Time capsule guides
Practical guides to making a time capsule, physical or digital, written to be useful whether or not you ever use ours.
Each guide answers one question in full: which container survives, what to ask a six-year-old, how to record a grandparent on a phone.
How to Make a Time Capsule
Which containers survive, what to put in and what to leave out, where to keep it, and how to make sure someone actually opens it — following the guidance conservators publish.
Read the guide→Time Capsule Questions for Every Age
Question lists for young children, teenagers, couples, a class, a family and yourself — and how to ask them so the answers are worth opening.
Read the guide→Questions to Ask Your Grandparents
Fifty questions by theme, how to record the conversation on a phone so it is worth keeping, and where to put the file so the family still has it in twenty years.
Read the guide→Questions to Ask Your Parents
Sixty questions by theme — who they were before you, what raising you was really like, money, the marriage, and the practical things nobody asks until too late — plus how to ask a parent who changes the subject.
Read the guide→Birthday Interview Questions for Kids
Twenty-five questions to ask on every birthday, how to adapt them from three to eighteen, how to film the answers in five minutes, and what to do with ten years of clips.
Read the guide→How to Write a Letter to Your Future Self
Pick the horizon first, write to the person who will open it, and fill it with the detail you would otherwise lose. Forty prompts, a structure that works, and three places to keep the letter so that it arrives.
Read the guide→How to Write a Letter to Your Child
What to say to a son or daughter at each stage — before they are born, at one, at eighteen, on their wedding day — with prompts for each, what to leave out, and how to make sure the letter reaches them.
Read the guide→Open When Letters: 60 Ideas and What to Write
Sixty open when ideas by recipient, what to put in each envelope, how many to make — and which letters work better sealed until a date than sitting in a box.
Read the guide→Time doesn't erase everything!
Lock the present, reveal it in the future.