Applications I Use Every Week – Part 1

Applications I Use Every Week – Part 1

by | Sep 14, 2009 | Featured Articles, Ordinary Pastor, Pastoral Ministry, Technology, Time/Life Management

[YouTube Video] Hey everyone, today’s blog post (and a few others this week) is a screen cast from my desktop in my study at home. I am currently using a 2.4 GHz iMac. I also have a MacBook Pro for portability (I’m hardly ever without my laptop) and its set up exactly like my iMac. What do I find to be some of the best applications I tend to use every week? Which are some of the most helpful to me as a pastor? This week I’ll be taking a look at my desktop and sharing with you the apps that find their way into my workweek. In general, just take a look at my doc (the bar of icons at the bottom of my screen). I don’t have any on there that I don’t regularly use. I’m going to give a quick overview today and then throughout the week, I’ll screen cast some details on those that I find most helpful. Finder. The way you find your way around the Mac environment is basically through the “Finder.” It’s comparable to Windows Explorer in the Windows environment. Pathfinder (instead of finder). It is much more versatile and worth the small amount it costs. It makes Windows Explorer and Mac Finder look useless. Safari (I’ve left Firefox behind for the most part). Google. For e-mail, calendar, contacts, chat, and tasks. Also Reader. Few Google docs.  I will review a number of the web applications (WordPress, Picasa, etc.) that I use all the time. Dropbox.  This is an excellent file sharing and synchronizing software.  You can share any files with anyone,...

Stay on Top of Email

by | Aug 24, 2009 | Technology, Time/Life Management

I love gadgets.  I love e-mail.  As ubiquitous as e-mail and gadget to fetch (or push) my e-mail to me are, I have learned to control it.  I am 1000s of times better at responding to e-mail than I used to be and find my in-box and follow-up e-mail handled regularly.  I control it; it doesn’t control me.  Here’s some good tips. Yes, You Can Stay on Top of Email (Productivity Tip) | Michael Hyatt – Lead The Tribes...
Cheap Technology and The Ordinary Pastor

Cheap Technology and The Ordinary Pastor

by | Mar 30, 2009 | Featured Articles, Pastoral Ministry, Technology, Time/Life Management

I’m seriously considering leaving the world of Microsoft behind and going for something less expensive, easier to use, and more portable?  Does anything out there exist like this? And if I leave my Office 2007 behind, will I be left behind in a whirlwind of little productivity? I really do enjoy using Microsoft Office 2007. It has been a very helpful system for me since the day it came out. They’ve really done a bang-up job on the bells and whistles. I love being able to post blog entries from Word. The visual enhancements to pictures, charts, and graphs are so far beyond previous versions of Office (not near the quality of the Mac world, but then again, few ordinary pastors can afford to live in the Mac world). I’m addicted to Outlook. I’ve never quite understood why people are down on Outlook. It’s been my right hand man for years. Outlook is one of the best organizational tools I have employed in ministry. I could go on. I really enjoy Office. But there is one thing I do not like about it. It is expensive. Whether the Mac version or the PC version, it is simply downright expensive. Until recently, Microsoft had us right where they wanted us. There were no other truly inexpensive options. True, Word Perfect was out there, but then again, you were stuck in the Corel Corral and could not interact with the rest of the world who was using and sharing Word docs. That may not be so now. Google is hot on their trail. Calendar is excellent and now boasts of offline...