In a previous article, I discussed Tackling Scrapbooking Roadblocks. Some readers may remember me mentioning I’d been “blocked” for around 12 months. In that time I’ve done virtually no scrapbooking at all. I’m happy to report now that I’m on the road to recovery. In the past 7 days, I’ve completed 8 pages. 
How have I achieved this? Well…partly through setting scrapbooking goals and planning my projects.
Setting Scrapbooking Goals
If you’ve lost your way, it can often help to give yourself a clear deadline to work to, or a target to work towards. I’ve read about people saying they have no trouble completing gift projects, but they often get bogged down with personal projects. Perhaps this is because gift projects have a set time frame they need to be completed by?
You might like think about setting yourself a certain number of pages to have completed each week or per month. Some people like to challenge themselves to completing a layout per day, which I personally find overwhelming and demotivating. (Still, it might work differently for you.) If you’re blocked, I’d suggest much gentler targets. If you achieve those, you can always set yourself harder ones. 
For me, my goals are to have a few albums of family memories for myself and I’d also like to give each of my children a maximum of two albums covering their childhood years when they turn eighteen.
So what are your scrapbooking goals? Do you have any? If you had to some, what would they be?
Planning Projects
After you’ve set yourself some clear goals, you’ll need to plan how you’re going to work towards achieving those goals. Look closely at what you’re currently doing and evaluate whether or not this will achieve your goal. If not, you might need to adjust your approach. Perhaps you might find that your initial goals were unrealistic. It’s perfectly ok to revise your goals once in a while.
In looking at what I was doing, I took a little peek into the future in my article Are We Scrapbooking Too Much? Using myself as a case study, I was shocked to learn I might end up with as many as 28 albums for my children by the time they turn eighteen. That’s far cry away from my target of only TWO albums. Obviously I needed to seriously rethink what I was doing and figure out how to achieve the result I wanted.
As part of my planning process, I looked at several different approaches. I quite liked Becky Higgins’ Project Life and Memory Works’ Simple Stories Life Documented, but they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. I then found Project 12 which suggests selecting your favourite photos during a particular month and using them to create just ONE scrapbooking page (or a double page spread if you prefer). I compared this approach with my goal of two albums over 18 years.
- 1 page per month = 12 pages per year
- 12 pages per year over 18 years = 216 pages
- At 100 pages per album, that’s approximately 2 albums to present at age 18.
Aha! That works! Now I have a clear goal (2 albums to cover 18 years) and also a clear plan to achieve that goal (one page per month of photos). This has helped immensely in moving me towards clearing the dreaded scrapper’s block.
Clearing Scrapper’s Block
If you’re currently, suffering scrappers block I highly recommend thinking about your scrapbooking goals and revisiting why you got into scrapbooking in the first place. Determine exactly what you’d like to achieve and then take some time planning how you’re going to achieve those goals. You might need to change your approach. Maybe not. Maybe you’re already on on track. In which case, good for you! At the very least you’ll have a clearer sense of where you’re headed to on your scrapbooking journey.
Look out for my other roadblock busting strategies including reducing choice, organising and simplifying (all coming soon).
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