JANUARY 1, 2010
As I sit here and watch the snow fall out the window and celebrate the arrival of a new year, I am thinking about what I want to accomplish in the months ahead. I have a lot of catching up to do from 2009 and it is time to move on. Here are some of my thoughts:
Simplify—Life can be very complicated and messy and some times you need to step back and look at how to may it more manageable. That can be applied to this website and my genealogy, too. What are the primary goals we want to achieve and how to we get there?
Focus—Focus on what is important and what is best for you and your family and everything else will follow.
Just say “no” - It is too easy to say “yes” when someone asks but I have a tendancy to say “yes” even when my plate is already full. I need to learn to say “no” in order to accomplish what I want and what is important to me—this website and my research being one of the important things I want to focus on.
Never give up—Sometimes it’s a struggle to keep up with all the demands placed on us by our family, friends, job, and everything and everyone else that wants a piece of us. Sometimes the best you can do is just maintain the status quo and not move forward like you would want. But don’t throw in the towel and give up on your dreams of moving forward. Be patient, do what you have to for now, and when the time is right, then move forward again. I could have—and did at one point last year—box up all my research because I could not focus on it. Then, in baby steps, I pulled it back out and started moving forward again.
Help Others—Casto Connections is the culmination of decades of research by a lot of people all interested in learning about their roots and sharing that knowledge with other people. I chose to create this space where it can be seen and be available to others and even when I literally stepped out of my “cyber world” for a year, the research and knowledge and years of work were enough to sustain the site and still help people while I focused on my family. Each time you, the person who is reading this, sends new information or shares your family with another researcher, you are helping others.
Get Back to Basics—When I started out working on my genealogy, the internet was new, there were no websites, and most of my correspondence was done by good old U.S. mail. The tools we use in our research may be different but our goal is the same—learn about our family’s past. Other, more experienced researchers helped me and now I help others. The internet and this website have made things easier in terms of accessing information quicker and more difficult in that instead of one or two people corresponding, I get dozens of requests for information. And it is not the amount of requests that is the problem as much as it is the TIME to answer them. So, this year, I will be focusing on time management and scheduling time that will just be for genealogy. To the rest of the world, I will be unavailable and it will just be me and my Casto researcher friends working together in the Casto universe!
Happy New Year, My Friends!
Danita
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