PastorHacks

Sendible.com

So- right now I have a number of reminders set up on Backpack that are there to help me remember to send specific emails to specific people at specific times. 

Whew. 

What if instead of setting up a reminder, getting said reminder, then writing and sending the actual email I could just compress all that into one step and write an email that would automatically send later?

Not sure if there's an Outlook way to do this- I imagine so... but if not, check out Sendible.com

Schedule messages

Plan ahead and send messages to your friends, colleagues and customers using email, sms and your social networks. Sendible integrates seamlessly with your email service and social networks and provides you with easy access to your email and social contacts.

There's another, easier way to schedule emails in Mac Mail, though it takes a couple of steps in installation- I detail that here

Other options or ways to send that reminder to others at specific times? 

appointment bookends

lifehack.org sings the praises of appointment bookends- hard scheduling (putting it on your calendar!) time before and after appointments to prepare and debrief.

Here are the PastorHack version of prep and the life hack version of debrief-

Prep:

1. Pray (duh.) Ask God what HE wants to happen in the appointment. Ask God to help you hear what the other person is saying to you and help you both to hear what He is saying through their circumstance/story.

2. Review past notes, emails, etc from previous meetings with the person. Remember their personal details. What's his wife's name? What kind of schooling was he pursuing again? I was praying for them in regards to... ,etc.

In terms of meetings involving teams and more than one person, here's some good advice from lifehack:
Gather everything you will need; strive to dazzle your appointment with how prepared you are for them, and how intentionally focused you are. Review any related documents, and make notes of the questions you can get answered during the appointment. Appointments should be people-time, not paper-time.
If you are about to go into a meeting, do a mental roll-call of all the people who will be there, and compile your questions and outstanding items for them, whether related to the subject matter at hand or not. This part of the habit saves so many emails and phone calls in the rest of your week; you are capitalizing on the presence of others in a proactive way.

On the debrief:

Write down your de-brief of whatever memory you need to capture from the appointment. Grab your take-aways and lessons learned; reflect and rejuvenate.

Process your notes and get any new data you’ve captured into your system; file, calendar, replace and delete as you need to: The goal here is that meeting and appointment data by-passes your inbox and is immediately processed. Any new paperwork generated gets done or gets started when fresh in mind.

Get your jump-start on follow-up: Brainstorm all related next-actions related to the appointment or meeting you just had, and calendar what you can, including appointments with yourself— time blocked for those priorities you deem most important.

Use whatever time remains in that half-hour to get something done. Choose from that list of next actions you just wrote down, and do them.

Any other pastor-specific hacks/tips here?

Avoiding double booking...

Calendar hack

(that I'm desperately trying to remember) -

When you send an email to someone saying "How about meeting at 1pm on Friday?", "pencil" that in on your calendar program with a bunch of question marks (or otherwise tag it "tentative"). That way, in the heat of the scheduling moment when someone else is looking for some of your time, you won't accidentally double book. The question marks also remind me as I review my calendar to confirm with someone...

Why this hack now? Because Bob learns the hard way! (I'll let you know who emails me back first for that 1pm spot on Friday!)

Contacting

Two apps help me keep in touch with people- I'll use MAC examples, but you could easily do this with outlook, Gmail/Google Calendar, etc.

I looked and looked and LOOKED for good contact management software that would work for pastors- everything out there either suffered from bloat (doing too many extraneous things) or was way over the top in cost. Nothing I saw did exactly what I wanted, so if there are any software developers out there, I have a million dollar (or perhaps couple thousand dollar) idea...

At any rate, here's my current work around to manage contacting.

I took my list of everyone I wanted to be in my contacting schedule, and made sure they were in my address book.

I did some division (wow- my math teachers were right... you really do use this stuff!) to figure out how many contacts over the Tuesday-Friday week, and came up with contacting everyone once in a six week period.

I opened my calendar, created a new calendar set called "contacting" and began dragging names to days, starting with the A's and moving on. I set each one to repeat in 6 weeks. 

I started a mail file called prayer/contacting.

Everyday I email, call or visit with that days people- when I email, I try to ask about how I can be praying for them and place their reply in my folder. The next time they come around in the schedule, I refresh my memory by looking at past emails/notes from them.

The final step was placing "write/pray for contacts for the day" in my "dailies" or the to-do list I start every day off with.

And voila'! An easy way to make sure that everyone I'm trying to stay in touch with (in this case our whole church) gets contacted regularly.

How about you all- what's your system?

Scheduly!

Thanks so much to everyone who offered some ideas for Scheduling. Special thanks to Ed Eubanks who was the first to turn me on to Scheduly.

Absolutely amazing. Okay- not absolutely, it's still a bit beta-y. I had trouble doing a coupe of things- but eventually, got it all set up and it does exactly what I was looking for it to do- Free. 

I can make certain appointment times available, allow people to sign up online, it notifies me/allows me to accept or reject the appointment, AND updates my iCal or Google Calendar. (Outlook, too if you are into that) Awesome. 

