I thought it would be easy. I have no small children at home. I have no paid employment. Life at the moment is, generally, calm. Surely it wouldn't be hard to pretend I had a half-time job, and dedicate 40 hours over two weeks to genealogy work. However, this task turned out to be surprisingly difficult. It took 18 days, not 10, to log the 40 hours, and before it was over I found myself heartily sick of genealogy. It was an instructive exercise, however. A few observations:
- I can make a surprising amount of progress if I hole myself up in my office, ignoring phone calls, e-mails, Facebook, and even to some extent my husband.
- Ignoring other responsibilities in order to meet my genealogy goals (or any other specific goals, I suspect) eventually builds up so much psychological pressure (guilt) that the once-pleasurable work becomes a chore.
- Phone calls from grandchildren cannot be ignored.
- My goal was to work in concentrated segments of at least an hour each, but I found that surprisingly hard to manage, and eventually allowed myself sometimes to count the accumulation of smaller time periods. Otherwise, it was too frustrating to find myself with, say, a half an hour to work and yet know I couldn't count it towards the goal.
- The original impetus for this exercise was the expiration of my Ancestry.com subscription. Deciding to renew it took a bit of the wind out of my sails and slowed my progress, but I did eventually pull myself together and finish only one day later than my end-of-January goal.
- I had hoped the push would make a good dent in my accumulated backlog of genealogy work. Ha! Infinity minus anything is still infinity. Still, it really did help, and I made some good finds, though in trying to "beat the expiration clock" I spread my work very thinly, and concentrated more on new data than on entering the old, so the backlog looks more worse than better.
- Having a full year's subscription ahead of me, however, and a plan to put in a steady hour or two each week, I'm hoping some more methodical plodding will bear good fruit.
