I working on putting together a travel journal from our trip to Europe (oh yeah, Mike and I went to Turkey and Spain a few weeks ago). Most of the memory keeping I do now is all digital, but for this trip I have a physical journal/scrapbook of our adventures. 

It wasn't my plan to have a physical scrapbook, but as we prepared for our trip Mike started keeping a journal of all the important information we needed for our trip. Along the way, we started tucking receipts, tickets and brochures we picked up into the journal. And suddenly the idea of creating a travel journal was born. 

In order to make this journal actually come together (remember, I don't do a lot of physical memory keeping these days), I had to come up with some rules to help me stay on track. 

1. Keep it simple. I have a habit of overthinking others like this. To get this done, I have to keep it simple. There will be no embellishments ... just photos, handwritten notes and the paper ephemera we collected on our trip. (Though I will admit I've been using some washi tape, since who can resist washi tape?)

2. Print directly from Instagram and ignore all other photos. Mike and I took a ton of photos. Could easily get bogged down in sorting through all the photos we had. Instead of doing that, I decided to print only the  photos Mike and posted to Instagram. I connected our Instagram accounts to Walgreen's One-Hour Photo service, printed our trip photos and picked them up an hour later. Super easy. 

3. Leave the journal out until it's complete. I've left the journal, photos, glue/tape, a stapler and all the items I want to add to the journal sitting on our formal dining room table. When I have a few minutes, I sit down and work on it. Since I see it all the time, I feel more motivated to get it done. And I can always seem to find a few minutes to work on it, since it's all there ready to go. 

4. No pressure. Whatever I happen to get done is great. I'm not putting a lot of pressure on myself to get anything done by a certain time, nor does it have to look a certain way. Whatever I end up with is far more than I've ever had before ... so that's a win, right?