have the documentation. And that my friends, is a good thing.
Christine (listgirl)
Rochelle says
Great advice! I have been using Foursquare this year to help me with my P52. I check in everywhere I go. I am working on March now and it’s easy to check my history to see what I was doing on any given day. I’m using my P52 as a kind of diary of our life.
Diane E says
Thanks Christine! I will definitely look into that…trying to be better about documenting my days…LIFE through writing and not just with photos..LOL. It’ll be nice to have a constant reminder to help motivate me!!