An important part of family history is recording one's personal history. Probably the best way to do that is to keep a journal and make regular entries in it. After university and before I got married, I did a moderate job of writing journal entries. I averaged one entry every three days. By 2006, when my first two children were toddlers, I was down to a pathetic rate of less than 1%.
In the annual report, I want to have a graph showing me how I've done on my journal. Have I been writing regularly? Have I been writing substantially? Have written more or less than in previous years. I'm not sure if this graph would be useful on a timeline or if it's better as an independent chart. Regardless, for the annual report, I think I'll use the metric of "words written" instead of "journal entries" written. That'll help me answer the question about substantial entries.
Collecting the data will be easy since I write my journal entries on the computer (or Palm Pilot and sync them). I have a program that counts the number of entries and it should be easy enough to modify it to count words too.
With this annual report, are you calculating and reporting the data on how much time you are spending keeping track for the Annual Report? I would imagine even that would lead to some interesting results. My guess is that you would spend less time as you became more efficient, but who knows, that's why we track that sort of stuff.
ReplyDeleteI have been tracking the amount of time I've spent on the report. I plan to indicate in the report the final total of time spent. I'm up to 4 hours so far this year.
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