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!

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!

It’s October 1, fall is in the air (though it was 86 degrees here in St. Louis today) and the September 30 x 30 challenge has ended. For those of you who participated, how did it go this time?

I had a busy month with other professional commitments and I did not meet my goal of interacting with my genealogy research every day, but I did do some! I hope it was a great month for you. Did you manage to do 30 minutes of genealogy rsearch each day? (Or achieve whatever goal you’d set for yourself?) Please let us know about your progress in the comments!

It’s already September 18, so we’re more than half-way through the September 30 x 30 challenge, in which folks committed to their version of doing 30 minutes of genealogy research every day for 30 days. How’s it going? Please let us know in the comments.

As I said in the post establishing this month’s challenge, I’m not focusing on genealogy research as much right now. So my goal for this challenge was simply to do something (anything) around genealogy research every day this month. I haven’t fully succeeded–some days went by where I did not touch my genealogy. But I can tell you this: So far this month I’ve done more genealogy work than I would have if this challenge weren’t going on. So I’m really grateful for that.

How about you? If you’re participating in the challenge, how’s it going?

If you’re not participating but you’re intrigued, feel free to jump in right now and have a 13 x 30 challenge. I’ll post again on the last day of the month so everyone can report on how they did.