Scrapbook Productivity!

How can you beat the clock? I bet you think I am going to write about using every minute possible to scrap? Well I do believe in squeezing it in whenever you need to in order to get the job DONE. But this time I want to talk about streamlining. Time is often elusive. We want more time to scrapbook and enjoy the hobby and yet when we get a bit of time, are we squandering the very thing we hoped to have? Unknowingly, we may be our own worst time waster when it comes to crop time!

Now we know that this hobby is meant to be fun. And we know that you want your pages to be more than basic and rudimentary. Page productivity is not the ONLY goal in this very creative hobby. But you may be asking yourself lately, "What can I do when I get behind?" "How can I ever catch up?" "What should I do to get myself going again?" "How do some people do so many pages?" You may even feel overwhelmed and succumb to scrappers block, or worse yet put away everything and be tempted to call it quits. Don't worry! There is hope!!!

Examine with us what you can do to avoid the pitfalls of unproductive scrappers. We really don't think much about overall efficiency and our own methods when we sit down to scrap. We just do it like we see it done. Our friends or a family member may have led us into scrapping. We usually adapt their style of scrapping method without realizing it or stopping to analyze if we can be doing this more efficiently.

If you organize your supplies and streamline your choices, you will get your albums done in half the time. Maybe even a third of the time. And all you have to do is make a few simple alterations in how you scrapbook. It would not affect the overall creativity or the quality of the album or the messages you add. It would just save you TIME! And we all know that is a limited commodity these days. Here is what I mean.

How do you scrap? If it normally takes you one to two hours from start to finish on each page and you have an album with 40 pages (20 page protectors) then we can see that normally a 40 page album will take you 80 hours. That is the equivalent of two 40 hour work weeks. Now not many of us have that kind of leisure time in big chunks. Or even in small bits. But you CAN make that same album in much less time.

I scrap fast at crops, which always creates a 'buzz' along the lines of "How do I do it?" and why others are not yet at that point. This leads me to watch others a lot at crops in order to help them streamline their styles. So, I know the following examples are true--sometimes even more so than these samples! First, let's take a look at the average scrapping time for one page. Then, we will show you the minute-by-minute breakdown on how streamlining will revolutionize your scrapping productivity! You won't believe your eyes!

Here is the average time breakdown for how most people make a standard page.

Photos: choosing the photos from a big pile on the desk or table: Generally this takes scrappers at least 5 -10 minutes.
Photos are generally not sorted ahead of time, which makes it chaotic for the scrapper to decide what to work on next. If you need enough to fill a 40 page album, you need an average of 120-140 photos. Often this sorting process stretches out into a 3 hour ordeal with very little decided.

Paper: choosing each sheet of perfect matching cardstock and pattern paper in just the right theme for the photos: Most scrappers take 10 to 15 minutes for this step for EACH page. Rifling through the paper bins and having overchoices seems to be the norm. Sometimes frustration sets in at this point and the scrapper decides to 'bag it' mentally and just sit and visit or look at a magazine or another scrapper's album.

Design time: Now here is a whopper. Isn't it funny how people who will not cook meals that take more than 30 minutes will sit and design a page for over 3 hours and still not be satisfied? Average design time ranges in the 30 minute to 3 hour frame.

Cutting photos down: cropping off the bad stuff: this takes most people 5-10 minutes per photo. Some people have to find their special templates, get out the cutter parts, assemble cutters and then actually trim. Beginners usually really like cute shaped templates which they usually regret later. If you have 6 photos on the page this can add up to 45 minutes or more for one page just to trim the photos depending on how you dilly dally.

Embellishments: Making embellishments and adding them is one of the fun parts of scrapping. Embellishments set the theme. But accents are also easy to get bogged down making. Adding too many accents to the page actually looks busy and detracts from the photo's simplest beauty--people's faces. This is an important area to assess for yourself. Is this the area you are spending the most time on? If you make them one by one, embellishments can take anywhere from 5 minutes up to days to create. Thirty minutes to an hour is average for many creative embellishments. Let's cut that down!

Journaling: This takes most people from 10 minutes to 2 hours to get the right words down on paper. Even if you are just adding names and dates and places this can take 2 minutes per photo for a total of 12 minutes for 6 photos. Scrappers usually take up to 30 minutes to write out their journaling and some leave it to do at home when they can 'think' better and not be on the spot or can use their computers for the tidy penmanship fonts. Even if you know what you want to say, it takes time to write it down neatly or type it out. Figure an average of 20 minutes per page for journaling. Many people take even more.

