Getting Organised for the Cruise...

With Christmas over, now the focus for us (meaning me, my workmates, and many of my genealogy friends) turns to the 4th Unlock the Past Cruise which is now only 37 days away. So in amongst my Christmas shopping which was about 90% done online (gotta love internet shopping), I managed to do some shopping for me,  and here’s what I bought … First up was a stop at CafePress.com.au. This website is enormous, so it’s easy to be overwhelmed as there are hundreds and thousands of items (if not millions) listed on this website. But I simply did a word search for “genealogy” then narrowed it down to just notebooks … and that narrowed down the range for me, and the two below are what I chose. Then I headed over to Zazzle.com, which is a similar type of online store, and found these two notebooks … And I like the fact that both stores offered me the option to have lined or blank pages in my notebooks. I chose lined, as I do tend to write rather wonky otherwise … On the last cruise I went on, I took just one note book and almost filled it. Now I have four and I probably won’t use them all, but at least I’m prepared. I guess some of you might wonder why I didn’t just go for the $2.00 notebooks that you can get from the newsagent? Well yes I could have, but putting it simply, they’re boring. As these are notebooks that I intend to keep afterward because they will be chock full of notes from all the talks I attend (that’s the plan anyway), I wanted something with some style. Now for anyone who is not...

Use ‘Trello’ to Get Organised...

Let’s face it, time and organisation and two things that everyone seems to need more of, but they are also two of the hardest things to obtain. Now while I would love to give you “a whole big jar full of time”, sadly trying to put a clock (so that it still works) in a jar, just doesn’t work well, so we’ll all have to keep working on that one. But on to organisation, and that is something I may be able to help you with. Well, actually not me personally, but rather a program called “Trello”.I first heard of Trello through Lisa Alzo’s article “Say Hello to Trello” in the Apr/May 2013 issue of Internet Genealogy Magazine, and since then one of my colleagues has us using it at work as a group to-do list. So I’m learning it bit by bit, and finding it quite useful. Now back to Lisa … while I’ve know of Lisa through social media for several years, I finally got to meet her when I went to RootsTech in March 2013. Trust me, it’s a thrill when you finally meet your social media buddies in person. And it was nice to be able to put a face to the author of the article. Lisa is a writer, instructor and lecturer so has a busy life, and in the article she tells her readers how she’s using Trello to keep track of her deadlines, to-lists as well as keeping track of her own personal genealogy. Now Trello isn’t a genealogy tool as such, but rather an organisational one, but it can be used to help you keep it all organised (genealogy to-do lists included). Trello is free, and you can create an account...