A few weeks ago, I (Steph) posted this post with some ideas to help us all “get it done”.  I asked for ideas for a future post and got several great ones that I would like to share!

Our first tip comes from Rachel (rach3975 in the digiverse): “One of my favorite tips is to pre-write journaling. When I download pictures to the computer and mark them for scrapping (which I do by copying the best ones into a scrapping folder), I also take a few minutes to journal in a Word Document. That way I get the memories down while they’re fresh and don’t have to sit at the computer 6 months later with a case of writer’s block thinking, “I wish I could remember the story behind these photos…” I also keep a running list of all the cute things my kids say. I organize it by month. Then if I have a photo from a given month with no story to tell, I can open my Things You Say document and pair the photo with something they said around that time.”

My family took a vacation to Hawaii last fall and I blogged on a private blog each day things that happened while we were on that trip.  As I am scrapping it now, (8 months later) I am amazed at all of the little details I had forgotten about.  I am so happy to be able to add them to my layouts!  I need to follow Rachels advice though, and do it more frequently!!

Sabine had a few great suggestions for us, but I think this was my favorite: “I read Ali Edwards’ book Life Artist, which is a phenomenal book.  I love her idea of how twenty years from now, it won’t matter which paper I used, but the fact that the page exists at all.  Does everything match perfectly?  Perhaps not, but a story got told, rather than being left to fade in my mind.  Since adopting this philosophy, I find my pages are more carefree, and loving…so, in other words, better than they were when I agonized over making them perfect!”

I wonder how many memories I could get scrapped if I spent less time deciding which red paper to use (I just made this comment to a friend yesterday…haha).

knittenjen had this great tip: challenges help me get a “start” – sort of like a template (which each site has challenges for!). I have all the photos I need to scrap in their certain locations. Then I create a spreadsheet where I enter the sites and their challenges as they come up. Each page I scrap for a challenge is just as special as if it had no outside prompting, and what with the deadlines and the many, many challenges – I finish more scrapping! And I get ideas to do stuff I would not have otherwise thought to do! I’m not “legalistic” about it with myself – if a challenge doesn’t interest me, I don’t do it. But most of them do! And as a bonus, I end up earning free product after earning a certain number of points.”

Many blogs and sites (TDD is one) give away gift certificates randomly to those that participate in a chellenge, your layout doesn’t have to be deemed “best”, you only need to do a layout to win. LOVE that!!!

Use a calendar to jump-start your memory.  If you have a hard time keeping track of notebooks to write things down on, keep track on a calendar by writing keywords and phrases.  This will not only help you when you sit down to scrap, but it will also be fun to look back and see when things happened in relation to other events going on in your life at the time (i.e. the baby took their first step the same day that your oldest child had piano lessons and someone else had a doctors appointment, etc).

Sabine had this great organizing tip that I loved, because it is very similar to the way I do it.  I don’t want to spend my scrapping time tagging and labeling, so I organize my photos chronologically:  “My pictures are well organized.  I don’t use a program to do it, simply copy them to my hard drive from the camera, rename the folder, and rotate the pictures.  I have a folder for each year, and within, I rename a folder, for example, 2009-06-25 Mom’s birthday, zoo trip.  So, they organize chronologically in Windows automatically,(yup, no Mac for me, I’m afraid!) and I have a couple of keywords that remind me what’s in each folder, which makes it easy to find things later on.”

I loved seeing these ideas come into my inbox and have decided to try a few of them and see if it helps me to GET IT DONE!!!

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