If you are looking for something like this, check out Scheduly.

Pray your calendar...

Take 5-10 minutes... right now if you can (and you can), and look at your calendar. And now pray through it- what appointments do you have today or this week?
Pray down the list.
Pray for each person with whom you will meet.
Pray that God will prepare you both for that time together. Ask God to give you ears to hear- both what the person in front of you is saying and what God is doing in/to/through that person.

Pray for each meeting.
Pray that good things will actually be accomplished, with fighting, without frustration.

Pray for the open spaces.
Pray that God would give you a beautiful mix of time to think and dream, time to pray, time to rest and a little, tiny bit of time to "waste."

Pray for your Study time. Pray that you will be smart enough to protect it. Pray that God would grant you a clear head and a purposeful heart during those times.  Pray that God would grant you the grace to speak needed words to your community which point them towards Jesus.

Pray for your mornings and evenings- that you would bookend your work days with good time
with family and good time with God.

TimeBridge...

We've been using Doodle.ch for a couple of years now to simply the process of scheduling Elder meetings, but Bill's post on TimeBridge has gotten me to go back and reassess their site. I had looked at it awhile ago and been turned off by a couple of things... but on second appraisal, all I can say is- wow.

1. I have a Google calendar set up to Jott appointments to. It syncs with my iCal, so anything that shows up there, shows up on my iCal.
TimeBridge syncs with Google Calendar, so- when I suggested some proposed times for our next Elder shindig, within minutes, those times automatically got blocked out and labeled (tentative) on my iCal. Pretty dang slick.
I know that TimeBridge also goes ahead and schedules the meeting for the earliest time everyone is available, a feature I didn't necessarily like the first time around (I may prefer a later time, all things being considered). But if it goes ahead and deschedules all the tentatives and locks in the final time on my iCal? I'll be officially using this service from now on.

2. It's cheesy, but you can drag a "Create new meeting" button to your browser... kind of dig that :)













Check out TimeBridge

UPDATE: from the comments-
Bob: Thanks for positive remarks on TimeBridge. Interestingly, we have actually had quite a bit of uptake by high-tech clergy. We hope to continue to make it easier for you to stay connected to your congregation. I wanted to provide you a little tip that will give you more control of when the meeting is ultimately scheduled. In the new meeting form there is a tab for Meeting Options, if you open it you can set the meeting to manual confirmation mode by unchecking "automatically confim." This means that you wait for everyone to express their preferences and then you, as the organizer, can decide on the best time with all that information in hand. Hope this helps you get more out of TimeBridge. --- John

From (about) a year ago... Doodle

One of the most annoying things in the life of a pastor is trying to schedule meetings. We're dealing with volunteers who are being very generous with their time, but try getting a group of them together and you'll realize- we all have radically different schedules. To try to get more than 4 people together at the same time is to experience profound frustration...

Our elder team uses Doodle.ch.

I can create a poll with dates to choose from. Then I send it to everyone involved. They mark their open dates and their blackout dates. No muss, no fuss. And no clogging our inboxes with endless "What about Tuesday? No. Wednesday? No Tuesday... oh wait, I forgot so and so works Tuesdays..." And so on.

I really think you should check this out

Timebridge

I've been using doodle.ch as a way to cut the hassle of scheduling elder meetings (with 7 elders now, it's a pain in the rear to trade the "I'm available Tuesday at 7!" "Oh, I'm not..." emails among that many).

The person calling the meeting lists their available times and everyone else chimes in on which ones work.

Now here's a new service that seems to do the same, but prettier (doodle.ch is, uh... not flashy, to say the least) and includes Outlook/Google Calendar integration. It also automates the process a bit more, in that if there's a clear winner in everyone's availability, it "schedules" the meeting for you and automatically emails all the participants. I like that.

And if I'm reading it right, it also emails reminders to stragglers who are being pokey about listing their availability. I like that too :) It also gives the option of listing meeting locations (which might change depending on the date), another nice innovation...

It's free, looks nice, cuts a lot of time out of scheduling meetings. What more could you want? (Maybe iCal integration???)

Check it out!

Jott and Google sittin' in a tree...

Bill Reichart (www.BigCreekChurch.com) sent this one in...

"I just got this from JOTT, and this has got me even more jacked up about using JOTT...

'We've been working hard on the official release of the Google Calendar Jott Link, and we're happy to announce it's finally here. Why is this cool? Because you can now create a Google Calendar event in a single step, from anywhere, simply using your voice. Just call Jott, say "Google Calendar", and then the time of the event and what it's about….and you're done. We'll take your voice, convert it to text, and insert it into your calendar for you. "Meet Cathy at 9 am next Thursday" is no longer a to do that needs another step, it's something that's recorded in your Calendar.

Joining in the Jott Link fun are our friends at Mosio, Xpenser, Gumiyo, and Vitalist. They offer amazing services, and now they're even more accessible to you with Jott. For more information on these Jott Links and others, please visit http://www.jott.com/jott-links/.'"

I love Jott. Do you love Jott?