Motivation Monday - Getting Back on Track

I just took a week off from everything genealogy. I put my volunteer projects on hold, stopped reading any blogs or genealogy related books, didn't touch any records, put off starting my genealogy class, and even stopped looking at my email account that I have devoted to genealogy purposes.  I was feeling overwhelmed and a little burnt out with everything that I had on my plate. In short, genealogy had started to feel like a chore and that's when I knew I needed a break!

It's summertime and my son is home all day. That means more mess, more "Can't we go SOMEwhere Mom??", and more whining from my daughter as they get sick of playing with each other. And we are only halfway through! I find myself torn between different activities I've committed myself to. Time management has always been a struggle for me. So I decided to take a week off to clear my head and re-prioritize.

At first, it was really difficult getting past the "I should be doing [fill in the genealogy activity]." I have to admit that after about Day 3, I was enjoying my time off although I was having a hard time finding things to do during the hottest part of the day when I don't want to do anything that is going to make me hotter. My son was shocked that I was taking a week off and when I told him the reason he gave me some wise and simple advice: "Mom, treat it [time worked on genealogy] like money. You only have so much of it, so you budget it. Figure out how much time you want to work on genealogy and when you run out, you're done." It was pretty good advice for a 9 year old!

So today is Monday and my week off is over. I've had a chance to prioritize and hopefully I can make it stick. I'm taking my son's advice and am going to budget my time so that I can get chores done around the house, take my kids' to fun activities, and still get stuff done in my beautiful land of genealogy. First thing though is cleaning house. Literally. My house is a mess. I'm also going to have to focus my volunteer efforts on only one thing right now. I have a couple of things going that I will finish up and then I am going to focus on one main project, which is my other blog Southern Tier Cemeteries.

To keep it simple, I'm focusing on these projects:

1. My blogs: This one and Southern Tier Cemeteries.
2. I'm in the process of revamping my filing system and syncing it with my genealogy software and Ancestry.com trees.
3. Genealogy classes through NIGS.

Before I can do anything though, I need to get some order in my office. So my efforts this week are going to be focused on the following:

• Cleaning my office 
• Going through the paper piles and putting them where they need to go
• Finish scanning some family photos so I can get them back to their owner (and there is a family reunion in 2 weeks that I need to have them done by!)
• Finish up a volunteer project so that I don't have that hanging over my head.
• Start my class!
• Continue working on organizing my cemetery photos for my other blog.

I think that is plenty to work on for this week! We are also doing some home improvement projects around the house, so I should be plenty busy!

Does anyone have any other advice (other than my son's) on how they manage their genealogy time in their busy daily lives?

© copyright Monica Palmer, 2011

Motivation Monday - DearMYRTLE's March 2011 Organization Checklist

I have completed the next section of DearMYRTLE's Organization Series, 2011 March Organization Checklist! I have done almost everything on this segment of the Organization series, with the exception of joining a Second Life genealogy chat. I will be starting a class with National Institute of Genealogical Studies in May called Social Media for the Wise Genealogist and I've put any new experiences in social networking on hold so that I can experience them with the class.

I have been distracted from the tediousness of entering in the paperwork I have on hand into my genealogy program because it's, well... tedious. I really need to get back on track and this is my motivation this week. Since I am a stay at home mom and life does seem to interrupt my genealogy pursuits, I will focus on attacking the paperwork in small spurts and hopefully make some headway by the end of the week. I think I need to get working on that before moving on in DearMYRTLE's series.

So I will be hunkering down and trying to make a dent in the paperwork. Since entering some of this information that I had already looked at, I've already discovered some information I hadn't known before! Living proof of the "Go back and check your information from time to time" tip!! I am excited to find more and this is my inspiration! Wish me luck!

© copyright Monica Palmer, 2011

Motivation Monday - DearMYRTLE Feb 2011 Organization Checklist

I finally completed all the tasks in DearMYRTLE's January 2011 Organization Checklist. I have to admit I am not completely sold on transferring all my files into Dropbox. I love Dropbox and it's capabilities, but there are several reasons why I do not want to transfer all of my stuff there.

• I already have links in my Legacy program connected to where all my media is currently located. If I switched them all it would take a lot of work to go through my program and switch everything over. 
• I don't want to pay for space on Dropbox. I have a hard enough time justifying the money I spend to my non-genealogist husband without adding to it. I don't think my multitudes of media will fit in the free 2 GB provided. 
• I don't want some of my personal information in the "cloud." I have it on my hard drive and feel that it is safe on there. I am not convinced of the safety of my information on the "cloud." If I put some stuff in Dropbox and others on my hard drive it is then breaking all my information apart and I currently have it all under one parent file "Family History" (with plenty of subcategories). 

I do like the convenience of having some of that media available, so I am considering making copies of some of it and filing it in Dropbox, but I haven't made any final decisions yet due to the lack of determining which would be important enough to copy.

So I am moving on to February's Checklist. I have yet to participate in a Scanfest. Unfortunately, my alarm on my phone went off for yesterday's Scanfest during the movie Hop that I was watching with my daughter during our Girls Day Out. I don't regret missing it because it was time well spent with my little girl! So I will have to schedule for the next one and hopefully remember the day before instead of 10 minutes before it starts!

February's checklists consists of choosing a genealogy program, volunteer indexing, joining mail lists, getting started on photos, and continuing to work on the genealogy binders. As I read through the checklist, I've realized I've already done everything on this list! I actually have been in the process of categorizing, scanning and organizing my photos for some time now. It is as huge project because I have always been an avid photographer! I managed to check everything off the list in the 5-10 minutes it took me to read it!

I am doing my data entry differently than she is recommending it since I already had a system set up and will just continue to use that. So this week I will continue to work on getting those papers entered into my Legacy program and move on to the DearMYRTLE's Genealogy Blog: 2011 March Organization Checklist! I'm hoping to be completely caught up by the time she posts the May Checklist!

Motivation Monday - DearMYRTLE's Jan 2011 Organization Checklist

I know this is April, but I just started frequenting Twitter and realized that DearMYRTLE has a checklist for getting yourself organized from a genealogy standpoint in the year 2011. I am a little late to the game, but I'm starting with the January 2011 Checklist so that I can go in order. Luckily, I've already done the majority of it, but the one thing I do have to change is my hard copy filing system.

When I started using Legacy I found this website with a filing plan that has a customized plan for Legacy as well as other genealogy programs. I started implementing it and it was effective enough. It used a numbering system based on marriages that were assigned to each family group. You would file all the paperwork for that family group under a tab with their marriage number. The only real issue I had with it was that there were A LOT of numbers! There was also a lot of dead space in my binders where I didn't have very much paperwork, if any, on certain family groups.

When reading DearMYRTLE's checklist, I loved her idea of having your genealogy binder read like a coffee table book. What sold me though, was her comment about someone else coming in on the scene and not understanding my system. I don't think my husband would be able to walk in and know that he had to look up each family in an index system to find their number and pull them all separately. And if I told him that, he'd probably walk right back out again! So I decided to switch to DearMYRTLE's plan so that it's more user friendly. I now have stacks of paper all over the floor to be sorted into the new system. Then I will be done with January and can move on to February's checklist!