The Cure for Temporal Headaches

Whenever you begin putting together a new persona (in any setting, fictional or historical), it always helps to firmly ground yourself in a specific time. This is simply Good Living History—the narrower the range, the more focused your research can be, contributing to a more accurate impression. If you’re portraying a ‘longhunter’ (an 18^th century market hunter), you don’t want to be drawing your ‘outer persona’ (aka clothing and accoutrements) from the 1720s or 1790s (even though they’re technically still in the 18^th century); rather, you would focus on the 1750s through 1770s, since that’s the period in which these folks operated. If you have enough information from primary or secondary sources, you can even pin your impression down to a specific year, month, or week (this becomes easier to do the closer to the present one gets, as the amount of raw information (and therefore, potential sources) increases exponentially).
Deciding on a specific span of time makes your persona more authentic, especially if you’ve done your research.
To help me figure out and visualize exactly when a persona is set I like to make up a tool like this. It’s basically an analog spreadsheet!

This shows me at a glance what year the persona was born, how old they were/are during certain events, and what year these occurred.
A tool like this can be created for any time period (I’ve done so for Middle-earth purposes to great success), but this one is the one I use for GFFA use. In this case, it covers a time period encompassing all six ‘Saga’ films (Episodes I through VI). The top row is the ‘out of universe’ date (from 36 years BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin) to 10 ABY (After the Battle of Yavin). On this timeline I have marked when each of the Episodes take place: 32, 22, and 19 BBY for Episodes I-III; year 0, 3, and 4 ABY for Episodes IV-VI.
Below that is the ‘in-universe’ date, in terms of Before or after the Great ReSynchronization.
On a separate slip of paper (laid out on the same scale as the above—very important!), I have a numberline that represents my age; I’ve extended it a couple years into the future for later use, and folded those future ages underneath for now. On this slip, I’ve marked when each of the films were released, significant historical events, and the years I attended college.
Now, by aligning and moving this slip over the first timeline, I can easily anchor my age at a familiar Earth date, see what the in-universe date would be, and see how old I was at the time.
For example, my AgriCorps persona is ‘anchored’ around my real-time experience of following the developments of the Clone War from 2002-2005 (22-19BBY). I align my age slip so that 22BBY lines up with 14.5 (my age at Episode II’s release), which shows that Silo the AgriCorps Jedi was born in .5BrS (half a year before the Great ReSynchronization, or 35.5 BBY).

My earlier Rebel-on-Sulon persona was ‘anchored’ around the Present being 5 ABY. From there it’s easy to work backwards and see that Citizen Olis was born around year 11 (post-ReSync. dates don’t have trailing characters), or 25BBY.

For my rebranded Naboo Rebel impression (currently unnamed, he might wind up being another Olis—not sure if that name is culturally-Naboo enough), I figured he would be part of a post Battle of Naboo baby boom, and so born in 31BBY, which as I’m 30 years old, puts the Present at 1 BBY—the perfect time to be whipping up rebellion and making things difficult for the Imps! This scheme also happens to pretty closely align 19BBY and 2001, both years in which a violent sneak attack (Battle of Coruscant/Sept 11, 2001) was quickly followed by a shift to imperialist foreign policy (Declaration of the New Order/declaration of Bush’s indefinite War of Terror).

I’ve made up digital versions of this tool previously, but being able to more easily move slips of paper around appeals to both my tactile and temporal intelligences. However you choose to make yours, the main takeaway here is that pinning an impression to a specific time is a no-hassle way to take your persona to the next level.