Organization: My Shoebox, Finished

From 15 pages to 1 page!

I spent the better part of the last few days going through the documents in my shoebox and have cleared most of them out.

What I found:

A large portion of the documents were already attached to me tree- I just hadn’t deleted them from the shoebox. Delete!

A smaller amount were things I had been researching for others.  I had finished working with those documents are were again able to delete.

A few were obvious cases of climbing the wrong tree.  Delete.

Some were more recent items- things I’ve been working on currently.  I know what they are and why I saved them.   They still reside in the shoebox.

Those were the low hanging fruit that were easily dealt with.

On to the more difficult items.

The batch of records I could no longer easily access.  The records I had saved when I had an Ancestry.com world membership.  Since I am currently a US Discovery subscriber, I cannot see these records from my home account.  So a trip to the library was in order.

Finally there were those “Why did I save this?” “What was I thinking?”.  If I couldn’t think of a good reason why to save, I deleted.

 

Now that my shoebox is in some order, I have to decide if I really want to use it anymore.

If I save documents and then are later not at the same level of membership, I am not able to access them.  It seems easier to just download to my computer or use Evernote to hold these “not sures”.

In the shoebox I cannot annotate my finds.  Again, my computer or my evernote may be better for this.

For now I am undecided how or if I will use the shoebox.