Most families arrive here for one of five reasons

What these five situations have in common

Each of them is a version of the same problem: something irreplaceable is currently held in one place, and that place is a person, a device, or a moment that is passing.

For grandparents it is the identifications and the voice. For new parents it is the texture of a year nobody has capacity to document while living it. For families apart it is the ordinary daily detail that distance strips out and a weekly call cannot restore. After a death it is the fraction of a person that survives in other people's accounts. For the family archivist it is an index that exists only in one head.

The practical consequence is that the right first action differs sharply between them, and starting with a generic plan — organise everything, in order, from the beginning — fails all five.

Which one is urgent

Two of these have a real deadline and three do not, and it is worth being blunt about which.

Recording an elderly relative, and recording anything about someone who has recently died, are both time-limited in a way that is not recoverable later. If either applies to you, do that first — this week, not this quarter — and treat everything else on this page as optional.

A first year, a dispersed family, and a family archive are all cumulative rather than expiring. They reward a small weekly habit and they punish an ambitious plan, because the ambitious plan does not survive contact with an ordinary month.

The mistake all five share

Nearly everyone starts at the beginning: the oldest generation, the earliest photographs, a chronological plan. That instinct is the single most reliable way to never finish, because the beginning is also the hardest and most emotionally loaded material.

Start with this week instead, prove to yourself that twenty seconds is genuinely twenty seconds, and then go after the one thing that is actually expiring.