Search Results for: 30 x 30 challenge

April is whizzing by and we’re more than halfway through our 30 x 30 challenge. How is it going?

I’m happy to report that I’ve managed to research every day, though some days have not been a full 30 minutes. I’ve been laser focused on reducing backlog of downloaded documents to be processed. So far this month I’ve downloaded only one new file, which I processed the same session. I’ve managed to reduce my backlog by more than half. I started with 112 documents and I have 49 documents left.

I’ve been very pleased that I haven’t missed a day, though I wish I had more time to spend on the backlog-busting because I’m finding it very fulfilling. One reason I’m short on research time is that I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my new How I Do It Orderly Roots Guide ready to be published on May 2. According to my spreadsheet, I have averaged 25 minutes, 8 seconds a day. So I’m hopeful I’ll end the month averaging 30 minutes a day.

How about you? Has the challenge helped you make progress toward your goals? Have you been able to research each day? I’d love to hear how it’s going!

 

Sunday marks the half-way point in our February 30 x 30 challenge, but I though I’d start the check-in a little early. If you are participating in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge, now’s your chance to give us an update in the comments.

I’ve had a good month so far. I’ve researched every day. (I started on January 30, actually, so I’d get 30 days in by the end of February.) Typically, my goal for a 30 x 30 challenge is to do 30 minutes of genealogy research for 30 days in a row. But this time I decided to cut myself some slack. Instead of 30 minutes a day, my goal is to get through 30 source citations in my source documentation checklist. I’m going through my sources in numerical order and checking to make sure that all the information I now put into a source is there (spoiler alert: so far all the source records have lacked information). Also, I’m looking at each source record to see whether I gleaned all the possible information I could from it (not usually). When I set the goal of going through 30 source citations in 30 days I figured that would be very easy to achieve.

It’s not exactly going as planned. I started this 30 x 30 by checking Source 91. Now, 14 days later, I am on Source 98. For a number of the sources, I needed to do some further research in order to verify the information. And you know what? That’s just fine with me. In my research log each day, I’ve written down the next steps I need to do before I’m comfortable moving on to the next source. Since I’m looking at early sources (documents downloaded in 2012 when I was quite new to serious genealogical research), the going is slower. It should pick up when I get to later sources.

Will I manage to get 30 sources by the end of the month? Maybe. But as long as I’m putting in at least some effort each day, I will feel very satisfied. And I’m really enjoying the work. One of the things I love about this challenge is that we can each set our own rules and our own standards for satisfaction.

So please tell me: How’s your personal 30 x 30 challenge going so far?

Our August 30 x 30 challenge is over and I’d love to hear how it went for you. Were you able to do genealogy research for 30 minutes a day? If not, did the challenge prompt you get more done than you might otherwise have? Do you have any achievements to share?

I had a great month. I researched every day, though I didn’t always do the full 30 minutes. This month I kept a spreadsheet of my daily progress on reducing my backlog of downloaded documents that need to be processed. One of the fields in that spreadsheet is how much time I spent each session. The Numbers spreadsheet understands minutes and hours so I can easily glance at the sum for that column and see that I spent 17 hours and 20 minutes researching in August (including 20 minutes yesterday, which is technically past the 30-day challenge). That’s an average of 33 minutes and 32 seconds a day. That feels great!!

The bad news is that I only reduced my backlog by 24 documents, which is kind of sad. Mostly that’s because I downloaded 40 documents in August, despite my pledge that I would resist downloading. So that means I processed 64 documents, which doesn’t sound quite as pathetic.

In any case, I enjoyed this month’s research and, as always, felt I benefited from doing it daily. I love the connection I maintain with my research when I work on it daily.

How about you? If you participated in the challenge, please let us know how this month went!