Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

January 2024 30 x 30 challenge wrap up

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It’s January 31 already! How was your month? Some aspects of my January were great. I participated in Yoga with Adriene’s 30-day yoga journey and did each at-home yoga practice daily without fail. And I met my goal of closing my fitness rings on my Apple Watch every day. My month was focused on health and fitness, not genealogy. So I can report a successful month.

What about your genealogy research? Did your 30 x 30 genealogy challenge go well? Were you able to meet your goals? Did you make any fun discoveries? Please share all in the comments to this post. That wraps it up for this challenge. I plan to do a new 30 x 30 challenge every two or three months, but of course you can always do one on your own!

I look forward to hearing how everything went!

January 2024 mid-month check in!

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I can’t believe it’s already January 15. It’s time to check in and let us know how your 30 x 30 challenge is going this month. Have you been able to reach your goal of daily research? If not, have you done more research than you might have done without the challenge? Please chime in in the comments and let us know how it’s going, whether you’ve made any great discoveries and/or how you’re feeling about your progress.

I’m not actually participating in this month’s challenge–I’m taking a little break from genealogy research and focusing on my health and fitness. (Nothing bad is happening, I just want to take it up a notch!) And I’ve done great with that this month. In fact, if you’re curious, you can take a look at the current issue of organizing newsletter, which I just published, which has a picture of this month’s habit tracker and all its glorious checks. And please feel free to subscribe to that newsletter, which is for people who love reading about organizing.

I can’t wait to hear how your 30 x 30 challenge is going!

New year, new 30 x 30 challenge

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Happy New Year! As I mentioned last week, daily research is so helpful. And a great way to help establish the habit of daily research is participating in a 30 x 30 challenge. For the month of January, you’ll strive to do 30 minutes of research every day for 30 days. This is your challenge and you can adapt it however you want. Maybe you want to focus on organizing your research, not doing new research. Or perhaps you want to focus on processing your backlog of downloaded documents. You may want to average 30 minutes a day for the month, not do 30 minutes a day. Whatever works for you is great. You alone measure your success.

I just want to help you focus on what’s important for your research this month. I’ve been holding these challenges periodically since 2015 and have proven to be a great jump start for lots of people.

If you’d like to participate, just say so in the comments. (I know a number of you said you’d participate in the comments for last week’s post, which is great.)

Then, in the middle of the month, I’ll create a post and ask you to report in on your progress this month. And there will be a wrap-up post at the end of the month.

Are you in? I hope it’s a great month for your research. Ready, set, go!

How you can profit from daily research

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I’m planning to start a new 30 x 30 challenge on January 1. I’ve been doing these challenges periodically for eight years and they’ve been helpful to many people (including me). Come January 1, I’ll be asking you to commit to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or genealogy organizing, or really anything you want to commit to) for 30 days in a row. What’s the value of the commitment? If you’ve done a 30 x 30 challenge already, you probably know. But if you haven’t, you might be inspired this post, which I originally wrote on November 3, 2017. Watch for an introductory post to the challenge on New Year’s Day!

The benefits of dailiy genealogy researchI know some of you work on genealogy research every day. But I think the majority of folks are like I once was. I’d wait until I had a free day or half day on the weekend before I’d do any research. And sometimes when that day finally came I’d be paralyzed with all the choices of things to research and very slow to start. Very occasionally, I wouldn’t get anything done because I couldn’t decide!

This year, I’ve been trying hard to research daily. As I mentioned in this introducing a new 30 x 30 challenge, I haven’t missed a day since August 1. That feels great.

It got me thinking about some of the advantages to short, frequent research sessions over long, infrequent ones. Here’s what I came up with.

  1. I’m more connected with my ancestors. Because I’m thinking about them every single day, I don’t have to review everything in order to get started.
  2. I forget less. In addition to researching daily I’m also keeping a very informal research log in Evernote that helps me stay on top of what I’ve researched.
  3. I keep a “next steps” list in my  research log so I know exactly what to work on when I sit down to research in the morning. Overwhelm and paralysis is a thing of the past!
  4. I stay focused. I don’t have the luxury of going down rabbit holes when my timer is going and I know I’ll have to stop before long. This does a great job of keeping me focused. When I’m tempted to get distracted, I just add the bright shiny object to my genealogy task list.
  5. I’ve created a habit! Doing 30 minutes of genealogy research is a great way to start the day. It used to be I’d forget to research. No more. It’s part of my routine and I love it.
  6. It’s easier for me to find 30 minutes a day (3.5 hours a week) than a weekly half day or biweekly full day to research. Taking a whole weekend once a month feels pretty much impossible. I still love having longer sessions–it’s truly a special day when I spend the whole day researching. (Thankfully, I have had a few of those this year.) But daily research means that researching is getting done without my feeling like I’m sacrificing other things.

I really do enjoy longer sessions and I consider those a bonus. This year’s daily research, which is usually a minimum of 30 minutes, means that 2017 will be my most productive year yet when it comes to family history research. And from a time perspective, it’s been really easy!