Today I want to introduce you to a tool that addresses a different issue – remembering what happened at the meeting! I find remembering meeting outcomes and action items difficult.

Ketchup is a tool that allows you to create agendas, add notes and keep all your agendas in one place so you never forget what was discussed at the meeting, and what you agreed to do!

It’s very easy to create a meeting and add the details of the time, place and attendees:

After the meeting you can print the agenda and notes, or share the link with other attendees (or just leave it online to access later when you need).

I’ve found it to be a very useful tool for managing staff meetings, web meetings and any other meeting I find myself at. And it’s free.

Check out Ketchup.

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1. Alienation. Someone shared that they had been excluded from social events because they didn’t have a Facebook account. That’s not very nice. If lack of access to technology excludes people from community, this should raise warning bells. At the very least, there should be more than one way for people to access information – limiting communication about an event to one channel (e.g. Facebook) is exclusive as it assumes that people a) have access to technology (e.g. Facebook), and b) want to use it. We should assume neither.
2. Addiction. This example of a South Korean couple starving their child to death while caring for a virtual child is at the extreme end of the spectrum. But the need to be plugged-in, to know what’s happening, to read updates, to share updates is a modern and unhelpful phenomenon that has the Center for Internet Addiction. If only we felt the same eagerness to read God’s word and pursue our relationship with Him. On a more light-hearted note, wondering if you’re addicted to Twitter? Try this fun quiz. Apparently I’m 45% addicted to Twitter. It’s a fine line between engagement and addiction. Other posts I’d recommend include: ‘Addicted to tweets‘, ‘Excessive internet use linked to depression‘, and ‘Enabled or enslaved by technology?‘.
3. Laziness. Some things are best communicated face-to-face, or at least over the phone. Technology allows us to be lazy and laziness is never good. For example, sending your Bible study leader a text message to let them know that you won’t be coming tonight. That’s lazy – if you are not going to be there, it’s courteous to pick up the phone and apologise and explain. It’s easier to send a text, but for the benefit of your leader who has spent hours preparing and who is responsible for caring for you, it’s not a good option.
4. Potential to sin. I’m not sure if our opportunities to sin have increased with technology, or if we’re simply more aware of them. But take for example Facebook – it can prompt jealousy and envy (I wish I had what she has), pride (posting status updates to promote ourselves), lust (looking at unhelpful photos of people), gossip (sharing news on Facebook, or that we heard on Facebook) about others. The list goes on. Sure, Facebook didn’t invent jealousy, envy, pride, lust and gossip – but it sure makes these sins easy to fall into!
5. Wasting time. Nielsen recently revealed the extent of time spent on Facebook, and how this is increasing. On this site I shared how Australians spend 29% of all time online, on Facebook. I know I seem to be picking on Facebook – I’m not, it just provides lots of good examples! Technology can make us more efficient and productive, but it can also just help us to waste time. And we waste a lot. When the Master returns, I want to be busy doing his business, not procrastinating on Facebook.

What would you add to this list?

(Feature image attribution – it’s a light-hearted image for a more serious topic! http://www.flickr.com/photos/paloetic/ / CC BY-NC 2.0)

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“I recently came to the realization that email owns me. A good technology that should be at my disposal has instead taken over and put me at its disposal. And if you’ve read Postman you’ll know that technology is very good at this. No sooner do we put a technology in our service than we find that it has so changed our lives that suddenly we have become enslaved to it.”

How many of us can relate to this feeling?

You can read the full post here, with Tim’s resolutions for dealing with this realisation.

Are you owned by your email?

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Thanks to Check 1-2, I discovered CreateBooklet. It adds an option to ‘Create booklet’ when you print a file on your Mac. It’s a little tricky to explain, so I’ll leave that to the guys at Check 1-2. Thankfully, the developer has also released an update for Snow Leopard. And, it’s free. I’ve got a lot of respect and thanks for people who develop free, quality apps. Thanks Christoph.

If you’re not using a Mac, an online application that does the same thing is Booklet Creator. Here are some instructions about how to use BookletCreator, including explaining how A4 PDFs are turned into A5 booklets.

My guess is, most people are still using Microsoft Office. However, if you’re not using Word, or you have a PDF that you want to turn into a booklet, you might find these tools to be quite useful.

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At Sydney Anglicans this week, I share 15 tips to stop procrastinating.

