Setting a framework

Most researchers in any discipline will tell you that you need boundaries, without boundaries for your research you will quickly lose your way, and end up squandering time and resources with little to show for it. The same is true of Genealogy. When you decide to begin your endeavor lay down clear boundaries to focus your search, that doesn’t mean you won’t expand your boundaries or that you don’t need to have your eyes open to possibilities that fall outside of them. If you do not have a focus you will jump from clue to clue and line to line and your journey will be greatly slowed.
I learned this lesson the hard way, when I first started I did not choose which line I wanted to investigate first, instead I decided I wanted to get as much information about as many people as I could. What ended up happening is I got swamped by data and made erroneous assumptions and connections. All in an effort to push my lineage to another generation and then another.
After taking several online classes through the Genealogical Society of America and free lessons through Brigham Young University I started over. I may not have needed to start over, but after learning about all the places I went wrong, and how inaccurate my tree may have been, I went back and took a look at what I had.
My first three generations in all families were complete and accurate, I had my parents, my grandparents and my great grand parents information from living sources, mainly my mom and aunt Kathy. After that though I had been using Ancestry and had relied on other users tree’s for too much information. Much of which turned out to be incomplete or plain wrong. When your last name is Thompson, and some of the other surnames you are looking up are Stark, Cox, and Horton you would be surprised how many false trails there are to follow. Some of the other surnames are not so common, Ketchapaw, Reichenbach, Judd and Swinehart, but yet I had still took wrong turns and had too much bad information so, I started fresh.
I learned that I needed to concentrate on one line at a time, and delve deeply into all the information available to me, not just a cursory search of trees that had the same names. So my boundaries were clear, instead of jumping from Swinehart to Thompson to Judd depending on what I felt like that day, I would concentrate on the one line. While working on that line I documented everything imaginable in paper form, and saved in copies on my computer. I had binders dedicated to information that was not verified yet and information that was verified.
I started with Swinehart, simply because I knew the least about it. I had grown up knowing my Great Grandpa and Grandma Judd, and Thompson. I had what I thought was an accurate tree for the Judd line, and was able to get information readily about that side, the paternal side, of my family.
On the maternal side however, I had known my Grandpa and Grandma and knew I had a ton of other relatives but had no clue how I was related to them all. We rarely saw most of them, and when we did it was a yearly get together that stopped happening after my grandfather died in 1992. On top of all of that the family story was that my maternal line had Native American lineage and that intrigued me. So my journey began with the intent of finding where our native side originated. I set up the binders I mentioned, I set up an office area, I paid for the World subscription to Ancestry, I joined my local historical society which also had a genealogical section that I joined. I sat down with my mom and picked her brain for dates, names, and places of birth and death. I was lucky also that much of my maternal grandfathers family was buried in one cemetery near Manton, MI.
During my frequent trips to see my grandpa I would take a notepad and a camera. At first I took pictures of the markers that had the Swinehart surname, later I went through and took pictures of almost every stone. From this limited amount of information I managed to add two more generations to my Swinehart line, which I already had actually, but this time they were more than a name. I found pictures of my Great Grandfather Forrest Swinehart, I found pictures of his father Paul L. Swinehart, but I also came across people with stories to tell. I met people I didn’t know I was related to, and expanded my understanding of the whole clan we had. I had always known we were a big family but one day after taking a bunch of pictures and visiting the county records in Cadillac we drove through Manton, I stopped at a gas station and mentioned off hand to my wife, that our family is huge I bet if I go in the store and mention the name Swinehart someone inside is related. Sure enough not one but two people, the cashier and a customer were distant cousins of mine, and turns out the person I was looking for that ran the cemetery was also related. 
I spent 5 months searching property records, birth, death and marriage records, tax records and Ancestry databases to make sure that I had all the information available. When I was certain that I had every available record I took that information and moved on to the next level. At that point once you have a system, the majority of your ancestor can be discovered the same way. You will see soon enough though that some people, for one reason or another, are harder to find and you can spend weeks even months or years stuck, but I will get to those cases soon enough.
Now I am not saying each individual in your tree should take you 5 months to investigate, it just happens that there was a lot to discover and I didn’t have a lot of time each week to be working on genealogy. Just be sure whatever pace you set your information is thorough and accurate.