Welcome to A Week In the Life week, Nettio style!

If you’re a fan of Ali Edwards like I am, you probably know that today marked the first day of Ali’s 2011 A Week In the Life project.

For those of you who haven’t heard of A Week In the Life before, AWITL is a seven-day documentary project designed to capture your everyday life through words and photos. The idea is rather than focusing on the big moments like birthdays, vacations and holidays, you spend a week focusing on all the little details that make up your everyday, regular, routine life.

I’ve attempted A Week In the Life twice before, once in 2008 and once in 2010 and in both cases I took photos and notes for a few days, got bored/burnt out with the process and never made it to the scrapbook album portion of the project.

2010 was especially difficult for me because Adam was deployed at the time which meant my days, evenings and weekends tended to blur together in one big pile of sameness. Some people would argue that the whole point of AWITL is capture those same routines and while I’d agree to a point, there were only so many days I could handle taking yet another photo of myself emptying the dishwasher, haha.

But the truth is I LOVE this project. L-O-V-E.

The completed albums I’ve seen from other scrapbookers make me want to complete an album of my own in a bad, bad way. There’s something so magical in embracing the everyday and especially because Adam and I are at a point in our lives where a lot could change in the next few years, I love the idea of taking this time to document our life right now.

So when Ali announced a few months ago her plans to do AWITL the last week of July, I made a commitment to myself that THIS would be the year I complete this album.

And this weekend, I came up with a plan…

1) Focus on documenting this week, album next week

Ali recommends separating your documenting from your album process and I’m going to follow her advice.

Originally I liked the idea of working on the album while the stories were still fresh but I also know myself well enough to know that it would be WAY TO MUCH for me to do everything at once.

So this week I’m taking photos and notes and next week I’ll be putting my album together.

2) Begin with the end in mind

In the past when I’ve done AWITL, I went into it figuring that once I had all my photos, I would work out the design.

This time around I decided to do things differently and sketched out a design plan for my album already. Right now I’m liking having the constraints of a planned design because it’s giving me a better idea of the types of photos I need to take throughout the day while still giving me the flexibility to the capture the stories I want.

As far as my design plan, right now I am to planning to do an 8×10 Portrait photo book through Blurb which I’m going to design using Adobe InDesign. I’ve never done a photo book before so that part kind of scares me but I’m excited to have the chance to brush up on my InDesign skills, haha.

It’s definitely going to be a much more clean, magazine style design than you usually see from me but I am really really excited about the design.

It’s all about the words + photos.

3) Break my daily documenting into chunks

One of the more overwhelming aspects of AWITL for many people (myself included) is the idea that you’re trying to document every day for seven days in a row. Can we say burnout by day three?

I made the decision this time that rather than trying to document my entire day every day like I have in the past, I would break my day into four chunks: Morning, Midday, Afternoon, and Evening and focus heavily on one or two of those chunks each day.

My reason for doing this is two-fold:

One, it will allow me to really focus in on capturing certain parts of my day without feeling the pressure to capture everything.

And two, since my weekdays tend to be pretty similar from day to day, I’m hoping this will keep things fresh throughout the week as I won’t be documenting something I’ve documented the last four days already.

There are a few things I will be documenting every day like clothing and food, but since this decision was partly influenced by my album design, I’m comfortable knowing that while you won’t see everything everyday, you will get an idea of our daily life over the course of the week.

4) Use Evernote to document my week

I’ve recently jumped on the Evernote train and will be using it to capture my journaling/notes for this project. I love that I can add notes from both my computer and iPhone and they automatically sync.

In Evernote, I have an A Week In the Life notebook that has eight notes in it: one note for each day of the week for documenting those day specific notes (schedule, routines etc) and a note named Weekly Faves where I will be documenting ongoing themes throughout the week. Right now my Weekly Faves list is broken up into these categories:

• Food
• TV Shows
• Places We Go
• Technology
• Brands
• Clothing
• Websites/Apps

My plan is to compile the Weekly Faves lists into a two-page spread that will serve as a round-up of the week.

I have to say this may be one of my favorite aspects of my album design not only because I was able to fit my “faves” obsession into this project, haha, but because I love the idea of mixing daily and weekly themes. If my lists become really long, I may limit them to a top-ten list for each category but for now I’m writing down anything we do that falls into these categories.

5) Download my photos off my camera every day

While I’m not going to be focusing on creating my album this week, I am going to upload my photos to my computer every night/morning. Not only will this give me a better idea of any photos I still need to capture but it should help me avoid the OMG-too-many-photos moments that always come when I work on a large project.

So that’s my current plan for tackling A Week In the Life. I’m sure some things will change as the week progresses but after today I’m feeling really good about my design and plan for this week.

Anyone else doing A Week In the Life project of your own this week? Do you have a plan or are you winging it as you go? Feel free to share your plan or lack there of in the comments!

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