I see mothers all over the internet feeling guilty about how they’re always behind with their kids’ scrapbooks.

A large part of that reason is that all our expectations are too high.

If you are a scrapbooker, why do you do scrap? (is that the correct word?)

Is it to preserve a memory?

If that’s true, then relax your standards somewhat and just get the memories down.

If it’s to foster your creativity, then by all means get fancy but remember the reason you got into it in the first place.

I am not a scrapbooker by any means (I lack patience and “fiddliness”) but I do want to preserve some memories.

One of the things on my 37 things list is to do two crafty/creative projects a month.

I’ve done a couple of projects and thought I’d show you my first attempt – a pseudo-scrapbook :

For those of you who are TRULY crafty, don’t laugh – this is HUGE for me.

• I bought a brag book.
• I used some of the party printables for the front and back covers.
• Printed TONS of pics from the party.
• Arranged them in an order that made me happy.
• Put in some of the leftover cupcake toppers and tented food tags.
• Realised I still had space for about 6 pics.
• Went back to the photo shop to print additional pics.
• Rearranged a little bit more.
• Called it a day.

Am VERY happy with the results.

I showed the people at work and (just goes to show what kind of people I work with) they were all SO enthusiastic and encouraging about my efforts that 3 of them want me to do their kids’ party.

Um, no thanks

If you’re stuck in scrapbooking guilt, just go get some brag book, put your pics in, journal on the opposite side of the book and call it a day.

I guarantee you’ll feel so much better.

What do you think of my little project?

PS would you like me to show you some more of my very low-maintenance attempts at making cute things?

I like to think of a few small things I want to do around the house every month.

I thought it would inspire and motivate you to also think up a few things and tackle one small task every weekend.

Let’s hold each other accountable and do this together.

For March my tasks are mostly photo-related:

1. Print 12 pics of Connor and 12 of Kendra for their first year frames (yip, 8 months later )
2. Do the “Dion and Marcia” wall of photos in the passage outside our bedroom.
3. Decide where “friends” wall will be and start planning configuration
4. Two months’ filing

What are your 4 organising to-dos for March?

Be gentle with me.

I have another confession.

Of all the aspects of my life, after the library books (since I wrote that post, I’ve actually been very good about returning them on time. Who knew that airing my dirty laundry would fix my issues???), the next area that is most disorganised is my photos.

Strangely, they probably don’t seem disorganised to the majority of the population but to me, they’re desperately disorganised.

Also, I don’t seem to have a system for printing and displaying photos.

The only time I print some is if either I buy a beautiful photo frame or I’m given one as a gift.

The other day at work someone suggested I get a digital photo frame to display pics of my gorgeous babies (yes, I’m biased).

Immediately I jumped to conclusions and said, “oh, that’s way too expensive” until I heard what it cost – between R500 and R700.

My word, that’s almost nothing when you consider the cost of printing!

I felt like such an idiot though for simply assuming it was out of my budget.

I am now the very proud owner of a digital photo frame and I’m pleased that I (almost) never have to print photos again

How often do you print photos? What do you do with them?

Last week we spoke about decluttering all those f-r-e-e downloads (including mine!) and all the email. I always try to play along with you so I also decluttered some downloads (4 MP3 audios and 5 PDF e-books).

How did you do?

I must also apologise – I forgot to mention that as part of the Office Organising Bundle, you get Conquer your Email which will definitely help you if email’s your problem.

So how do you know if email’s a problem?

The quick answer is if you spend more than 30 minutes a day on email … but why don’t you take the assessment below this article.

90% of people waste an extra hour a day on email that they don’t have to. That hour translates to SIX WEEKS a year. You read that right – six weeks!

Now onto the rest of the computer decluttering.

Photos

Now that we’ve all gone digital, it’s so easy to snap, snap, snap and then snap some more.

Download pictures regularly, delete the bad ones there and then, and save the rest to CD or DVD regularly to fr.ee up some space on your computer.

I only print beautiful shots (because printing is so expensive here) so if I wouldn’t want to print it, I don’t keep it on my computer. If I want to use pics on the blog, I compress them immediately so that they take up 50KB as opposed to 1MB. And I name them meaningfully so I can find them afterwards with just a few clicks.

Blogs

How many blogs are you following in your Google Reader, Bloglines or other feed reader?

Do you know how long you take to read all of those blogs every day? Take some time to go through your feeds and declutter those you tend to skim over, especially if you do this 3 or more times every week.

Get to know your comfort number. Mine is around 42 – 45 and I know when I start adding more and more blogs without deleting any, I start feeling more and more overwhelmed at the sight of all those unread items!

My coaching challenge to you

1. Print out this post.
2. Tackle one of these sections every week until they’re all done.
3. Let me know when you do them.

Happy Organising.