When you need to schedule a meeting with one or, even worse, multiple people, don't you spend tons of time exchanging emails back and forth just to find one time that fits in everyone's schedule? It often becomes a headache and a big time waster. But just when you thought you would remain relegated to an email only solution, then comes along TimeBridge.

TimeBridge. It's a simple, free service that helps people set up meetings. It acts like a personal scheduling assistant (something I don't have in my church budget to pay for!)

Basically, when you want to set up a meeting with a lot of people, instead of emailing back and forth, you set up a TimeBridge request which only requires a couple of quick and easy steps.

The process is super easy and usually only takes me a minute or two. First you log into your account. Then, just like writing a email, you write a subject line and choose the recipients to email (I've important my gmail contacts into TimeBridge. TimeBridge is nicely integrated with both Google and Outlook). Then you propose a "series" of times when the meeting would work best for you. What is so cool about TimeBridge is that it is linked to my Google Calendar (it works with Outlook Calendar as well). TimeBridge allows me to view my calendar and see my availability. I then simply mark on my calendar the slots that I would like to meet. I then set up a meeting location. And lastly I send it. TimeBridge does the rest of the work. You just set it and forget it!

Immediately my recipients get an email which gives them an opportunity to indicate which of my available options would work for them. What I like is that until the meeting is finalized, all of my selected meeting times remain in my Google Calendar as "Tentative" - this is so I don't accidentally book another appointment. But once everyone has responded, the meeting is set, the meeting is put in my Google Calendar and the other tentative times blocked out are released from my calendar.

One extra bell and whistle that I like is that TimeBridge also sends automatic email reminders to all the meeting participants the day before the upcoming meeting.

I have been using TimeBridge for over a month, and it has proven to be a tremendous time saver and one of the more useful apps that I use. Also, the people who get the TimeBridge requests have told me that when they got the email request to schedule a time - it was easy to use and intuitive - people weren't confused with what they had received.

If you want to communicate more effectively with the people with whom you schedule meetings with, TimeBridge is must.

Have you ever seen this icon while surfing the web? Do you scratch your head and wonder, What does that mean?

It is the icon for an RSS feed. RSS feeds are a wonderful thing. In simple terms you subscribe to a website's RSS feed and in return you receive delivered fresh and instantly new and updated content and information. Instead of going, visiting and checking your favorite websites and blogs for new information and content - THE CONTENT comes DIRECTLY to YOU.

Here is a post from Web Worker Daily and Aliza Sherman on the author's first impressions about the impact reading feeds is having on her life and work. Here are some of her main points:

1. They make me look smarter.

2. They give me interesting fodder for conversation with my husband.

3. I read more blog posts in one week by Seth Godin than I had in the last several years. I don’t mean to neglect Seth. He’s smart. I like him. I learn from him. But I stray from reading blogs in general because I can’t seem to find the time. Reading feeds over eggs and coffee carves out time to learn from the masters.

4. I learned about new paths to productivity.

5. What I read in feeds last week had either a direct connection or impact on what I do every day for work. It remains to be seen if I can keep up with my feed reading over time. In the meanwhile, I’ll absorb as much knowledge as I can to expand my understanding of this ever-changing industry and to improve what I do and how I do it.

Need a gentle introduction to RSS see her other post- Needing a Gentle Intro to RSS Feeds.

Let me springboard off of some of Aliza's thoughts.

Here are the benefits that I have received receiving and reading RSS feeds as a Pastor.

1. I stay more informed - I get through the RSS feeds some of the best and most helpful information for ministry, the church, and even devotionally. What I read provokes my creativity and enhances my ministry.

2. It saves me time - Some people say to me, How do you have the time to READ all those websites!? I say, I don't. But having the information come directly to me and then being able to skim the Headlines, multiplies my time and saves me from wasting it. I get the information that I want, and ignore the information the I don't want.

3. It gets me out of my ghetto - I get to learn from so many talented and gifted pastors, ministry leaders and people throughout the world. I learn from people outside of my denominational traditions and with different theological persuasions. Reading my RSS feeds expands my thinking and imagination.

4. I am building a "forever" library of resources - Because I use Google Reader to receive and read my RSS feeds, I can search for information easily if I need it at a later time. Searching my feeds for relevant information is much easier and effective than doing a general Web search. I am more likely with a RSS search to get the information relevant to my interests and needs.

