Why I decided to put together a photo album that wasn't as good as it could have been.

One of my happiness-project resolutions is “Be a treasure house of happy memories.” Thinking back on happy times elevates mood; research has shown that although depressed people have as many nice experiences as other people, they don’t remember them as well. By helping my family to recollect happy times from the past, I’m boosting their happiness in the present – and photographs are a particularly good way to recall happy memories.

On the other hand, one of my Secrets of Adulthood is “Photo albums and houseplants are a lot of trouble.”

I’ve been experiencing this conflict for weeks now. On the one hand, I wanted to make a lovely album of photographs from our summer – all carefully arranged, with lengthy, well-written captions to remind us, in future years, of all our adventures.

But whenever I thought about undertaking this project, I felt overwhelmed and panicky. It filled me with dread. We had so many photographs, and it was going to take a huge amount of time and energy to complete the album, even using an online service as I planned to do. As summer vacation receded into the past, and photos started to pile up from the fall (the Big Girl getting her ears pierced, the first day of school, my father-in-law’s birthday), the task loomed ever more ominously in my mind. I already had so much work to do. I didn’t want to labor over a photo album, too.

So I reminded myself of another Secret of Adulthood, this one lifted from Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” My desire to create the perfect summer album was preventing me from working on it at all. I needed to do a good-enough job and get it done – or else I might end up never doing an album at all.

I used another happiness-project technique to get the task finished: I set a specific time to do it. I’d been telling myself that I’d organize the album “in my free time,” but the fact is, I don’t have any free time. I’m never aimlessly wandering around the apartment, looking for something to do. Because making the album was a priority for me, I wrote it on my calendar as a real appointment, and I worked on it yesterday while the Little Girl took her nap.

As it turned out, making the album wasn’t such an awful task. Once I actually sat down to do it, I got it done in one sitting. I didn’t spend a lot of time arranging the pictures, I didn’t write captions, I didn’t do a lot of things that would have made it nicer, but I got it DONE.

Now I have the happiness of anticipating the arrival of the album.

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I found Friday Playdate after a nice reader mentioned The Happiness Project in the comments section. In her post, the writer describes a moment very much like the moment that led me to start my Happiness Project. I was on a crowded bus on a rainy day, rather than at my kitchen table with my children, but her thoughts remind me very much of my thoughts.

John Stuart Mill wrote, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” In my experience, this is quite incorrect. Asking myself whether I was “happy,” as the writer of Friday Playdate did, was the first step in a process that led me to A) recognize that I was already much happier than I realized and B) take steps to boost my happiness.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Comments

[NancyJak]

I've agonized over my lack of photo albuming since digital cameras came to town! I need to remember your words, find some albums (they seem to be extinct whenever I go to buy one) and just put the pictures in. But first I'd have to print them out...

[ferrers locke]

I suggest, when you look at the album with the family, get them to do the captions - if Little Girl's too young to write, take dictation from her. They may be a bit eccentric, but that's half the fun - and it will be perfect in an entirely different way.

[Debsylee]

This so reminded me of having to making my little boy's "all about me" folder for him starting school for the first time in September. The assimilation of photographs, obtaining the information and the overall design caused me to procrastinate over it until.....the day before he started school.
I really have no idea why I was concerned; it came together effortlessly and he was proud and delighted to show it to his new teacher.
As for my happiness project....someone asked me yesterday what happiness is to me. I said I've realised that happiness for me is the journey; I've spent too long thinking it was the destination (I think I may have stolen that from somebody hugely famous....but I love it anyway)

[EscapeVelocity]

Good for you! I think my last photo album was about 1997, except for Flickr (and I've never printed out a single photo from my digital camera).

[Alisa]

I totally need to put together some albums. My kids don't care if they're perfect, they just like seeing pictures of themselves!

PS your link to Friday Playdate is broken.

[Tootie]

I have a hard time making the time to do photo albums, too. For my next album, I'm going to do an automatic one on snapfish.com. It won't be as "perfect" as I'd like...but, like you said, at least it will be done!

[Joanne]

Sometimes just thinking and contemplating and deliberating about a project takes more energy than just hunkering down and doing it. Bet it came out great!

[Mrs. L]

I got behind in my scrapbooking and somehow stopped in 2000...and now it's 2008!

But lucky me, last year I invented a new approach: speed scrapbooking!

I got a 3-ring binder and filled it with plastic sleeves. Now when we go on an outing, I stuff things like the map of the zoo or the tickets from a museum into a plastic sleeve. I also put a receipt of some sort - the parking receipt, the cafe or gift shop receipt into the plastic sleeve, so I know on what date the outing occurred. Sometimes I add photos. I don't stick anything down, I have no captions, but I'm DONE!

[Ella]

That is so funny. I did my summer photo album last night, and I did a fairly quick job as well. As I was going along, I thought, "Gretchen Rubin would probably take the time to make sure each child is in the same number of photos, and she'd have captions on *all* the pages, not just a few of them." It is somehow reassuring to know that I was wrong.

[Jessica]

Great post. Thanks for getting away from the diet stuff for a while!

[Nicola]

I agree that photo albums can be hard work to create. However, I've just made a wonderful version, and received a hard copy of it as a properly bound book, by using a company called Blurb at http://www.blurb.com . No, I'm not an owner, co-owner, stockholder or employee of the company; just a very happy person who was able to create a book of an overseas holiday for my friend. He doesn't have a computer, so can't look at the digital shots I took of his trip to Canada. Now, with the book, he's got a hard-copy set of memories forever. People all over the world are using Blurb to self-publish their photo albums, family histories, recipe books, art portfolios, children's book, poetry, novels and so much more. I think there's a lot of happiness being generated through this site. My own next project is to put together a visual family history, covering at least five (and possibly six) generations to give as a gift to my three siblings.

[Nicola]

PS Re Blurb: it's all done online. No charge to join. No charge to make a book. Charges to get them printed, but they range from $19.95 for soft cover to considerably more for 100+ page hard covers. You get to design the look-and-feel, insert your own words and photos, and publish it under your name. You retain copyright of the content. And, if it's not a personal private publication, you can offer it for sale within Blurb's online bookstore. It's the power of the Internet at its best, honestly.

[Marissa]

What a great reminder for all of us perfectionists out there! I have struggled with this issue myself and I'm glad to know that others have as well. As soon as I finished reading this post I wrote the Voltaire quote on the bulletin board above my desk as a much needed reminder. Thanks for sharing!