Staying Motivated

Lately I’ve been distracted and unmotivated. I get home from work and I don’t want to work on genealogy, work on my blog, or fulfill some of my related commitments. For example, I am writing this blog post way past my self-imposed deadline. I’ve been wasting time doing other things instead, things that mostly involve binge watching TV shows. There’s nothing wrong with taking a break from genealogy, but I have goals I’m trying to accomplish. I have goals for the year and hopefully those goals are contributing to some bigger long-term goals. I have 3.5 months left in the year and I am determined not to let the siren call of Netflix stand in my way. So today I thought I would face reality and remind myself of those year-long goals in front of the whole internet.

Projects:

I have now made progress on any of these goals since moving. This isn’t really a surprise and I knew it was inevitable as soon as I got my new job back in February. There is just not space or a large surface in my apartment to handle sorting photos and documents into all the containers I purchased or scanning them en masse. I also don’t have the the ability to take time off to go complete the research trips I had planned. Unfortunately, I don’t expect to make any progress on this front for the rest of the year, but I think about it a lot.

Education:

This is an area I have managed to keep up with my goals, despite my lazy tendencies lately. I have attended at least 1 #genchat per month and watched at least two genealogy webinars per month all year.

Service:

Although I have backed off from some of my Facebook duties for no great reason, I have resumed publishing GAA Magazine once a month. It is going well and if you haven’t checked it out I recommend it. There are a lot of first-time writers who have been submitting articles and I have enjoyed taking on the editing and publishing role in the process. I’m not sure what the future looks like for the blog, but for now it’s chugging along. I really do need to get back to pulling my weight in my Facebook groups though.

As for other types of service, I admitted when I started my new job that the chance of me having an opportunity to volunteer in genealogy outside of work was pretty low. That is still the case but I have been doing some indexing in my spare time, which has been nice. I am hoping I can eventually find a website that will agree to host the results of my work when this project is complete.

Writing:

I have been able to put out consistent blog posts all year so far, today being the obvious exception. There have been ups and downs in the process though. At some points I have been able to schedule content weeks in advance but lately it has been hard. I know that part of my writer’s block has been a lack of source material and that needs to change. If I’m not doing genealogy, I won’t have any genealogy to write about.

The goal I am most behind on is writing character sketches. I committed to four this year and I have only produced one so far. I have a second one in the pre-writing stage but time is ticking to finish three sketches in three months. I am going to focus on these heavily for the remainder of the year. This will be what I spend most of my daily research on, setting aside the bright shiny objects and the DNA matches for a little while to buckle down and write about some ancestors.

Well, there you have it. If you have set goals for yourself this year, I hope you are making progress on them, and if you aren’t, it’s not too late to recommit to them. Now, it’s time for me to turn off that TV and get back to work!