I decided to do Project Life by the month this year instead of by the week. For many reasons, organizing by the week just didn't work for me. I really enjoyed it for a while and I got excited about it week after week but there was always something a bit off about how that schedule flowed for my family. Here are the primary reasons that I switched to monthly documenting for 2013.
Space
Last year's weekly layouts took up a lot of space - I filled two albums. Plus, I still do my normal digital layouts and those go into either our family album or each child's individual album. That's a lot of scrapbooking and takes up a lot of physical space. And there were many weeks when I didn't have enough photos to fill up a week's slots and I hated that I just used fillers - it felt like a waste of paper and bookshelves.
Pressure
It also felt like too much documentation. I was on overload - both because of space and also because of the pressure it put on me to constantly be documenting. Every week that rolled by where I didn't finish my Project Life spread felt horrid and I felt behind. I stopped chronological scrapping 7 years ago because I hated that feeling and that part really took the fun out of the project for me. I stopped documenting my pages here on the blog after week 32 because I just wasn't having fun with it anymore and the last thing I wanted to do was to photograph each spread and and spend even more time posting it and linking to supplies.
Family Calendars
Another reason that monthly spreads make more sense to me is that we organize our schedules here at home by the month. All of the kids have activities at school on monthly schedules and Tom and I have monthly deadlines. We put them on our shared calendar and in my iPhone calendar by the month. Breaking down events by the week didn't gel with either the schedule I have in my head or on my wall. And breaking my weekends up the way I did by using a Sunday - Saturday weekly spread made even less sense.
Photo Organization
Yet another reason is that I organize my photos by the month. That alone is a great reason to organize my albums by the month. I used to spend way too much time going through all my photos and reorganizing by the week before I could even decide what to print. And I loved that this format freed me up to organize by subject matter, not by a date. So I could choose to put all of the kitten photos together, all of Emily's events together, our weekends together, and so on. LOVE that!
Time
Obviously, I've only documented one month so far in 2013 but I spent far less time on those spreads than I did last year for sure. I didn't worry that photos were in perfect chronological order, I didn't worry about whether I had the exact amount of photos needed to fill up the slots and how many inserts did I need. I simply printed out the photos I wanted to use and then just filled up the slots until I was out of photos. It just felt right to me.
So that's what I'm doing and why. I'm sure that weekly documentation works just fine for many, many other people but I'm so glad that I chose another approach this year.
I'll be back with the layouts in a bit!
