Briley Genealogy » organization

Motivation Monday – January Goal Review/ February Goals

MargoMc — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

January flew by and now it is time to look over what was accomplished and what was not. Here are my January goals:

Smaller Goals:

~~Join 2 genealogical societies~~.(I joined GRIVA and the Virginia Genealogical Society)
~~Attend 1 Rootsweb webinar~~ (Took the first one in the series and learned some basics)
~~Post 3 blog posts per week~~. (Did this. Hope everyone enjoyed!)

Larger Goals:

spend 2 hours per week digitizing and organizing my records and notes (Did some, but not every week)
order the first deed book for my “Opus” from LDS (Can’t seem to get over there, but I promise I will this week)
spend 2 hours per week on inputting Briley deeds from Pitt County (I have most of them photocopied) into Deed Mapper (This may have to wait until after April)
Look for more “modern” records for my grandparents on Ancestry (not a priority this month) (Found a few, but like I said not a priority)

Overall, with all we have going on in our lives right now, I think I did pretty good. I am using my new electronic Outlook system to track projects outside of genealogy and am hoping to work it this month with genealogy. I can report on that at the end of the month. I also have to work around our house renovation, which is going on and on and on. I was hoping to be back there by now, but no such luck. So, without further ado, here are the goals for February:

Smaller Goals:

Finish Scanning Dad’s photo album.
Attend 1 Webinar.
Post 3 blog posts per week.

Larger Goals:

spend 1 hour per week digitizing and organizing my records and notes
order the first deed book for my “Opus” from LDS
Go by Kinko’s and see if they can scan in 10×13 sheets of paper. If they can, start scanning deeds I have.
Plan and work 1 genealogy project using Microsoft Outlook Organizing System

Good luck to everyone on their goals for February!

What I am reading – Take Back Your Life: Using MS Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized

MargoMc — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

I have been reading an organizing book this month. I need some ideas to go paperless even more and wanted to learn how to use what I already have (Office with Outlook 2007 soon to be udgraded to 2010) more efficiently. So, while surfing my library site I found this book: Take Back Your Life: Using MS Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized by Sally McGhee. When this book was written, Outlook was then in the 2003 iteration, however, the concepts she uses are easily adaptable to my 2007 version. She has an updated version for Outlook 2007, but I went with what our library had, and will check out the other book later.

This book has some very useful ideas that I have already started to incorporate into my everyday. The way she suggests you use tasks and the to-do list in Outlook, how to organize Categories, and how to tell the difference between goals, projects to achieve goals, and actions or tasks, seems to work well with how my brain organizes information. I am almost done with the book and have done much of the “thinking through” that she suggests.

McGhee suggests using Tasks to plan projects. When you create a new task, you decide, is it an action (she has specific categories for actions like “Call”) or is it a supporting project to help you achieve an objective (or goal). If it is a project, within the notes section of the task, you set up a basic outline of what needs to be done, who needs to do the action, and when the action is due. You then use this a “feeder” for your next action to continue to work towards the goal. I am using this right now to help plan an Arrow of Light campout for our Cub Pack that is coming up in April. So far, it has been great as we think about the theme, activities we would like to offer, what might help the ScoutMasters, even a menu plan.

As a Stay-at-Home mom with 4 kids (2 teens, and 2 elementary), I need a way that I can capture attention to what they need “to do”. Teens live and sleep with their ipods these days and every one of those devices have calendars. I am trying to use less paper and would like to have a way to delegate tasks to them without posting it onto the refrigerator. In an effort to ignore what they need to do, they have learned to not read the frig anyhow. Ignorance is bliss, right? With this system, I can send a task to a kid via e-mail and when they open it, up it pops in the calendar on their ipod.

I am still learning to discipline myself to use this system. I hope to be able to incorporate other things that need to be planned into it. I can see using this system for genealogy research also. I will share that later, as I learn and refine the system more.

Tech Tuesday – Our HP All-in-One printer

MargoMc — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

While at my Dad’s for Christmas, I asked for his old photo album. Looking at it again, I offered to take it and scan the pictures for him and burn them to a DVD. I have always been worried, that through no fault of anyones, the pictures would be lost or damaged. Now both he and I (and facebook family because I can’t control myself) will have electronic access to these pictures to have fun with and enjoy. I am getting an average of 10 pics a day scanned in, and am almost finished.

