I recognize, though, that it is something I have to work at and probably always will.  Especially when it comes to the minutia.  I just don’t seem to be naturally wired for all the details.  I wanna dream, create, think down the road.  Not schedule, budget, and do paperwork.  But the fact is it all needs to get done.

That being the case, I’m always looking for tools to help me improve in this area.  There are a few books on my list that I haven’t quite grabbed yet.  Granted, I’m OK with the idea that it will never be a great strength for me, but I have to get better at it to accomplish the things I want to over time.

Today I found a free e-book via a blog by Jonny Baker that I usually pass over fairly quickly in my reader.  The book is by Mark McGuiness and is called Time Management for Creative People.  I’ll let you know how it is as I check it out.  But it is free, so go get yourself a copy too.

Anyone else out there have similar issues?

Which also means it’s time to give it a go with a second mailing.  We seemed to get a pretty good response from the first one, so here we go again.  The first one we did was for Harvest Festival and I shared our mailer piece here.

This time, my brother-in-law, Joel, worked up the mailer for us.  Same one that took the great pictures a few weeks ago.  I gave him an idea what we were going for and he worked this up in about an hour or so.  Check it out:

I was stoked with and look forward to getting out to the community.  Joel has his own company, two of twelve art design, 2//12,  he’s been using to do some graphic design work.  Here’s his portfolio.  You need him.  Go hire him.

Thanks Joel!

Now I’ll spend a lot of time this week getting the rest of this event together so the outcome is as good as the print piece!

So I knew I was in a bit of trouble when I was gonna have to try and
come up with a flyer/mailer for our Hillbilly Harvest Festival.  So I
gave it a go.  Luckily, I have a friend down south who is a killer graphic
designer.

So I called Michelle Lasch to ask for some quick tips on designing
in Photoshop.  She told me that after I designed it I could send it to
her to take a look and have her "massage" it a little.  So I jumped on
the offer.  Like I said, I don’t feel like Graphic Design is a gift I
possess…yet.  (Workin at it!) 

So I will share what I think is my embarrassing design to show what
simple changes by someone who knows what they’re doing and has a great
eye can do.  Check out my original concept in comparison to Michelle’s
tweaked versions for me.

BEFORE

Front                                                   Back

AFTER

Front                                                   Back

Night and day difference. 
I knew some of the basics that were wrong with it, but don’t have the skills to get it there.  The 2 places I know I suck the most are having a good working knowledge of the features of Photoshop and I am horrible at knowing how to pick good fonts. 

Anyway, I’m stoked about the way it looks after she fixed it for us.  They’ve gone to print and we will be mailing it to every residence within a mile of our church.  That’s over 9000 residents!!!  Just the fact that there are that many addresses that close to us is a good reminder of how many people there are to reach.  I’m excited about this not even for the hope they’ll come to this one event, but more so that it starts to get our name out there as we seek to make ourselves more visible in our community and be seen as a positive force in our immediate area.  Another 800 or so will go in the hands of our congregation to use as invites.

So that’s what Michelle was able to do starting with my lame design and making a couple tweaks.  She does even better when she starts on her own!  Amazing.  Need to hire a graphic designer for any of your projects?  Hit her up.  You won’t regret it.

I’ll admit, the first time I watched it, I wondered if any talented white voices exist. 

Pretty amazing.  I want a copy!

HT: CECworship

Now I’ve used it so far for this whole series.  And it’s been great!  As you can see below, it has a player you can embed on your site if you want to.  You just jump on it, upload audio, video, artwork, notes, whatever.  And it all gets packaged in the player, it hosts a web page for you, and they even take care of the RSS feed.  That makes it easy to get it podcasted through iTunes as well.

And the best part…right now, the audio hosting is free for the first year!  So we’re now up and running without putting a penny into it for now.  After a year it’s like $30 a month or so, which really isn’t so bad either, I don’t think.

So check out our current series below, or, especially for you CLC’ers, especially you getting involved in Life Groups CLC’ers, subscribe now via iTunes.  We’ll have a link to subscribe when we get our new site up, hopefully in a couple weeks here.  And all you church leaders that need an easy way to podcast, check it out!

I tried using worshipplanning.com for a bit when I was at Revolution.  While it was useful as well, I’ve found Planning Center to be a whole lot more user friendly and customizable.  My favorite features:

• Scheduling abilities, including ability to view in a matrix format that is really good at looking forward and back at elements/songs used in services as well as people scheduled.
• Ability to post mp3’s and chord charts for the team to look at in advance.
• Easy to read print out of service flow or production volunteers to follow.
• Ability for people to black out dates on their calendars for the sake of scheduling (will be even nicer if I can get them to use it).
• Song database with charting abilityies that make it easy to change keys or make capoed versions.

Anyway, those are just a few.  Being that it’s been a great tool for me, I thought it would be fair to pimp it to you.  So if you need some help with your organizing and communication check it out.

The one thing that I am discovering would make it an even more useful tool is if I could get my sets planned a little further out, instead of the week of which is typical for me now.  I’m hoping to get at least 2-3 weeks out.  How about you other leaders out there?  How far in advance do you plan your sets?  Just wondering.

And who else is using Planning Center?  Leaders?  Volunteers?  How do you like it?  You have somethin better?  (Like an intern?)

Well, I came across a great podcast the other day to share.  Check out the Creative Synergy podcast.  It’s by Anthony Coppedge and Greg Atkinson, a couple of guys who have done a lot of great stuff in arts and tech.  The first podcast had a great interview with Kem Meyer of Granger Community Church as well as some decent tech tips.  I look forward to hearing how this goes and seeing if it keeps my interest.

How about you?  Any good podcasts you would recommend?