(Copyright (c) 2010 Cynthia Shenette) This week John Newmark of Transylvanian Dutch talks about rethinking and reprioritizing his time and blogging activities in his post Changes/Adjustments. This post really hit home with me. As the mom of a young child it's something that I struggle with on a daily basis. I've only posted once this week due to family commitments, activities, must-do yard work, and a slew of appointments of one sort or another. Research, correspondence, social media, library time, blogging time, blog reading time, oh yeah, and that life thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm sinking faster than I'm swimming. In my post Follow Friday: Happy New Year! I outlined the priorities that are most important to me. While I have a routine of daily activities, sometimes I just don't feel like I'm getting everything done that I want to get done. Is it time to let go or just organize better? How do you prioritize and schedule your time? Do you only do e-mail and facebook at certain times of the day/week? When do you do research? When do you blog and how often? How do you limit yourself? I don't do Twitter, though I am interested. I don't want to start one more thing I can't keep up with.
My question to you is, how do you manage your activities? Give me some advice. Throw me a lifeline, please...
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About Me
- Cynthia Shenette
- A long-time librarian, I am mostly of Polish, Acadian, and French-Canadian descent. I have started this blog to share and acquire genealogical knowledge, achieve inner peace, and perhaps realize my ultimate quest, to find two ancestors with the same surname who actually spelled their surnames exactly the same way...
11 comments:
Family first, hobbies next, laundry and clean dishes and food in the house next, dust bunnies - LAST!
Oh, no, make that enjoy life, FIRST. Practice NO GUILT. Hard for many of us ladies to do, that no guilt thingy!
Smart woman!
I probably can't offer a good solution, because I am in the same boat, but minus a child. When we all started out doing our genealogy, there was no social media, our research was sometimes slower and we didn't share. Now, we all want to share, via fb, the blog and for a lot it is twitter. It is the social thing that takes the time. Why not cut back to writing a blog a week, and read blogs and make comments twice a week. Good luck with whatever you decide.
Thought of another
Blog shorter pieces, maybe a photo and just a few words, will make you feel like you are still participating, but, not nearly as time consuming as some of our bio type posts which tend to take a lot of time to research and write.
No Twitter for this gal, I know I would become obsessed, and that is one thing I (for the time being) have sworn to not do. Might be missing a lot, but, I am not going to try to find the time for that as well. That is one way I have managed my time, NO MORE ADDICTIONS!
Now, if you believe that, I have some swamp land in Florida for sale, I really do! LOL
I have new phone, well over a week, have not had time to figure out stuff, no time to read the book, it is a Smart phone, and believe me, smarter than I am. Maybe next week I'll find some time??
I wrote on this same thing a little while ago. I do find my blog helps me organize my research, so I have found 3 posts a week manageable, but I am an empty nester! Of course, my fallback post is always Wordless Wednesday. I believe in family first, always. My son always told me 'don't sweat the small stuff' when I would get frazzled.
Know that if you don't get it done this week, or even this year, there's time to come. There's a reason so many of us are empty nesters. Frankly, I'm in awe you manage a post a month.
One other thought. Since you can't increase the hours in the day, stretch out your to-dos. If the goal is one research project - give it 2 months instead of 1. You can try feeding your family every other day, but not sure how successful that will be.
And beds really don't need to be made.
I have one child in college, one child still at home. Young children still need the most time, but older ones, even away from home, still need time, too. So they and husband come first as far as giving attention is concerned. I work full-time, so evenings and weekends have to serve for all other activities. No Twitter here, Facebook rather limited, but I do try to keep up with e-mail, especially since a lot of it is genealogy related. Just enough housework and other chores to get by. Pets, gardening, feeding birds in yard. And the rest is split up between genealogy and blogging. The blog works well as "cousin bait" and reading other blogs and interacting with other bloggers is fun and educational, so genea-blogging is definitely worthwhile, but it can be time-consuming (especially those best of/picks/follow posts), so I have to be able to let it go when other things (including genealogy!) get intense. (I also wrote on this subject about a year ago - we all seem to end up in that crazy time squeeze.) (Also, NR is right about beds - why make the bed when you're just going to mess it up again?)
Embrace and get comfortable with the challenge of it all... raising children, having a happy if not clean home, and enough hobbies to make life entertaining.
The older I've gotten the more I need to focus on one thing to make progress rather than multi-task. I used to resent that but now I've come to a comfortable acceptance. It makes advanced planning of my time all the more necessary though.
On the social media thing... any new thing you add to your day will take time away from what you're already doing. Try Twitter so that you know what it's about and then pick one to stick with, FB or Twitter. Honestly, most of the genealogy bloggers repost on both platforms and if you're like me all that redundancy will drive you nuts. I tried both and though I still have my Twitter account active I only check it once a month or so. I only post and read FB on a more frequent basis. That works for me!
Don't stop blogging! But find a sustainable pace for yourself so you don't become burned out like I did. It's hard to get back into the blogging habit once you've let yourself get lazy ;-)
Thank you all for your advice!
Much food for thought here as to scheduling/organizing my genealogy activities. I'm a relative newbie, so I'm still trying to figure out how to prioritize and pace myself. It's all a learning process.
One thread that seems common to almost everyone is not to worry about housework. I definately think I'll consider that one. Though given that I have a messy little boy, a somewhat messy husband, and four animals I wonder how long I'll stick with it. Actually, the more I think about it, the happier I am to let that one go... ;)
I have to agree, first comes the home and family, then my job. With the time left over I will blog, and sometime I am just to tired to post. Or perhaps I did not find any new information.
Research usually happens on weekends, if I go to the library. Or online it occurs in the evenings or my days off.
As for me, family first , keeping enough food in the house so I don't strave me or hubby. I do like a made bed and clean sink but to heck with the dust. Where else would I write my notes. My genealogy and blogs and internet business all share my time. I need to get more organized on these three though. Now to find some time to read the pile of books by my bed.
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