Titles: Titles have gotten much more artistic and creative in the last 2 or 3 years. Many of these extravagant beauties take about 15-30 minutes to create by hand. Sometimes longer.

Add it up:
Have you been keeping track? This one page has now taken our scrapper an average of 160 minutes or 2 hours and 40 minutes to do. At a 3-hour crop, she will be lucky to finish this one layout. Does this sound familiar? At this rate she will have to attend 40 of those 3-hour crops to get one album done or work 120 hours or MORE on this one album. This would be fine if she only wants to get 3 or 4 pages done a month or 40 to 50 layouts done a year. But if our scrapper has thousands of photos and hundreds of pages to tackle yearly, she may want to be more productive.

How can we be more productive with the limited time we have to scrap? It can be done! I used to be a scrapbooker who only did a layout or two at each long crop. Then I realized that I needed to move faster if I wanted to get caught up. If I also wanted to do my heritage album photos, pursue genealogy, do other hobbies, or spend any leisure time with my own family, things had to change. Examining my scrapbooking methods gave me the answer. I had to spend less time per page. But how? Streamlining my choices could make ALL the difference. Let's look again at our scrapper now that she has discovered some scrapbook streamlining tips. Time is now her friend instead of her foe. And boy has she tamed that clock!

Photo choices: Save from three to 30 HOURS just for one album!
Organize all your photos FIRST. Spending 3 hours organizing photos before you plan any pages or go to crops will yield days and weeks worth of time saved later on. Once your large stash of photos is sorted, you can grab JUST those you want to work on at a specific crop. Once sorted, you are ready to work. You can pick 10-30 photos off the organized stack and presto you not only save time trying to sort photos on the fly but you also KNOW your themes for that night's work. Whether you work chronologically or by theme or by subject, you can work much more quickly once you sort everything up front.

Portioned out, preliminary sorting for one minute will save you 5 minutes of stressful hassled sorting and handling per photo at a crop. That may not seem like much. But if you are adding 4 photos per page on a 40 page album you will save about 3 hours on JUST this album by pre sorting and organizing ALL your photo collection before you set to work making any albums. In addition, every album you make after that you will already have saved yourself 3 hours time in photo sorting alone! Now that is awesome!

Paper choices: Keep it simple.

Use your Stashes
I am in favor of using what you have in your stash. I have rarely met a scrapper who had less than 24 inches of paper in her stash. Even new scrappers seem to stockpile paper first. Most scrappers have racks, bins, and rooms full of paper. Yet they keep shopping. I love shopping too. But sooner or later these stash papers need to get used. This factors into the efficiency and productivity too. If you 'shop at home' you save yourself at least an hour's time each session.

Think about it. By the time you pack up the kids, drive to the shop, pick papers, browse the new cool stuff, and come back, an hour or more has passed. You most likely have papers that will work just fine. You just didn't really look and think and improvise. Doing a cute theme page? Even if you don't have the 'right' themed pattern papers on hand, you can tear an accent from your scraps or paper piece something faster than going to the store yet again. Choosing papers from what you own will save you hours of shopping time--but only YOU can commit to the search and find in your own stash.

Think Color and Mood --not always Theme and Pattern.
Another way to save time on paper and shop in the stash is to think of color moods or families when choosing papers. Don't be so set on specific matching of photos to only themed print papers. I may not have 40 hiking theme papers in my stash. But I may have about 15 misc themed nature/outdoor papers, 15 brown cardstocks, and 15 green cardstocks. I want to use these 45 papers up so my stash declines. Here is a good opportunity to do so in this outdoor album. I need to be flexible enough to allow my background papers and mats to be just that--BACKGROUNDS! Mats and backgrounds are meant to mildly (emphasis on mildly) point to your theme on the page. Don't let papers and prints take over your page plans and overwhelm you or your scrap style.

Mix and match.
Improvise. Use what you have. In my example, the outdoor theme is still represented in the color family I chose and the photos are emphasized. Yet I still mix in a few patterns and can get creative with my page designs. Like a wardrobe, your papers should coordinate but not be too busy or compete with the focal point, which is always the face in the photo. Reinforce your theme or message with color and your paper choices will go faster which means more time elsewhere!