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Are ‘being more productive’ or ‘procrasting less’ on your list of resolutions for 2010? Here are five great websites to help you make 2010 a year of less procrastination, and more productivity:

• Zen Habits
• Web Worker Daily
• Stepcase Lifehack
• Lifehacker
• Dumb Little Man

What are your resolutions for 2010? Does productivity make it onto the list?

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• What are the service times for your church?
• What are the bank details to give to the church?
• Can you add me to the list to receive the weekly email newsletter?
• I’d like to join the church – how do I do this?
• I want to become a Christian – how do I do this? (wouldn’t it be great if that were a common question!)

If you have ever had the need to write the answer to the same question twice, you might benefit from using Google’s canned responses. Launched in 2008, I only just discovered this handy tool a couple of week’s ago when a friend put me onto it.

Canned responses allows you to save a response to easily re-use it on another occasion. They save you from re-typing the email from scratch. They save you from having to dig around to find the response you gave to the same question three months ago.

Of course, you can adjust any of the response to customise them as you need, and you can add text before, after or in the middle of the canned response, but  simply having the pre-written response on-hand can be a real time-saver. Other uses of this tool including adding signatures to the bottom of emails, or creating templates for weekly roster reminders, or weekly emails to your Bible study group.

If you use a Mac, but don’t use email, you might like to try out a tool called TextExpander (explained in more detail, along with some other email tips, in ‘8 tips for email liberation‘).

But if you don’t use Gmail, perhaps it’s time you switched – there’s lots of benefits to using this tool to manage your email!

It’s easy to import your email to Google from another web-based email account (e.g. Hotmail), and even if you don’t want to use a Gmail account, you can send and receive your email, using the Gmail interface, by importing your mail settings.

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• Surveys, polls and sign-up forms (e.g. Wufoo)
• Organising meetings (e.g. TimeBridge)
• Reputation management (e.g. Google Alerts)
• Website analytics (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Collaboration (e.g. Huddle)
• Password management (e.g. Pastor)
• Email newsletters (e.g. Campaign Monitor)
• Task management (e.g. Remember the Milk)
• Note taking (e.g. Evernote)
• Time tracking (e.g. Freckle)
• Asset management (e.g. Dropbox)

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Last week, technology blogs Mashable and Cnet that the Los Angeles’ city council is about to start using Google Apps. For those unfamiliar, Google Apps is a set of tools provided by Google to assist organisations with communication, collaboration and publishing.

How does it work?

Most churches and ministry organisations will already have their own domain (e.g. www.stanglican.com). You can keep this domain and use Google to manage these common tasks:

• Email – use Google’s email tool (Gmail) to manage your email. Your email address will remain the same (e.g. steve@stanglican.com), but there are added benefits such as awesome spam filtering, access to email wherever you have internet access, and a dedicated team working behind the scenes, 24/7/365 to make sure your email is always available. Here’s some more tips and benefits to using Gmail.
• Calendars – use Google’s calendar tool (Google Calendar) to manage your schedule and collaborate with the schedules of others in your team/ministry/church. There are many benefits to not using a paper diary, but one of the most compelling for ministry is collaboration. Google Calendar will allow you to create multiple calendars, see who has what on when, allocate resources, find common meeting times, and publish (where appropriate, of course) particular calendars online for anyone to access. That’s a very brief sell – check out a tour with more of the features.
• Documents – use Google’s document creation/management tool (Google Docs) to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You can import (eg. from Word/Excel/PowerPoint) and export to the same formats (and others) – i.e. you can maintain most of the benefits to using Microsoft Office and open documents others send you. Again, one of the key features is collaboration – Google Docs is a great platform for sharing documents and allowing others to work with you on particular documents, without the issues associated with emailing these around and hoping you’re working on the most current version. And importantly, you don’t need to be connected to the internet to access your documents.

There are other tools and benefits provided by the Google Apps service – all available free for non-profits (i.e. churches and most ministry organisations!) Learn more of the features of Google Apps, or sign-up.

Will your church or ministry organisation join LA city council?

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1. 20 simple productivity tools for bloggers. I’m a fan of TextExpander and Fluid.
2. Bible events seen from Google Earth. “The images…use real satellite imagery to achieve the incredible effect.”
3. Free album download. Phil Wickham offers his album ‘Singalong’ as a free download. h/t Hayley Neal.
4. 20 non-preaching websites for better preaching. Most are US-specific, but not too hard to find a local equivalent where necessary.
5. PhillipJensen.com. The Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral gets his own website!

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