Since I've been working two jobs, I've really been counting on the power of the web to help me work more efficiently. I've discovered a bunch of new sites and tools that have really enabled me to keep everything organized. I thought I would take this chance to share with you some of my favorite new internet discoveries.
1. Fluid - This is an amazing little program for Mac that turns any website you frequent into a standalone application. For example, let's say you have Facebook open almost all of the time. You plug Facebook into Fluid and it creates a standalone application that you put in your dock. It's completely separate from Safari and it also has an amazing coverflow feature that allows you to browse through all of your friends' profile pages in coverflow view. I currently have fluid apps for Facebook, TaDa, Digg, Planningcenteronline, and Muxtape. Very cool.
2. TaDa - Tada is amazing... it has made me about 1000% more organized. It's so simple... it's just an online to-do list. You can have as many lists as you want and you can have as many items on each list. What I like about it is that it's web based so I can update my lists from anywhere... from home, from work, even from my phone (it has a great mobile browser interface). I have about 15 different lists... everything from "Things to do This Week" to "Books to Read" to "Things I should blog about".
3. Planning Center Online - I've blogged about this one already but wow... it is just fantastic. It allows me to manage all of the teams here at church... worship teams and tech teams all in one place. I can create weekly worship schedules, upload mp3s and chord charts, schedule the musicians, and then the people who are scheduled can download all of that to rehearse. Since we started using this, our musicians generally show up at practice with the music for that week already printed out and the MP3s on their ipods or on a CD in their car. All I have to do is upload that stuff one time to the server. Amazingly convenient. If you are a worship pastor and you aren't using this software, you really should be.
4. Poll Everywhere - We tried this cool piece of technology out for the first time this past Sunday. This is a website that allows you to do live text message voting in real time and it also allows you to display the results in real time on your screen. We opened our service this past week by inviting folks to text vote a question that our speaker used later on as a part of his message. We had about 75 people vote and it was cool to see the bars dance all around on the screen as the answers went live. It isn't free, but it isn't very expensive either. Very cool... before Poll Everywhere came along, this was VERY expensive to do.
5. Spaces - I hadn't used this feature on my Mac before recently and I'm really liking it. I have 4 spaces setup on my desktop... one for mail and internet, one for tada & planning center (I ALWAYS have those two pulled up), one for itunes, muxtape, and random other fun stuff, and a fourth for any overflow. If you're a multitasker and you work on a mac, you might want to play with spaces to see if you like it.
6. M-Velopes - If you've ever done the Dave Ramsey envelope system, this website will probably rock your world. Jessica and I did the envelopes but there were always some drawbacks that made us abandon the system. First, I didn't like the idea of carrying around $1000 in cash for half the month. Secondly, those envelopes tore up pretty quickly and the whole thing became a tattered mess. Third, when you're out in the store, you don't always have time to write stuff down and we found ourselves losing track of which envelopes certain things had come out of. Enter Mvelopes.com. Basically, it's a digital version of the envelope system. It automatically connects to your bank account, pulls all of the transactions out for you, and then allows you to file them into envelopes. You can even set certain transactions to always go into certain envelopes. For example... we have $100 a month set aside for eating out. So, anytime a transaction comes in with the keyword "McDonalds" or "Bojangles" or "Starbucks" or whatever comes in, that transaction automatically goes into that envelope. The software keeps track of everything for you and pulls all of your balances and transactions off the web each time you launch it. Best of all, it's web based so you can access this stuff anywhere. Also, you can instantly print off or email custom reports. I email Jessica the amount in each envelope a couple of times each week and it only takes about 10 seconds to do that... really handy. This has really helped us a lot with our finances. It isn't free, but it's been totally worth the $10 a month we're paying to use it.
There are more... so many more, but that's all I've got the energy to talk about right now. Hopefully some of these will be helpful to you.
I've been playing this week with a really cool new website called
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