On the last day of every month, I post a little reminder to "roundup" your memories for the month. This simple little exercise will prompt you to take a few minutes and jot down the details of the ending month before the new one takes over. Look over your calendar, your blog posts, your photos, or whatever types of records you have kept throughout the month. I find that even reviewing my bank statement jogs my memory about what has happened in the month.
I’ve been doing monthly roundups since January of 2006 and I can't even begin to tell you how much easier it has made memory keeping for me! I am constantly referencing my past roundups for ideas for scrapbook pages, and I always have material for journaling now. After I answer the questions I just post them to my blog and my roundup is done. If you don't have a blog, just save them on your hard drive or print them out. You can even create a scrapbook of roundups!
Here’s an example of a monthly roundup reminder post and here’s an example of how I did my own roundup recap. You can find my roundup archives here if you want to look through some of my previous entries.
On to the roundup… feel free to copy and paste the following and then fill in your own answers.
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- What books and/or magazines did I read this month?
- What movies, television shows, plays, etc. did I watch this month?
- What fun things did I do with my family and/or friends?
- What gifts did I give and/or receive?
- What special or unusual purchases did I make?
- What illnesses or health concerns did I have?
- What were my accomplishments this month?
- What were my disappointments this month?
- How did I do on my goals for the month? (Or any current short or long term goals)
- Anything else noteworthy to include?
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- Upload all digital pictures to my hard drive and clear off memory cards in camera. Place all photos for the month in a computer folder labeled with the month and year. Make a backup copy of the photos from the month on my external hard drive and a dvd. I also upload all photos to my flickr account (you can use any offsite photo storage site, but here's why I love flickr). Ideally, these activities should be done every time you process any pictures through your computer so you don't lose any precious files, but if you have lapsed during the month, now's the time to get it done!
- Choose photos or digital layouts to be printed out and get it done while I'm thinking about it.
- Backup any other documents or files as needed. I use an external hard drive, I also upload many documents to Google docs. I don't like to lose stuff.
- Backup my blog. It's easy to do if you have one, just use Typepad backup or blogger backup.
- Clean off my work area, empty my inbox, and clean up my computer files. Here's a link to my digi organization post.
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This is a great way to finish off the current month and prepare yourself for a fresh start.I hope you will try it! If you post your roundup on your blog, it would be great if you could give a link back to me so others know where to find the roundup tool, but it's not a requirement or anything. LOL! Also, feel free to edit the questions and tasks however you want to make them useful for you.
The important thing is to just take a few minutes to record the memories of the month before they are forgotten!
P.S. the font I used for the roundup titles is shadowed serif available for free on dafont.com