Our wonderful printer

I love this project because it is teaching me how to use our new printer – the HP Officejet 6500A plus- more efficently. The printer has apps that can connect it to websites and google. I am a sucker for planner pages, and one of the apps lets you print out various blank planner pages. It faxes, copies, and scans from both flatbed and by scrolling papers through (so you can load multiple pages in a pile and tell it to scan and they all become one document). I have been scanning each photo on the flatbed and importing it into Google’s Picasa. There, I crop the photo and caption it.

We had a dinosaur scanner for a long time, and the steps to get it to scan and save always intimidated me. I find with this scanner it is as close to point and click as you can get. The ease of use compared to what I was had used gives me much more confidence with scanning projects. I have already decided to scan in my Mom’s family pictures. I am also going to be scanning in all of my old notes. Any one have any recommendations on OCR programs?

This printer has a few other features that we LOVE! It can be hard-wired or wi-fi. We can print to it from our i-phone while on our wi-fi network. And…we can e-mail the printer to print. To use the e-mail feature you have to set up an HP print account through their website. We don’t use the e-mail feature much and I do not give out the address. I love my neice and nephews, but I don’t want multitudes of their pictures spitting out of the printer every day.

There is only one thing that I would change about the printer, and that is its ability to scan larger documents. But, I am not so worried. For the oversize copies of the deeds that I have right now, I am planning on going to Kinko’s and scanning them there straight to a USB drive. Hopefully they have the ability to do that.

Happy scanning!

Motivation Monday-January Genealogy Goals

MargoMc — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Here are my goals for this January. I will be checking in at the end of January to review and plan for February.

Smaller Goals:

Join 2 genealogical societies.
Attend 1 Rootsweb webinar.
Post 3 blog posts per week.

Larger Goals:

spend 2 hours per week digitizing and organizing my records and notes
order the first deed book for my “Opus” from LDS
spend 2 hours per week on inputting Briley deeds from Pitt County (I have most of them photocopied) into Deed Mapper
Look for more “modern” records for my grandparents on Ancestry (not a priority this month)

I will be using some of these goals as posts in the next few weeks…so keep posted!!

2012 Genealogy Goals

MargoMc — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:00:50 +0000

The new year begins, and like many others, I find myself looking over the last year and deciding what I would like to accomplish this year.

This year I am will finally be able to devote some time to my genealogy. I have been burnt out on volunteering (school and otherwise) in the past year and decided to take some time for myself. Research and the puzzle of genealogy is very relaxing to me. Excess volunteering took away the time I had for pursuing my research. I am taking a hard look at what I volunteer for and am cutting back to that which makes me happy, not haggard.

I have 3 major on-going goals for this year:

Digitizing and Organizing Records - Oh, how I long to be almost paper free. I realize I will need paper back up for some things. I also need to associate many of the records with the “owner” in my software. This will take me some time, and I plan on devoting about 2 hours a week towards it.
Document as much as possible on my grandparents and great-grandparents. This is an obvious goal, and many may wonder why I did not do it earlier. When I started this, my grandparents were all still alive (except my maternal grandfather). In an effort to maintain their privacy, I just jotted down notes to look up later. I have a BIG problem with sharing information about living people, especially as the internet sharing of data got started. I still block from my GEDCOM data on living people, it is much easier now. I just decided, at the time I started this, to begin with my gr-grandparents (since I had much of their information from my grandparents).
Margo’s Opus. This is a long term project I have wanted to do for years. I resolve to get started on it this year. It has to do with deeds and mapping and some counties in North Carolina. More on this later.

I have also decided on some smaller goals, which should not take as long to achieve:

Join some genealogy organizations. Ok, I let memberships lapse. This year I will join Virginia Genealogical Society, North Carolina Genealogical Society, the NGS, Pitt County Family Researchers, and (the one I look forward to most) GRIVA (the Genealogical Research Institute of Virginia).
Learn to use better Roots Magic. Webinars and such.
Attend 4 conferences or field trips. There is already one on my calendar from VGS, and GRIVA will be offering a bus trip down to Raleigh and the NC State archives.
Blog and build contacts. Self Explanatory.

I will try to keep up with these goals and evaluate monthly where I am. Since some will generate blog posts, I hope to keep everyone up to date.