To be successful in your genealogy research, you must be able to plan each research step, and organize the information you find there. What use is it to have great organizational skills if you don't have a clue where to look for the information? It's just as futile if you do well planning the research, but have lousy organizational skills! There is a happy medium -- if you organize the results of your research, you tend to be more organized in your search for information, and more focused on specific research goals. Organized results allow you to evaluate and analyze information quicker and more thoroughly, freeing your time for more research.

It doesn't take a new genealogist very long to discover that the ancestral paper trail quickly becomes uncontrollable. Miscellaneous scraps of paper with undecipherable notes, orphaned photocopies with no identifying marks, lecture and class handouts, copies of e-mails, bibliographic references, post-it notes, scribbled messages, and torn bits of magazine or newspaper articles make every genealogist's filing cabinets a chaotic nightmare.