…and your satisfaction.
Would you like to? There was a time when I was very slow (it took me one or two weeks to complete a two-page layout). I would have liked to become faster, but I thought I would have to sacrifice quality to do so. I also suspected it would mean giving up the joy of the process. In fact, I’ve read these same types of comments on the message boards at 2 Peas.
At one point I began making some changes in the way I scrapbooked. The changes were unrelated and happened over a period of about six months, but each one contributed to a surprising increase in all three: speed, skill, and satisfaction. I’ve since become a woman obsessed, actually.
So let me ask you again. If you could increase your satisfaction, your skill, and your speed at scrapbooking, would you like to know how?
I’ll post a list of changes I made, recommendations to you, today. And over the next few weeks, I’ll spend an entry discussing each recommendation.
1. Give yourself a scrapbook area. Even if all you have room for is a little table just big enough to hold a layout, claim it as your own creating space. Whatever project or layout you are working on or intend to work on soon, have it out on that table all the time. Even if you don’t know when you’ll have time to sit down with it.
2. Spend at least ten to twenty minutes at your table every day. If that means reorganizing, then do it. If it means choosing the next set of pictures so you can think about what you’ll be doing next, do it. If it means pulling out papers that could potentially go with your next layout, do it. If ten minutes is all you have most days, that daily ten minutes will make a world of difference. I’ll explain why in the post dedicated to this recommendation. (Note: This is the reason why having a permanent table is so important).
3. Give yourself permission to take risks, make mistakes, create a really bad layout, and otherwise get messy. This means you can go ahead and cut that paper up, even if you’re still not sure it’ll work.
4. Participate in online challenges. Have a blog or gallery where you can post your layouts publicly. This will be the motivation for creating the layout by the challenge deadline. My experience with these is that you have between 3 and 7 days from the time the challenge posts, to the deadline. Seven days may be a lot, but remember that you have to photograph the layout and that usually needs to happen in the morning hours to get good lighting. Then there is the time it takes to edit it, upload it, and post it to the blog/gallery. That cuts out at least one day of scrapbooking time. If you are trying for multiple challenges at a time, or if want you to be among the first to post so that people actually see your work, your time is even shorter.
It forces you to work at a faster speed.
5. Give yourself permission to scrapbook out of order. I used to be a slave to the timeline. I still keep my books mainly chronological, but ever since I allowed myself to go with my “creative flow,” or the momentum of whatever I am feeling motivated to do at a given moment, I work faster and I love all of my pages.
There they are. My five recommendations. Changes I made that had enormous impact. I can’t wait to discuss each of these in more detail in future posts.
