Can of worms - one thing leading to so many others
Some genealogists have research plans and suggest writing notes to come back to distractions later. I can see where that makes sense with trying to finish off anything. Thomas McEntee, of genealogybargains and do over fame (these catch names span social media and help me find people again). described these as Bright Shiny Objects or BSOs. This tickled my fancy. I often chase them, as I do this for my amusement.The same group seems to also suggest setting down a regular scheduled time to research. Hah! This is not my job. Nor is it necessarily my life style. I like that I can sometimes go out and play on a nice day.
Considering organizing time and information is not limited to to my genealogy. You may have noticed Facebook posts on Bullet Journalling (#bujo). A friend helped guide me in finding a form which mimics some of what I have done. On Sunday nights, I tend to look at what is happening in the week ahead and what has to get done. I may do a revisit going into the weekend too. This week at a glance does not include all of the things my digital calendar reminds me of, like the the community bookmobile visit. Right now my pool hours have some flexibility (and some variability outside my control, so I look at the hours in the morning of my swim days) so they are not entered ahead of time - and workouts are tracked thru my watch. I have fallen off the BuJo wagon again. I don't like carrying it around, and I don't do a good enough job indexing to find things again. I liked having project pages, and have spun those off into google docs and maybe the top item makes weekly todo list (another to be added when one is completed - at IBM I always had 5 bugs). Another IBM (Daytimer) thing I found useful was a side by side comparison of the plan for the day, and what actually happened for the day. One of my google calendars tries to address this. My daytimer got replaced by my palm with contacts/calendar/task lists. I still miss it for fool proof syncing and it's drawn alphabet. When I came east for what I thought was a short period of time, I found myself scribbling notes in gmail drafts and I leveraging hashtags in wunderlist (which was killed by Microsoft). BuJo came after this. So now I am back at tracking in Google. Yes this was a tangent but I will endeaver to tie it in to genealogy.
Spring of 2023 I attended my second Rootstech. Along with familyseach some of my family turned me onto these resources. During a presentation on Research Reports, I had an "Eureka" moment of how this could be useful for me. It had similarities to work stuff, but I had not applied it in this way. I adopted and mangled it for my own use. I include background, progress, what's next, and what's out of scope. Thanks to Kelli Jo Bergheimer, Mess on the Desk. I have so many I created an index... and there are efforts I have not even gotten to. People I have worked with have complemented the format, bringing a smile to my face.
I am happy enough with this process, I went to mention in response to a facebook question on the group, Genealogy Squad. Citation? I had actually created a zotery entry and shoved the handout under it. However I was waiting around somewhere and only had a phone, on which I don't think zotero runs. So I googled "Rootstech 2023 Research Report" and found under the youtube channel, familysearch. Listened to it again - wow, different things grab my attention now. Also decided if I liked this presentation, maybe I should see what else she has done under familysearch and across a range of media. And we are back to the can of worms. So many things; So little time.
Should you want to delve into this, here are the links:
- https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/getting-organized-using-technology-and-a-research-report
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ijFpa1MUqk&t=573s
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