Monday, August 26, 2013

Where has the time gone?

So I haven't posted in awhile. Life got a little crazy, and it's only about to get crazier. I think that is a lot of the reason why genealogy is considered an "older" person's hobby - most people my age are too busy with careers, kids, and life to spend much time researching their ancestors. And if you add a blog or two in there, you have zero time to sleep!

I am about to embark on a journey into graduate school. One of my first classes inspired me to post on this blog again. We are being encouraged to establish our digital presence. Blogging is a fantastic forum for this, but there are SO MANY blogs out there. How do you determine what blogs you will read? Even if you only decide to read genealogy blogs, there are thousands of them! Using something like Flipboard is helpful, but having the time to read blogs is the biggest challenge.

One of the biggest problems people have today is time. There is never enough time for anything. We get up, go to work or school for 9 hours or more, come home, eat dinner, go to bed, and repeat. Somewhere in there you have to find the time to fix that dinner, clean the house, play with the kids, feed and walk the dog, do homework or help kids with homework, and get 8 hours of sleep. If you are to have the time in there to do genealogy research or read a book or a blog, what do you sacrifice? If you continually sacrifice your sleep, then your health fails. It's a never-ending cycle.

Technology can make this easier but I think it also makes it harder. We have all these different ways to consume information now that it makes it hard to ever shut off. If, at any moment, you can have the answer to anything right at your fingertips, then why ever shut off? It's so easy to get distracted - when you have your email with you always, you get an email and you're off on another tangent. That's definitely something genealogists are always faced with: going off on tangents. How do you stay on track?

And there's my point...I just got off topic! How do you stay on track and research efficiently? Comment here!