December Daily® 2024 | Special Guest Jen Wong

Hi friends! I’m happy to be here sharing about my plans to finish my 2023 album this year. I almost never finish my December Daily album within the month of December (or let’s be honest, January of the following year) and I know I’m not alone. December is a whirlwind for most of us, and by the end of the day, I’m often too tired and lacking brain power to work on my album. But that’s perfectly okay!

I don’t feel any guilt about it because I know that eventually it will get done. I enjoy working on the previous year’s album prior to December of the current year. In the months prior to December, the anticipation is in the air, there are new products to play with, and the holiday spirit is building up again!

When I first dusted off my 2023 album and supplies, I’ll admit that I felt that familiar twinge of overwhelm. But, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that big projects just need to be broken down into small steps, and got to work. Accessing the Starting Point I opened my 2023 December Daily album in August and found I had barely completed anything except a handful of pages. Here’s a look at a couple of them.

Since then, I’ve been plugging away ever so slowly, and have been making progress, bringing up my total to around twelve pages.

I usually take my albums until Day 25, but because in 2023, my family and I traveled to meet our extended family in Europe, I will go all the way until January 4, one day after we returned home, which feels like a good place to wrap up the album. That leaves over 20 pages left, which if I’m being honest, feels challenging.

The good news is that even though I didn’t finish many pages last year, I did complete the recording portion of the project. If you’ve heard me talk about my documenting process in general elsewhere, I have an established habit of journaling in an online note-taking app, and I found plenty of content for last December. This makes it easier to remember what happened last year and what stories I want to tell.

The other thing I did was to curate and edit my photos. I take a lot of photos during December (and even more while traveling), so there were a lot of photos to go through. But during December and January of last year, I took some time to upload all the photos from my camera and phone, and gather the photos from other people I might want to use (my partner, other family members, friends, etc). I have already done some basic editing on the photos and they are all tagged in Lightroom so I can easily see how many and which photos I plan to use each day.

When I picked the project back up recently, it wasn’t too difficult to go through my journaling and smaller set of photos to loosely plan which stories I would feature on each day. I jotted down any notes I wanted to remember if I had them. This is what my planning sheet looked like earlier last month.

My plan

With photos and a game plan, I am ready to create pages. As someone who likes working with Photoshop, I am the most efficient when I mock up pages in the software. I already print at home and have to resize photos to print, so it makes sense for me to bring the photos onto canvases so I can easily plan out the spread.

I don’t always plan everything down to the minute detail, but once I feel it’s good enough to create, I will go ahead and print the photos and put it together.

Though I love interactive elements and won’t say I am completely ruling them out, I probably will lean heavily on simple spreads and photo templates to get the project done. My focus is to create a home for photos and stories, and not so much on the products.

I also know that because I am trying to fit in 35 double page spreads, I can’t add too much bulk to my album. I try very hard to only have one album per year because I do not have the shelf space!

Here’s a look at a few of the new pages I’ve completed recently.

This one was mostly done actually, and I just needed to add the number to the page. I am not sure if I will add any more to it.

Using photo templates is an easy way to fit in lots more photos from an event.

I love little pockets for journaling cards and this one pulls out from behind a photo.

Using the same style of font and colors, I hope to make the album look consistent.

I added another pocket behind this photo template to hold a 4” x 6” journaling card. Moving Forward: Getting it Done, One Page at a Time

From here, I’ll keep loosely mocking up pages on my computer, printing photos and digital elements in batches, and pulling out any physical supplies I’ll need. I create mini “kits” (also known as “piles on my desk”), so when I have a few minutes here and there, I can jump right in.

I don’t know if I will realistically get my album done by December but I’m not stressing it either. Any progress is one step forward in the right direction. This is supposed to be fun, and I already have enough deadlines in my regular job and life that I don’t need to put pressure on myself.

I’ll continue to share my progress on Instagram, so you can follow along if you’d like to see my December Daily spreads unfold! You can find me at IG: @circleplusarrow. Here’s to celebrating each step forward, small win, and creating homes for our stories!