How to get Started:

Sign up for Feed Reader - I would recommend Google Reader

Start signing up and subscribing to feeds - start with this site - Ministry Best Practices and my other site Provocative Church, then go to HELPFUL BLOGS on my side menu and visit those sites add their feeds (that is a good place to start)

And then sit back and enjoy having relevant, helpful and interesting information delivered right to you.

(ht: WebWorker)

I have never seen your office, but if it is anything like mine - you are constantly fighting against the clutter.

Crown Financial Ministries has some thoughts on the high cost of clutter. Here are some highlights:

National studies have shown that the typical executive spends four and one-half hours a week looking for lost papers. At a salary of $30,000, the cost of searching for important papers, measured in lost time, is $3,376 per year. At $60,000, the cost is $6,752 per year. At $100,000, the annual cost jumps to $11,250.

As staggering as these costs are, the majority of managers and business owners with whom I've worked report that they lose even more. I have found that the cost often jumps to 15 percent of their yearly income.

Just think—at this rate, nearly two years of each life is lost looking through clutter.

Penelope Trunk thinks that simply having a messy desk alone can undermine your career.

Clutter isn't just paper. It is also electronic. The History Channel show "Modern Marvels" recently aired a show about 90s technology that proved this startling statistic:

In 2007, over 170 billion email messages were sent per day. That's almost 2 million messages every second. 70% of them were spam and viruses.

Our lives are filled with clutter and information overload!

I don't presume to have this issue fixed and settled, but here are some ways that I help reduce clutter:

Limit paper - I tell everybody, don't send me paper. I don't want to have to file it and then try to find it later. I am pushing most of my information online. Google Docs and Google Notebook are my big "go-tos". It is easier to store and find my documents on Google Docs rather than search email attachments or my hard drive. Also, with Google Notebook I clip and save any interesting fact or illustration for a future sermon/save online receipts/store important information etc. I believe that Google Notebook is one of the more underrated tools within the Google stable of online apps.

Use a good email client - Gmail is the king. I use labels and filters to make sure only the email I need to read reaches me. Also they have an awesome spam filter that significantly reduces the clutter in my life..

HOW DO YOU REDUCE CLUTTER IN YOUR LIFE?

Churches are notorious for meetings. We actually have meetings in order to plan meetings!

I am sure this can be true in just about every professional setting. Meetings can be a problematic. Too many meetings. Unproductive meetings. Boring meetings.

People, as busy enough as they are, don't want to go to meetings just for the sake of going to meetings. And since, in the church, most of the people we work with are volunteers, as a leader, you have to work extra hard on making meetings worthwhile when you have them. Because since you don't pay volunteers you can't order them to come to the next meeting you call.

Here are some helpful thoughts and tips that I have discovered to help avoid, "Death by Meetings".

Be judicious with meetings!

I try to only call meetings with my volunteers and leaders only when I have to. And most of the meetings that I do call are well planned and scheduled in advance. Try not to spring too many last minute, emergency meetings on people.

Know why you are meeting.

What do you want to accomplish? What are your anticipated outcomes? If you don't know the answers to those questions, then you don't need to meet! To often we think that if people just meet together than productivity will ignite. Not true! You must plan and prepare before you meet. Review past notes and information before you meet. Don't wing meetings. Have an agenda to guide your time and to forecast for the participants where you are going and what you intend to accomplish.

Infuse value into your meetings.

What you invest into your current meeting opportunities will produce dividends for future meetings. If your meetings are engaging, purposeful and productive then people will see value in them. If your meetings help move the church or organization toward it's greater vision than people will see value in them. And if people see the value of your time together, they are more likely to carve out time and make future investments to meet.

Not all things can be accomplished in meetings.

Meetings don't always produce the best environments for new ideas and creativity!

MSNBC has an interesting article titled “Meetings make us dumber, study shows“. Here’s the point that really deserves to be noticed:

"The researchers speculate that when a group of people receives information, the inclination is to discuss it. The more times one option is said aloud, the harder it is for individuals to recall other options…"

Meetings aren't always the best incubators for new ideas and creative thinking. New ideas and creativity are often cultivated in environments of play or quiet reflection.

