If your student ministry is like ours, you have ten billion things to do this summer. There is fall planning, mission trips, camps, recruiting, curriculum writing, students to hang out with, volunteers to care for and develop and then something called a vacation. I don’t know what that is but I’ve heard it’s nice.
All these projects are a little overwhelming. If you’re like me, when the list of projects eclipses 10, my brain gets overloaded and I don’t know where to start. Then…I do nothing.
This summer we’ve implemented 2 project management tools that have changed the game. The first is Basecamp.
I have fallen in love with Basecamp. It is a simple, online tool that has streamlined our workflow. You can create projects, to-do lists, to-do lists within to-do lists, due dates, and assign people to manage to-do lists. It has a calendar tool and works well with Outlook and Gmail. We love it. Here’s a screen shot of our Camp Lifeline project page:
The second tool that has made our lives better this summer is Creative Boards. I bought 3 of their boards. One functions as a “to-do” list of all our summer projects (white are planning for the fall and red are planning for our summer camp). The second is a “doing” board and the last is a “done” board.
Every morning our team meets for 15 minutes. Each team member reports in on progress, what they are working on today and what they need from other team members to accomplish their task. During their report, they move projects from the “to-do” to the “doing” board. Here are a few pics…
Hopefully some of these ideas are helpful. Enjoy your summer projects!
