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Free Personal Organizers…

Brandon — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:34:19 +0000

I find that most of my youth ministry friends are using their phones for organization; in fact I have not used a paper organizer for years (from my monochrome Visor Palm device in 2000 to currently my Motorola Droid). That said I do prefer a pen and paper when it comes to brainstorming ideas, I mostly use a homemade journal or a Moleskine for creative space. Other than blank paper here are a couple of sites that I think do a good job of offering several templates for you to use in sparking ideas or if you are just looking for free day planner inserts instead of giving Franklin Covey $50 bucks.

Pocket Mod:
Disposable organizer on one sheet of paper with multiple uses. There are dozens of options to choose. (My mother-in-law said she would use this concept as a kindergarten teacher for making little booklets). Here are similar sites that do the same thing (www.pocketmod.com/v2 and www.pocketmod.com/app)

DIY Planner:
You can Google and find several calendar tools but this site has it all. Browse through all their “templates” and find downloads for several types of time management tools. From 3×5 card size to full sheets. Sift through all their FREE resources.

Continue Reading "Free Personal Organizers…"

Share Tasks with Remember the Milk

Jeremy — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:42:06 +0000

I, like many in our field, have ADD. That makes assigning, completing and following up on tasks an adventure with our team. It is common for us to be in a car on the way to Starbucks or walking down the hall when we remember an essential task we need to do, or we need someone else to do. Until now, we have had no solution outside of everyone carrying a pad of paper around with us at all times to remedy this situation.

Fortunately, we found Remember the Milk and production is up something eight percent. Remember the Milk is basically a todo list system that is stored online. What caught our eye was its ability to create lists that are shared with each other. Once shared, we can each put tasks on everyone’s list.

It does all the standard stuff like priorities, due dates, and notes, but it also has fields for an estimate on the time it should take, location for the task, and tags.

However, none of these are the reasons we went with this over another service. The reason we chose Remember the Milk is because of the sheer volume of ways in which you can access the information. It has an iPhone app (like everyone else), but it also has an Android app and a way to sync it with your Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. Want it to [...] Continue Reading "Share Tasks with Remember the Milk"

My Evernote Ideas…

Brandon — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:49:07 +0000

If you are not familiar with Evernote, it is a clean and easy note taking software (Learn More). It is a great way to capture and organize ideas, web pages, audio, and more. It is a web app, desktop app (syncs beautifully), it is available for Mac and PC and most handheld devices. But this is not a commercial for Evernote (which is FREE). I wanted to share a few of the way I am using it that might spark ideas for you in your ministry context.

In Evernote you can create different “notebooks” to work from and store things in. I have “notebooks” with ideas, links to youtube clips I might want to use in a lesson, series ideas. I find this to be much better than having several documents on my computer (which are not synced with an online source) or a bunch of scattered documents in Google Docs. It is one location to do a mind dump, and that helps me sleep at night. (Another place to do a great mind dump is “OmniFocus” but that is a different post for another time).

One of my folders is called “CODES.” I use have tons of serial numbers for software and did not know how to keep track of them. Now they are all in one place. I guess I could use a word doc but Evernote is searchable so I can search the [...] Continue Reading "My Evernote Ideas…"

Remember to Pray More with Echo Prayer Manager

Jeremy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:50:29 +0000

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister. Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more. My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.

That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS. After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random). Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.

Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time! Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.

There’s also [...] Continue Reading "Remember to Pray More with Echo Prayer Manager"

Communicating youth group news with teens and parents … From SYMC

Chris — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:55:14 +0000

Last weekend was the Simply Youth Ministry Conference, and there was lots of great training. One of the speakers, Tim Schmoyer videoed his seminar on Communicating Youth Group News with Teens and Parents and dropped it on YouTube. You can watch it here (it was really good):

If you’d like to pickup more seminars from last week end you can get them here. Or if you’d like to register for next year (It’s going to sell out early) Visit: youthministry.com/symc.

