🗂️Build a Daily System That Keeps Your Genealogy (and Life) on Track
If your days feel scattered, with research notes, project ideas, and family history tasks spread across notebooks, apps, and sticky notes — you’re not alone! So many of us juggle genealogy goals alongside everything else in our lives, from work, to creative projects, and personal /family responsibilities.
After attending the recent annual conference of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, I was asked by another attendee about my approach to organization so I thought I’d share! Here’s the approach that helps me keep it all together — and I’m sharing it in case it becomes a model you’d like to try, too.
📔The Daily Notebook
Every day begins with a notebook — one page capturing what needs doing and what’s already done. This is the foundation of my documentation system, and it’s how I keep every part of life organized, from family history research to daily routines.
I call this my “Captain’s Log” (a little nod to Star Trek 🚀).
A quick note: this is the notebook I’m using right now, but I’ll likely upgrade once it’s full. My two must-haves are 1) a spiral binding so it lays flat, and 2) A5 size (5.83 × 8.27 inches).
🛤️The Pathway
From that notebook, each entry follows one of several paths:
Time-sensitive to-dos → move into my Google Calendar, where they stay visible until completed.
Non-time-sensitive to-dos → move into my To-Do Journal (the one with the clocks cover), where I track progress and check off each completed task.
Things I got done, notes, & ideas → move to my Timelines Journal (the one with The Lorax cover), my bridge between analog and digital. At day’s end, I transfer these entries into my Notion archive — my digital “Second Brain.” Everything there is organized into a searchable, structured system that serves as my digital memory and archive.
🎨The Bonus Round
While not part of this official organization workflow, I also pull highlights from the day into my creative memory keeping junk journal. I’ve shared about those before and I welcome you to follow my Junk Journal updates if you’d like to keep up with what I do with them.
💡The Benefit!
This flow keeps the moving pieces of my life, from the personal, to the creative, and the genealogical — organized and connected. It’s not perfect (no system ever is!), but it helps me stay on top of my work and build a living archive that strengthens overall productivity.
🪶Join the Conversation
How do you capture and organize your days? I’d love to hear what systems work for you — and if you know someone who’d appreciate this framework, pass it along!
Here’s a video I made as well!
I’m relatively new to active genealogy and planning and journalling. One thing I’m sure about is that if I hand write it, I’ll never read it again or find it again so it has to be digital. So far I have a separate journal where I have pinned notes about the goals for the year. Then whenever I see something useful on Facebook about sources, or suggestions how to do something, I screenshot it into the journal, with a suitable heading. I go through the journal every now and then to check what I should be doing and what I found. Really not organised to do tasks, but perhaps I should be.
Great advice.. As a project management leader, this has been similar to what I practice daily. I've graduated from the (notebook) planner to digital planner, but the concept is still to stay organized and scheduling the work to be done.