Let all things be done decently and in order. (1 Corinthians 14:40)
Ouch! I read this Bible verse and was immediately convicted. I have a file folder on my hard drive simply named, “Genealogy.” This folder is a catch-all for everything I don’t want to deal with at the moment. I keep hoping that everything will just magically process itself. I have been pretending that since I have this folder organized with nice subfolders that I was handling the materials effectively. Nope. I was just procrastinating big time.
I read two good books this past week. I bought them specifically to try and get myself motivated to clean all this stuff up.
Organize Your Genealogy: Strategies and Solutions for Every Researcher by Drew Smith
How to Use Evernote for Genealogy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Organize Your Research and Boost Your Genealogy Productivity by Kerry Scott
Even though I am a seasoned researcher I found both of these books very helpful. They are not just for beginning researchers.
So far it is working. I have processed more than half of what I have in this folder. Funny thing is, some of it I was able to just delete. It was taking up needless space and making me think I had more to deal with than I actually do.
My error is that I don’t deal with things immediately as they come in which is a major workflow problem. When you have a lot of things coming in at the same time on different projects it is just too easy to just throw it all in a folder with the intention of getting to it eventually.
I was already using Evernote but I needed to do some serious cleanup there too. I have Evernote all nice and tidy now. One thing that I needed to move from my Genealogy folder to Evernote were all of my reference materials I have been collecting, things like e-books, PDFs of cemetery surveys, PDFs of document indexes, class syllabi, etc. What’s nice about Evernote is that the contents of these files are now searchable which saves me a ton of time.
There is a lady that pulls documents for me at the Family History Library. She names the files with everything I need to create a full citation. Because of that, I can park these files in this folder and not worry about forgetting what they are or where they came from. I have quite a few that I need to rename, save to my main Media folder and link to Legacy.
With DNA being the big thing right now I have a ton of DNA stuff in this catch-all folder which I need to sort through.
I want to have the folder empty by the end of weekend so that I can start fresh on Monday morning and I think I will meet that goal. Thanks, Drew and Kerry.
Next time I will tell you what my #1 favorite feature of Evernote is.
Copyright © 2016 Michèle Simmons Lewis