I usually tweak the roundup graphic a bit each year and I think this is my favorite one so far. Feel free to save it for your own use. I’ll post a new one each month to remind us all to document our everyday lives.

Whether or not you follow my monthly roundup prompts, I hope you have a system for documenting the details of your everyday life. It might seem overwhelming during a busy month or boring during slower times, but it’s worth having some systems in place to help you capture the details.

Here are a few of my suggestions to make documenting an easy part of your routine.

I think this was the most difficult roundup I’ve ever done. Life has been hard to document over the last year, but this was a particularly scary month in the United States. I couldn’t exactly leave political events off of my recap and I wouldn’t want to do that. I also needed to be sure they were recorded in a way that will be suitable for all viewers of my album. I plan to do more journaling of the events that took place, but won’t be sharing those publicly.

I hope that by sharing my approach, it will make it easier for you to decide how you want to do your own documenting.

Now that January has (finally) ended, it’s time for my list of roundup prompts. Before I put them all together on a reminder graphic, I wanted to check in with all of you about roundups in general.

You’ve probably seen the templates that I have designed for digital scrapbooking. I use them all the time for scrapbook layouts, but I was so excited when my daughter Riley used one to create a vision board for her 2021 goals.

I finally got all of my Christmas decorations put away yesterday so it feels a bit bare around here, but also fresh and clean. So far, the first few days of January have mostly been about working on unfinished business from last year. I cleaned up Christmas, cleaned out the fridge, and completed my December roundup. I also tallied up our stats from the year (husband’s travel, Jazz games attended, etc.) which didn’t take me very long since most of that all stopped last March. I also put together a year-end recap page. It feels so good to get these tasks done!

We start off the calendar year with a brand new slate for telling our stories so it’s a natural time to make some decisions about how to document our daily lives. While I do want to emphasize that we don’t have to have everything figured out for the entire year as of today, it’s also a good time to consider some overall approaches as some of them depend on daily action.

Can you believe we made it to the end of 202?! That’s cause for celebration! This is going to be quite the year to document. If you’ve been doing your roundups each month, it will be really easy. If you haven’t, that’s ok too. It’s never too late to start and the end of the year is a great time to do a roundup. There are tons of recap news articles out there that will help you list the events of 2020,

Before I get scrapping December moments and memories, I told myself I would get my November roundup completed. It helps me to set these types of mini-goals or conditions to hold myself accountable. November was definitely a tough month, but I’m so glad to have it documented!