The bright side of the backlog

I often post here about having a backlog of documents that I need to deal with. When I get on a roll, I tend to download documents willy nilly, rather than pausing to process each one before downloading another. I do always rename the file as soon as I download it and put it in my Surnames folder. That list of unprocessed documents used to stress me out or at the very least make me feel like a bad genealogist.

Before I focused on my backlog during the January 30 x 30 challenge, I had 88 documents to process! (By process, I mean extracting facts from the document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.)

By the end of the January 30 x 30 challenge (well, actually by the first week in February), my backlog was gone. And since then I’ve been focusing on watching RootsTech classes and prepping for the 1950 census release, so I haven’t been adding to the backlog since then.

It felt great to clear out the backlog. But I realized something that surprised me: I kind of miss my backlog. What? Here’s the bright side to having a letting documents pile up. When I have a backlog, I always have a mini-genealogy project at the ready. I just pick a document and process it. (I actually enjoying processing documents, so it’s not a hardship.) I don’t have to figure out what/who I want to research in a given session.

Now that I have no backlog, I have to get focused on some research questions. Weirdly, I feel a little like I’m starting from scratch.

So here’s what I decided today: I’m going to allow myself to build a backlog of up to ten documents without feeling guilty about it. But when I hit ten, I will stop looking for more and start processing what I have. I’m calling it the Rule of Ten. I imagine there will be times when I have more than ten in a given session. But I will whittle it down to below ten in the next one.

This feels really good to me and I can’t wait to see if it works out well!