When you’re trying to capture a person or a moment that’s really important to you, you want to get it right. You want to be thorough. But that’s hard! So you put it off. “I’ll get to it when I have enough time to do it right,” you think. And weeks go by, and you feel bad about putting it off…
So here are some tips to make the process both easier and more fun:
Baby steps are big steps. This isn’t like writing a book, where you have to finish it before it’s “published.” This is your chance to relax on an event or person important to you — relax and enjoy it! It really is fine to add little bits of material over time. If you’re doing a LifeTimeline, just put in a few events. And stop. And then later add a few more events.
LifePosts are designed to be like living scrapbooks. You don’t say, “Well I’m not going to start making a scrapbook unless I can finish it all at once.”
And most parts of LifePosts look great even with just a little bit of work. For instance, if you really want to just put up a picture, a headline and a paragraph of information, you can do that using the LifeStory tool. It’ll take two minutes.
Easy scanning. Just use your camera phone to make copies of photos you want to use. The quality has gotten so good that a picture of a picture usually works just fine. (If your organization plans huge amounts of scanning, consider renting from our partners at E-Z Photo Scan)
Get help from friends and family. Invite other people to contribute and be specific. If you want someone to do real work, make them a Co-Creator. Then they can do pretty much everything you can do to build out your LifePost and invite additional contributors.
Pull together some material before you dive in deep. Create a folder on your desktop for LifePosts Stuff. Go through your computer files, family scrapbooks and records, relevant social media accounts, and look for photos, videos, quotes or documents that might work on LifePosts. Drop copies into your folder.
You can always change your mind later. Unlike, say, a newspaper obituary, which is permanently preserved as written, a LifePost can be changed at any point. If you write something today and decide you didn’t get it quite right, just change it tomorrow.