Your best Project Life tip

I'm not perfect at staying "caught up", but one thing that has really helped is hand writing the cards. When I just grab a card I like and write about the photo or the week, it is so much easier. I used to get caught up in worrying about perfectly color-coordinating the cards and photos and would procrastinate on create the layout. Now, I just put things together, use a cute pen and write things down. I can add embellishments later. Worse case scenario, I can just change the card.

I am the last person to be giving tips on staying caught up; I only do it monthly, and I've only completed up to February. However, my best tip is in regards to keeping good notes, I bought one of those school planners that you can find just about anywhere right now. It's about the size of a checkbook, and has both weekly and monthly calendars. It works great for keeping track of everything. When I go to scrap my PL, I can just flip through the planner for any dates and journaling notes (the weekly calendar has plenty of room, so you can write small journaling reminders if you want). I also paperclip any/all ephemera into the planner, on the appropriate date. The best part: if you buy one at Walmart, they're only about $3. I know a paper planner is a bit old school, but it works for me.

I don't do monthly spreads or anything organized like that. If keeping up with that kind of system stresses you out, my tip is to just go with the flow and use the pictures you already have. Use PL to get through the backlog of photos not in albums.

I actually use PL to scrap the random photos I take of DS that I don't want to traditionally scrap. Either it's just one picture or maybe the photos aren't good but I want to record the story still. That's when I pull out PL stuff. It's faster (but still looks awesome) to jot down the story on a card and put the pics into pockets. Done. Then I use my time to scrapbook traditionally those darling photos I just can't wait to get artsy with.

I do try to do "a week in the life" kind of spreads with PL occasionally because I love those kind of details on our everyday life. But I just pick a normal week and try to remember to take lots of pics and jot down what we did, ate, etc.

I do monthly spreads. I also use my computer (Photoshop Elements or PowerPoint) to make a general layout of the spread. This helps in three ways. First, on the left side, which I inherit from the spread before, I know the orientation of the pockets and can decide what size to print my photos (portrait, landscape, 4x6, 3x4, etc.) Second, I can figure out if I need to have more pages, more/less journaling etc. It just helps me go quickly when I do get the photos printed and I'm ready to go. I can decide to leave out a picture, or include it and use a smaller size insert (e.g. 6x8). Third, I usually check in with my progress about once a week and also jot down journaling notes so that when the month ends, I can remember stories I wanted to tell that happened at the beginning of the month.

This helped me do my first month of PL because I wasn't sure if I would have enough content to make a monthly spread. By the end of the first month, I saw monthly was the right pace for me and that I really would enjoy capturing my memories in this method.

1. Print at home.
2. Keep track of things you do each day- on a calendar, ohlife.com (they email you every day and you reply with the events of the day- it is kept in a blog-format for you to re-read), app.
3. Take your photos horizontally and vertically, just in case.

Great tips everyone!

I agree about the printing at home. Much more convenient. Also lets me do more custom sizes. Like sabriolet I do a lot of journaling on photos and use templates in PSE.

Print at home!

Also - I like to embellish my PL - some weeks more than others. But sometimes it works to just grab a kit and use it for your week. You can really drive yourself crazy by searching for the "perfect" card and downloading printables and remembering to use them, etc. I'm always surprised at how much I like the spreads I create by using one kit on that week.

I don't do PL in the sense of everyday. I do use PL for a birthday LO or a beach LO, for example.
It's nice because I can use a lot of photos. I am a hybrid scrapper so I do traditional, PL and digital in my albums.

I do mine monthly (two page spread per month)...

I print off calendars (6 months on a 8-1/2x11 page), and keep it on my desk... I sit at my desk every couple days, and the first thing I do is scribble down the highlights of the past few days... Just a word or two to trigger what happened... When I go to print/layout my pages, it helps me estimate how many pictures of what sizes to print...

I take a lot of vertical pictures, so I stick with mainly design A... It let's me get a ton of pictures into just two pages - four across the middle and I can double up in the 4x6 pockets... I could fit 22 3x4s if I really wanted too...

I print at home... It just would not happen if I had to plan to send them off or go in to get them printed...

I print then with a pretty big white border... I trim that border down to maybe 1/8", making my photos smaller than 3x4 or 4x6... It let's the card/paper show (so it already looks somewhat decorated...lol), and it gives me room to scribble a couple words, the date, or put a few embellishments... I love the look of full sized photos with the embellishments on top but I've yet to master taking a picture with enough white space to be able to do that myself...lol

If I have a lot to say, I write it out on my computer and print it on a PL card by putting the PL card in the 4x6 tray... I also use a typewriter, but I can get an easily readable, smaller font by using my computer...

When I go to make my pages, I print all my photos, trim them, lay them out how I want them, then pick all my cards... I glue my photos down right away (unless I need to run that card through my printer or typewriter first)... I find it much easier to do all the embellishments while looking at the two pages as a whole... Easier to plan, and it lets me go through each supply once which saves some time... Not that I mind it, I'm just so slow...lol


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I always use PSE 12 to process multiple files. It corrects the photos in a large batch for me. It saves me a lot of time.

I do weekly, but I only work on my album monthly, so my tip would be to organize photos weekly (if you do weekly that is). I have a folder named ProjectLife14, and then I have subfolders for each week, so it is very easy to see what I organized and what I didn't.

ladybuginohio-I'm so sorry, I just came back to this thread and saw your question. I have an android & use private diary from google play. The free one.

Thank you!