Use Coordinating paper packs.
This is a wonderful time saver. If you happen to have one in your stash, use it! If you need to purchase one, it might be worth it. Having the talents of a master paper designer coordinate your patterns and solids for you in a paper pack is the BEST relief for those who dawdle over paper matching. Why pay 50 cents a sheet for paper YOU have to coordinate when you can often pay less for a pack of paper already coordinated by experts? Using a paper pack from the paper companies will save you 5 - 10 minutes per sheet. For a 40 page album--get this--you save at least 200 minutes for this step alone. That means you will save yourself AT LEAST a whopping 3 hours time on one album by getting a paper pack instead of single non-coordinated sheets! If you have paper packs in your stash, dig those treasures out and USE them!

Design Choices: Elegant, Classy and still Fun!

Sometimes I like to try to reinvent the wheel and design a page completely from ground zero. But this takes a lot of time. Most of the time I keep my layouts simple, classy, rectangular and basic. But every now and then I like to drop in a 'different' kind of layout format just so the album is not boring. In order to move myself along, I often use design sketches. I have a file of my own sketches that I have made during car trips and waiting room visits and down time.

I also use Becky Higgins' sketches a lot from a great book called “My Creative Companion”. There are 100's of sketches to choose from and no two look alike when worked up. When I need to get my album moving I use my sketches as a shortcut for design time. This cuts my design time down from 30 minutes a page to about 5 minutes a page. (I don't fret about which format to do either. Sometimes I just close my eyes and pick one! They still look great!)

For a 40 page album, designing the layout formats from scratch will cost me as much as 20 hours. But using pre-drawn sketches to help me decide my page layout means I am only spending 3.3 hours on 'design'. It saves me about 25 min a page! Multiplied out, that means I am saving more than 16 hours just in design time!!! Yikes. Good thing I use my sketches!

Cropping your Photos.
Decrease the amount of time you spend cropping photos and you will also increase the classic look of your albums. How so? Most experienced scrapbookers know that as a beginner you tend to cut your photos into cute template shapes in the theme of the page. We often feel after a year or two or three that this was a 'mistake' and regret our gung ho scissor phase. While cutting photos into classic ovals, circles or squares is a great way to add design flair, I recommend we do not use shaped templates on theme pages. Years from now, it will just looks a little too cutesy and it was time consuming too! Invest in a good oval or circle cutter that is easy for YOU to use, fast, and reliable. A jumbo square punch is faster than cutting photo into squares by hand. Whittle down the time you spend cropping cute shapes and you'll be thankful in the long run. I would say that I crop only about 1 in 4 photos into these classic shapes. The rest of my photos I leave as rectangles. I do trim off odd distracting bits where needed but generally use my fast paper trimmer for this.

Where you might have originally spent 10 minutes trimming each and every photo into a shape, you can now save HALF the time. Use a few classic shapes for variety here and there once on each two page layout and keep the rest as original photos in rectangles. Your eye will go to the focal point photo, which is either matted, or in a classic shape like an oval or circle or square. You have just added to the balance and trim, focused look of the book AND saved yourself trouble and time. Now that is a great solution when you are short on scrap time! This is an example of a time when less is more! We just saved ourselves 10 more hours on this album if there are 120 photos in it!

Embellishments: Keep it Speedy
Now speedy is NOT the same as boring. Remember you don't have to do a super duper time consuming piece of art to have a beautiful page layout. You can get a GREAT look with a few speedy tricks. The key is to add a few themed items in the right proportion and yet not overdo it. Instead of taking days to make your page accents, think FAST! it will save you at least 30 minutes per page.

Here are a few of my favorites.
Stickers:
Get in the habit of looking through your supplies on hand BEFORE you throw up your hands and say "I have to make this page accent from scratch?!??" Page accents made with stickers are NOT what they used to be. I always mat and double mat my sticker elements now. Even sticker borders can use a fast mat cut with the paper trimmer. Use up that sticker stash and mat or double mat 3 sticker accents and a matching title. Poof you are done! Creating a sticker flower accent double matted is 1/10 the time of creating paper pieced flower. You will be using up your stash of stickers and saving money! Use some of the geometric punched pieces lingering in your stash as mats for your smaller sticker elements. It adds so much class to the lowly sticker. Double matting a sticker completely changes the level of sophistication of the accent! I am not sure why, it just does!