Quick Tip: Stop Spam with Mailinator

Jeremy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:45 +0000

It’s my experience that I can often tell when a site is going to spam me. However, there are those times when I need something, and the site requires me to fork over my email and “verify” it forcing me into the conundrum of deciding between and endless barrage of spam and whatever I think I “need” from the site. This is where Mailinator comes in. You simply give anything @mailinator.com … anything you choose… and Mailinator will have your email waiting for you when you surf over to their website:mailinator.com. Once you check your email you can have it deleted or just leave it and Mailinator will automatically delete the email in a couple of hours.

Of course there are other applications for this like giving a “persistent” teenager the wrong address or giving it to a vendor at a conference to obtain a free glowing pencil topper, but we do not endorse or participate in anything like that here. It’s just a quick tip. And it is FREE!

Fill Out PDFs Free with Formulate Pro

Jeremy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:31:02 +0000

It seems that although everyone makes their forms downloadable online as a PDF, almost no one formats the files as editable forms that can be filled out within acrobat reader. This means I have to download the form, print it out, fill it out by hand, and then either walk it over to whoever needs it or scan it, save it, and attach it to an email. Sounds like it would be easier to just stop by the registration table and fill it out on the spot. Formulate Pro fixes that problem.

I should say, that if you have Acrobat Pro, there is a typewriter and annotation tool that works relatively well, but at $449 from Adobe’s site, or $378 from Amazon, it is a little pricey just for filling out forms. That is where Formulate Pro comes in. This tool does one thing, and does it well. It allows you to type, draw and make check marks on top of the PDF. Then, you can save it with those edits as a PDF of print it out. And, it’s free!

After downloading and installing the app it is as simple as opening the PDF, clicking the “T” (text tool) for typing, the squiggle tool for drawing, or the checkmark to check a box, then save or print. Right now, it’s only for mac, but the source code is available at [...] Continue Reading "Fill Out PDFs Free with Formulate Pro"

Extending the Life of an Aging Computer

Chris — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:55:06 +0000

My main computer that I use for all my day to day work is pushing 3 years old, and it’s really starting to show it’s age. I realize that 3 years doesn’t sound like that long, but it’s the longest I’ve used a computer since the 386 I built my freshmen year of college. But in these economic times I’m sure most of us aren’t able to replace our computers as often as we would like. I find myself in a constant battle in keeping mine from crashing and losing hours of work. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but is there anything we can do that can help prolong the life of our aging machines? Here are a few things that I have found that has helped:

1. Hardware Upgrades: Sometimes over time we can develop some hardware problems that are easy to tackle ourselves. Two upgrades we can do that make a huge difference are RAM and Harddrive. If you find your aging computer slowing down, make sure you have the maximum amount of RAM your computer can handle. If you don’t know the maximum amount for your machine head over to Crucial.com, and run their memory scanner and they will tell you how much your computer can take. You can also buy the upgrade from them, and their prices are some of the best around. Another upgrade that can [...] Continue Reading "Extending the Life of an Aging Computer"

Win a Website Makeover

Chris — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:30:41 +0000

Let’s face it, a lot of our church websites need help. Most of the time they aren’t up to the design and functionality we would like. Well, the guys over at Snapshot Web would like to help fix that. They are giving away a year worth of hosting, plus a custom design just for you. Just follow the link and take their quick survey to be entered. Who knows, a new church website could be in your future.

Organizing My Life

Chris — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:19:03 +0000

I have a confession to make. My life is out of control. OK, that may be a little dramatic, but over the last 6 months I’ve allowed myself to become more and more disorganized. A lot of it has to do with the number of projects and things I’ve needed to get done have increased, and my organizational system hasn’t scaled to the new amount of tasks.

There are those that tell me I need to start using a GTD system, but to be honest those systems seem like they would be too much work to keep going. I see the need for something more than just keeping a list in my moleskin notebook. I’ve looked at a number of different software packages and web tools, but this is what I’ve narrowed my search down to:

1. Entourage
Entourage is what I use for email. It has a task list that can be tied to me email and calendar. It’s already in my work flow and I’m very familiar with it. It’s not perfect, but ramp up time would be small.

Pro: tied to my work email and calendar, everything in one place, little setup time
Con: doesn’t sync to my phone, have to be at my computer to update the list or check things off, can’t share it

2. Backpack from 39signals
Backpack is an online tool for creating simple pages that can include to [...] Continue Reading "Organizing My Life"