Over the years I have stated I am going to digitize my paper files over and over again. I am trying again this year. I have so many reasons to get this done but just have not been able to complete the task.
The ultimate irony is I am a very organized person in my home (except for the genealogy closet!). I have plastic bins in all of my kitchen cabinets to organize all the tools. I have a cabinet for my daughter’s legos, a charging station for the electronics, and organized cleaning supplies in the closet under the stairs. Even my bathroom drawers have organizers in them.
I have to ask myself why I cannot finish a digitizing project to clean up all the paper in my genealogy closet. The best I can answer is I am overwhelmed by the size of the project. When I committed to organizing and digitizing at the beginning of the pandemic, I pulled everything out of the closet and told myself it cannot go back in until it had been handled. What occurred is my dining room being taken over by all the stuff and a week later I put it back because I could not deal with the clutter in the room.
There is also shame I have not stayed organized over the years. I can hear Brene Brown in my head. I also hear Elsa from Frozen. I agree. It is time to Let It Go! Both the shame and piles of paper in plastic bins.
What am I going to do differently this time? Hopefully it looks more like taking a document or two out each day. Scan and process them so they reside in my Dropbox files, my Ancestry.com tree, and FamilySearch Family Tree. No big boxes left out to sabotage the process.
Today I used the Clear Scanner app on my phone to digitize the probate file and lawsuit for my 3rd great grandfather, a death certificate for my husband’s great uncle, and the Celebration of Life cards for my Uncle’s memorial. It was extremely difficult to put half of this in the recycle bin when I was finished. The other papers, I filed into my 3 ring binders.
I just considered writing “Wish me luck.” I need to end with something else because there is no luck involved in this project. Just baby steps and keeping at it!
One step at a time! I’ve heard that for some genealogists, a strategy is to set a timer for 20 or 30 minutes and doing what you can in that time and then stop and do the same thing the next day.
Of course, who am I to talk – I’ve managed to organize most of my stuff, but I need to complete an inventory so I can find the items (as well as digitize most of them)!
You can do it!