Use Geometric Shapes:
Pull out the squares, circles, triangles and other punched shapes. Or spend an evening cutting circles and squares from your scrap bin. These graphic cardstock or patterned shapes come in very handy as fast page accents when creating an album. Think of SEI and Chatterbox and other wonderful graphic papers for inspiration. Most photos from 1950 onward look fabulous with graphic page accents. It's a modern era thing. :)

Color Block:
Cut that cardstock and pattern paper in quarter sheets and mix and match a simple 4-part color blocked page. I love to do this with my monochromatic scraps. Lovely, simple block designs with a lot of focus on the colors of your photos give your work a definite "Wow" factor. Another simple color block with minimal measurements is to cut the paper in thirds. Mix and match again. You can do this quickly and it saves you 90% of the time needed to use a color-blocking template and to measure each section.

Time saved: 20 minutes per page x 40 pages = 800 minutes or more than 13 hours just on embellishment!!

Journaling and Titles:
My time saving trick here is a little thing called flexibility. I decide album by album whether I want the entire wording in that book to match or if it is all right for my wording to vary from page to page. I use the 'mix and match' more in my chronological albums and a uniform style more in my special event albums. If I want all the journaling and titles to be uniform I tend to make titles and journaling up for the album I am working on all at once by computer. Sometimes I will make ALL the titles and journaling for a theme album before I go cropping.

If I decide it is all right for the wording and titles to have a varied mix and match kind of look from page to page, I blend store bought titles, hand lettered titles, swap items and computer journaling wherever I like. Preplanning page kits and albums helps me here as I can see which photo sets have titles from my stash and which will need me to make them up as I go. My albums then have a blend of clear legible computer journaling, funky handmade titles, and my own penmanship which my family finds endearing. I tend to do hand lettering when away from home and computer journaling at home.

I mix it up this way so that I can get pages DONE when I am out but still keep the versatility, neatness, and creativity of font cds and software programs. This 'use it all' approach gives me the best of all worlds at a SPEED I love. It also has decreased my page title stash supply by 2/3 over the last year! Yeah!! I don't put off journaling for later. I agree with Nike shoe ads here when they say "JUST DO IT!" Don't put off journaling. It takes twice as long as necessary if you procrastinate. Managing my wording in this way actually saves me about 15 minutes per page. Times 40, this means I am saving myself TEN HOURS per album writing time.

I hope these tips and concrete examples of time saved benefit you. We all have limited hobby time. We want to use what we have as efficiently as possible so we can move on and enjoy our photos and our lives with our families. Regardless of how many photos I have yet to do or the manner in which I prefer my albums, one thing holds true. The more albums I get done, the more pages my family can actually sit down and enjoy. You can save half the normal journaling time if you journal as you go. Another timesaver is planning computer journaling out so you can type, create, and print it all at once for the whole album. Time saved? More than 15 minutes a page! For the whole 40 page album? About 10 hours saved simply by not procrastinating and by planning ahead!

Don't be a slave to the old habits or someone else's methods. Do what works for you. If you feel frustrated by the backlog of scrapping waiting for you, adopt some new methods! Your layouts will be fabulous and you might even get caught up!

How much time have we saved making our 120 photo, 40 page album using these productive scrapbooking tips? Let's check it out. You will be stunned by these results!

Technique: Time we saved

Photo Selection and sorting: 3 hours saved
Paper selection: shopping at home-2 hours saved
Paper Selection: coordinating paper pack-3 hours saved
Design time: Using sketches- 16 hours saved
Cropping photos:less trimming- 10 hours saved
Embellishments: Simple yet beautiful- 13 hours or more saved
Journaling and titles: journal as you go or plan your journaling ahead of time- 10 hours or more saved

Isn't that amazing? There are many great ways to create fantastic pages in a shorter amount of time. You just have to relearn a few of the 'rules' and create new methods for yourself! Join the trend! Lots of scrappers are paring down the time they take on each album and producing wonderful, creative, beautifully designed and visually appealing scrapbooks in a fraction of the time they used to take. They are getting them done in just a month, week, or even a weekend! You can do this too! You'll never have to say "I have no time to scrapbook," again!

Happy Scrapping!
Rockester

(Who did 1204 pages in 2002) *Ü*