Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Quick Tip #19: Start where you are

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. I hope this one will help you treat yourself with kindness and get past overwhelm.

Start where you are

I hear from a lot of people who feel overwhelmed by the thought of transitioning from organizing their genealogy documents in paper form to digital form. The notion of having to scan everything gathered over years of research is truly daunting.

Here’s the advice I give: Just start where you are and from this point forward process new documents digitally. Then, slowly, you can make your way through the backlog, perhaps scanning a few documents each day and using a timer to keep you on task and keep you from burning out.

This advice can apply to doing other new things as well. Let go of any pressure to do everything at once or do everything perfectly. Start where you are at your current level of knowledge, and move forward. Perfectionism can be paralyzing (as my co-host and I discuss on our podcast, Getting to Good Enough, every week). Don’t let it stop you from pursuing a goal!

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

How I Do It is out!

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I’m so excited to announce the release of my newest Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow! I’ve been working on this guide for ages (way too long!) and am really happy with how it turned out.

If you’re curious about how I organize my research, you may want to purchase it. As a professional organizer, I never tell people how they should organize anything, because a successful organizing system works with the way you think. But I wanted to share how I organize my own genealogy research. Over the last decade, I’ve created a system that works really well for me. My goal is that readers will be inspired to implement those things that resonate with them and perhaps modify my methods to work for them.

You can read all about the guide (and purchase it) here. At 37 pages, it’s more than three times longer than any of the other three guides. That length allowed me to go into detail way beyond what I can do on the blog.

Speaking of the other three guides, I’ve created an Orderly Roots Bundle that gives you a discount when you purchase all four guides together. And I’ve created a much more robust sales page for the guides so potential buyers can have more information on which to make a decision. I encourage you to check it out!

 

April 30 x 30 challenge: How did it go?

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It’s the last day of April and the last day of this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, in which we tried to do 30 minutes of genealogy-related activity every day for 30 days. If you participated, please share: how did it go?

I had an extraordinarily good month. Perhaps because I was so focused on genealogy as I was getting my new guide ready to to publish next week, I actually worked on my genealogy research every single day! I averaged 30 minutes a day (33 minutes 34 seconds, to be precise) for the month, though some sessions were as short as five minutes.

My goal this month was to get through my backlog of unprocessed documents. I came so close! I started the month with 112 documents in my backlog and I now have 10. And those I think I can knock out by Monday. One of the reasons I was able to do it was my vow not to add to my backlog by downloading more documents. I did download nine documents over the course of the month, but they were necessary in order to make connections that allowed me to process the documents in my backlog. I kept a follow up note in my research log for clues to follow up on after this challenge is over, which helped a lot.

I kept a spreadsheet (in Numbers on my Mac), which I found very motivating. It allowed me to see how close I was getting to my goal of eliminating my backlog and my goal of spending an average of 30 minutes a day researching. Here’s a screenshot, in case it’s of interest. (Click on it to make it larger.)

The spreadsheet really illustrates how you can chip away at a backlog little by little. I intend to process the remaining 10 documents in my backlog and I’m going to try hard to process documents the same session I download them so I don’t build up another backlog.

I’m feeling great about my month and I hope you are too! Please let me know in the comments how your challenge went and whether you found it beneficial.

Coming next week: New Orderly Roots Guide!

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I am very excited to announce that I’m putting the finishing touches on my new Orderly Roots Guide, How I Do It: A Professional Organizer’s Genealogy Workflow and it will be released next week! This guide details how I organize my own genealogy research, step by step.

At 37 pages, the new guide is more than three times as long as the other three and it allows me space to go into the kind of detail I can’t get into on the blog. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I organize my research in a digital format and that I use Reunion as my genealogy software. I’ve included a lot of screen shots. I’m hoping that you will find the new guide helpful!

If you’re not on my Mailing List, I encourage you to sign up. Starting May 4, I’ll be sending out a series of emails that will include limited-time discount codes to buy the new guide individually or, at a bigger discount, the bundle of all four Orderly Roots Guides.

This guide has been a long time coming; I hate to admit how long it’s been on my task list. I finally had to let go of perfectionism and decide it was finished. I’m excited about the final product!

Photo by Huma Kabakci on Unsplash.

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.