How I learnt to love my inefficient email workflow

I have an inefficient workflow for writing emails.

Now, this might seem odd. Surely writing an email is a simple as

1. open email program/website
2. click ’new email'
3. write
4. click send.

And for many emails, this is the case.

Take 5: Free Photo Resources

Pastoring involves communicating. If you’re a pastor, you’re engaged in preaching God’s word regularly—whether that’s through monologues or preparing small group discussions. For many of us, as we communicate we realise the old ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’ has more than a pinch of truth.

Apple Pages Presenter Mode

In a recent episode of Mac Power Users David and Katie briefly mentioned the new Presenter Mode in Apple Pages for iOS. They described it as a teleprompter like mode, where words scroll down the screen at a pace you set.

iOS Take 5

Take 5 is going to be a series of 5 short reviews of tools/podcasts/hacks I find useful in ministry.

I’m going to kick off the series with five iOS apps I use all the time. They are:

Evernote is for sharing

Recently our family went on a holiday. When we there I had an idea—our kids should keep a little journal of the things we’ve done. Not only would it be a cute memory, but it would be a fun way for them to keep working on literacy and creatively learning without realising it! Now, of course, I didn’t come up with this idea until the holiday had started, so I didn’t plan ahead and think about a nice journaling notebook. But I did have my iPad, and scraps of paper. So I what I did was, each afternoon or morning, I let one child type their journal into Evernote, and the other wrote/drew something on a scrap of paper. I then photographed the handwritten note and inserted it into the note. And each day we’d add something to the note—photos, or typed and hand-written notes.

Rainer on Apps

The next series of posts I’m wanting to do is Take 5. In this series I’ll share brief introductions to five iOS, Mac, and Web apps/services which I’ve found useful for ministry.

Publish Sermon (Part 6)

This howto assumes you already have

1. [Sermon Manager installed and working on your Wordpress website](/posts/sermonpodcasthowto/setup-wordpress-for-podcasts/)
2. [An account with Backblaze B2](/posts/sermonpodcasthowto/setup-b2/) or another cloud host where you can store the MP3 files of the sermon recording.
3. [Recorded](/posts/sermonpodcasthowto/record-sermon/) a sermon, edited it, and [created a MP3 file](/posts/sermonpodcasthowto/create-mp3/).

Now it’s time to publish the sermon.

Create MP3 (Part 5)

Once we have our exported WAV audio from Audacity, we need to create an MP3 file. This is because our WAV file is probably over 100 megabytes, whereas an MP3 file will weigh in closer to 6 Mb.

Record Sermon (Part 4)

This tutorial is going to explain how to record using the free program, Audacity. There are other ways you could record a sermon, such using a dedicated recorder or even your phone. However, Audacity is a good option as it’s free and runs well even on older computers.