Saturday, July 6, 2013

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your "Genealogy Pie"

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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