Hey genea-folks,
it's Saturday Night again,
time for more Genealogy Fun!
Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:
1) Please read Tessa Keough's YouTube video on "Your Genealogy Pie" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkfzu8YaV9M). I found it fascinating, and wanted to share it with my readers.
2) Your mission is to create your own "Genealogy Pie" - make a pie chart (if you can), or another kind of chart, or just a data table, of how you spend your genealogy time over a significant period of time (a week, a month, a year). You can use some or all of Tessa's categories, or add your own categories.
3) Tell us how you created the chart - which program or service, the data you used, how you estimated the time spent, etc. What did you learn from this accounting and chart-making exercise?
4) Share your creation with the genea-sphere in your own blog post, on Facebook or on Google. Be sure to drop a link in a comment to this post.
Thank you, Tessa, for the great example!
Here's mine:
I watched the video several times - it's very well done!
I created a Pie Chart with this process:
1) I calculated the time I spent on these categories as:
* Education (reading email, social media and blogs, watching Webinars and Hangouts, attending conferences, seminars and society programs).
* Research (going to repositories, searching online, transcribing or abstracting documents, writing reports and notes, etc.)
* Data Entry (adding content to my software programs or to online family trees, including media, sources, notes, etc.)
* Sharing (writing blog posts, answering email, teaching, helping others, creating and making presentations)
* Volunteering (local genealogy society work, including meetings, writing articles, editing newsletters, etc.)
* Organization (sorting and filing papers, sorting and filing digital files, maintaining to-do lists and research logs, etc.)
2) I write an almost daily genealogy journal at The Geneaholic, so I I have some record of the tasks I perform each day and the total time I spend each day on genealogy. I used the period of 22 June to 5 July 2013 as my survey period (two weeks; the week before 22 June I was at my daughter's house in Santa Cruz, and a week before that I was at Jamboree. June was not a typical genealogy month for me!). I estimated the time I spent on each category each day , and added them up over the 14 days, and divided by the total hours spent (122) to get percentages.
My data percentages came out as:
* Education: 17.6%
* Research: 15.6%
* Data Entry: 16.8%
* Sharing: 41.4%
* Volunteering: 6.1%
* Organizing: 2.5%
3) I created my pie chart in OpenOffice 3.3 (which is similar to Microsoft Excel). I had to learn how to add a chart (used the Chart icon), then selected the Chart Type (under Format > Chart Type > Pie), and add data to the table (under View > Chart Data Table). Then I entered the data labels in the "Categories" column, and my data percentages in the Y-Values column. I had to add two more Rows (using the "Insert Row" icon). I also created a Title (using Insert > Titles).
4) Here is My Genealogy Pie Chart:
What did I learn?
* I spend over 40% of my genealogy time writing, helping, and speaking (or making presentations). I had no speaking engagements in this time, but I did create a new presentation and updated five others. Blogging usually takes up 2-3 hours of my day now.
* I spend about 35% of my time doing Research, Data Entry and Organizing. I was surprised that it was this high. I do try to spend at least two to three hours a day online finding records or entering content to my genealogy software. I don't spend nearly enough time organizing my paper collection, and have much digital filing to do also.
* I volunteer for SDGS, CGSSD and CVGS, but CGSSD and SDGS did not have meetings in the time period. CVGS had a Picnic and a Board Meeting, and I edited the newsletter, during the time period.
* Education is important to me, and I try to watch one Webinar a week, watch at least one Hangout, and at least one YouTube video a week, plus attend local society meetings and events, and the occasional conference.
My ideal Genealogy Time breakdown might be:
* Education 20%
* Research: 20%
* Data Entry: 10%
* Sharing: 30%
* Volunteering: 10%
* Organizing: 10%
I'm really not that far off from my ideal - a review over a month or a quarter might be interesting!
The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/07/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-your.html
Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver
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