I’ve suffered from a rather low ROA for my own adventures over the last decade or so. I’d simply move from trip to trip, without spending much time reflecting on the adventure or doing any of the work that maximizes ROA over time. Many (*most?*) trips, I wouldn't even do more than a cursory review of my photos. While I used to spend a lot of time doing ROA-like things after major trips—sorting photos, adding captions, keeping trip notes, even hand coding entire websites for each trip—eventually, I seemed to get "too busy" to do it, or I'd take so many trips that I'd never quite get around to finishing the routine before the next trip crept up. I got discouraged, felt guilty, and eventually stopped doing some of the things I'd have liked to for each trip. For those familiar with [GTD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done), you could say that most trip-related items landed in my Someday/Maybe list. Once it became incredibly easy to take thousands of digital photos (often dozens of nearly identical shots) and there were easy to use photo editing tools, the workload just increased. My photo library fell into disarray and I would declare [[Photo bankruptcy]]. But then I began thinking about the priority that we give travel in our lives and wondered if I was getting all the value out of it that I could. That’s when I started down this path. I ran across the concept of [[Personal Knowledge Management]], which made me think much more about [[the permanence of memory]]. I thought about how my dad was struggling to recall enjoyable episodes from his past, realizing that while I could still retrieve memories of my trips and gain value from them, he could not. I ran across the book [[Book Notes - Die With Zero - Bill Perkins|Die With Zero]], which reinforced our travel spending philosophy and gave a name to the idea of [[Memory dividends]]. I stumbled onto concepts such as evergreen notes and a [[Spaced repetition memory system]]. I wondered if the [[Life Admin system]] we had recently developed for ourselves could serve as a system for remembering the great trips we take. 🤔 Eventually, I started putting together the concept in my head. By using this Ideas Notebook, I began sketching out various component ideas, adding them together to construct a larger framework. I thought more about journaling, read books on memory, and what a system to maximize ROA would need to consist of. And, well, here we are.