Think through creative alternatives to face-to-face meetings.

I have tried different ways to interact with groups of people without necessarily having to set up another face-to-face meeting. Sometimes what you may need to accomplish doesn't require everyone to be in person.

Conference calls

Online chat and web conferencing

Collaboration tools

What you do after the meeting is just as important.

Try padding a meeting with 15 to 30 minutes of follow up time. This means that after a meeting have time blocked out to review your action steps, follow through on quick/easy actions such as email, and plan out your necessary projects and next steps. In order to do this it will mean that you can't allow yourself to schedule back to back meetings throughout your day. You are going to have to allow your schedule the margin to reflect, process and follow-through from your meetings in order for them to be the most effective.

How do you capture ideas when you get them? What are the buckets that you are using?

If you are anything like me, you have a mind like a steel sieve and therefore I need quick and easy ways to capture a to-do, an appointment, file an important resource or make a reminder.

I am not asserting that these tools are the "best", but I have tried and used many tools over the years, and I have settled on these few that are working for me.

The king of my tools right now is Jott.com

At its most basic level, Jott is a voice to text transcription service. All you need to do is call Jott, leave a message, and Jott transcribes it and emails you or your contacts the text.

I Jott myself notes or reminders right over the phone. This is great because if I have an idea or remember to needing to do something while in the car, I can capture it instantly in Jott and not worry about trying to remember it until I get home or to the office. Also I can Jott an email to anyone in my contact list or group of contacts that I have set up before hand.

If you have Google Calendar hooked up as your own preferred calendar application you can just add Google Calendar to your choice of Jott Links and simply by calling Jott you can add an appointment. There are times in the car after a phone call my next action is that I need to put in my schedule an appointment. With Jott links, I now just call in my appointment and it shows up in my Google Calendar. It couldn't be more simple.

(By the way, here is a great post from Lifehacker that gives you a good run down of the Jott features.)

The next tool I use a ton is Google Notebook.

This is one of the least known of the Google apps, and not until recently has Google been adding some very nice features. I use Google Notebook to capture information on the internet. Although I use it some for note taking (I use Google Docs more for that purpose), the main feature is the ability to clip information. The beauty of this application is the Browser extension that allows you to take any highlighted piece of information and "Note this" sending it right into the Notebook. I am always collecting interesting articles, quotes and resources that I know will come in handy during my sermon preparation or have some use in my ministry. Google Notebook is my online file cabinet for all my sermon illustrations, ministry articles, and the like. Because of the great ability to search the notebook or even tag items, information never gets lost or misplaced, it is always at my fingertips.

And lastly, I use Backpack reminders.

I haven't been using Backpack as much as I used to, but I love the Backpack Firefox extension which allows me to instantly add reminders that will go directly to my email. I use this app a lot while I am in meetings. A deadline comes up, a new event is going into the church schedule, I need to send an important email out to my volunteers or I need to add something to my to-do list and I don't have the time to stop my work flow to add it fully to my calendar, write the email or add it to my to-do list. This is why I like this little extension within Firefox, because within seconds I can capture that important piece of information knowing that I will get an email sent to me reminding me to take some action. Then later, after the meeting, I can spend the time populating my calendar, writing the email, adding it to my to-do list or doing whatever action is required.

What are some of your favorite collection tools?

I know for myself procrastination is a deadly habit in my life. I too often run certain tasks to their last possible deadline, giving myself very little margin to finish and accomplish them. I appreciate Sanders advice on how to move through the long to-do list and get through the inertia of procrastination.

But I should also mention that there is contrary advice to fighting procrastination. In the book, "Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time "by Brian Tracy he suggests to do just the opposite of Tim Sanders. Here are just two of his "21 ways",

1. Do the most difficult task first: Begin each day to do the most difficult task, the one task that can make the greatest contribution to yourself and your work, and resolve to stay at it until it is complete.
2. Slice and dice the task: Break large, complex tasks down into smaller pieces.

So there are definitely different ways to slice and dice this procrastination monster. Do the most difficult task first - tackle it head on by breaking it into smaller pieces. Or do easier tasks first to build momentum and confidence as you move toward the harder tasks.

Which way works best for you? And why?