From the Mind of MandoRon

Yesterday’s post about Jada’s church camp got me thinking about my own experiences at church camp. Primarily the junior high and high school years.

As it turns out, I wasted a lot of time and energy looking for the love of my life at church camp.  In hindsight, I apparently got the wrong denomination.  You see, I was at Falls Creek which is a Southern Baptist camp.

The love of my life was at a United Methodist church camp…

Jada has been off at church camp since Monday.  It’s her first time, and she was a little nervous.  Andrea and I have been curious about how she would do.  Would she get homesick?  Would she by shy?  Etc…  She comes home today.  I’m sure she’s having a blast.

GracePoint’s children’s pastor, Rochelle Mann, put together a blog for the camp and has been posting pictures, videos, etc… this week.  I thought it was a pretty good idea for parents wondering what their kids are doing.  The blog is gpsummercamps.wordpress.com.

I know of at least one parent who linked to one of the youtube videos on her facebook account.

Here is the recap video from day 2.  Jada has a brief appearance around the 1:30 mark and also the 3:13 mark where she appears to be helping Levi Mann float on his back in the pool.  Oh… and I just wanted to say “Nice hat Nathan”.

I wasn’t planning on a writing a sequel to my recent post, Of Inboxes and Men, discussing how people manage their inbox.  But plans change.  I recently read an older blog post from Michael Hyatt on the subject of email inboxes, and it’s got me rethinking my own email strategy.

A little background first…  Michael Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.  I follow him on Twitter, and when he recently tweeted a link to a blog post on email inboxes, it caught my attention.   As a CEO, I imagine that he gets a lot of email.  I also know from his tweets, that he cleans out his inbox every night.  So I figured he would probably have something meaningful to offer on the subject of email inboxes.

I wasn’t wrong.  You can find Michael’s original post here.

In his post, he talks about how to clean out your inbox everyday and several strategies for making it easy.  But what really caught my attention was how he files old emails.

Simply put, he doesn’t.

He has one folder titled “Processed Mail”, and moves anything he might want later into that folder.  Then later, he uses the search features of the email program to find what he’s looking for.  Michael believes it’s more efficient and takes less time than using a lot of subfolders.

I use approximately 150 subfolders to file away old emails at work.  My system isn’t working.  I work a lot of different projects with a lot of different suppliers.  I never know whether to file old emails under the supplier’s name or under the project.  I end up doing a mix of both.  Sometimes it takes quite a while to find the right folder.

So I’m thinking about trying Michael’s advice.  It’s a big change and I’ve been thinking about this for several days now, trying to decide if it will work. 

I think my plan of attack will be to try it for a month, or so, without doing away with the older emails already in the subfolders.  I can always go back and refile the ”processed mail” folder later if I bail on the whole thing.

Thoughts?  Is anyone else doing this?

Hola!  Before we get started, be sure to check out Fred McKinnon’s Sunday Setlist post.  He’s giving away all sorts of goodies celebrating the one year anniversary of the Sunday Setlist.

At GracePoint this week, we heard a powerful sermon about loving others.  Bryson finished up the “At the Movies” series by using “Gran Torino” as the basis for the sermon.  Good stuff!  There was even a sweet Gran Torino parked on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the school.

The music was awesome too.

• Speaking Louder Than Before by Jeremy Camp
• Your Name High by Hillsong United
• Hope Now by Addison Road
• You Never Let Go by Matt Redman
• No More No Less by MercyMe (offering)

Speaking Louder than Before was a new one.  Decent song, but it didn’t seem terribly easy to sing along to.  We’ll keep an eye on this and see how it fares over time.

Your Name High was only sort of new.  We used it a few months ago for the first time, but only in the first service.  It was cut out of the second service because of time.  This week, it showed up in both services…  Rod laid down some very nice keys on this one.

Hope Now really got everyone singing along.  In hindsight, it was a rather abrupt transition from Your Name High to Hope Now.  Something to remember next time…

You Never Let Go used to show up every other week but now it only sees the light of day occasionally.  Great song, but you’ve got to be careful to keep the energy up.  It can drag otherwise.

No More No Less has been around for a few years.  Christina always rocks the vocals on this.

Thanks for checking in.  Be sure to go to Fred’s blog for the giveaways and other setlists.

“Watch your tongue and keep your mouth shut, and you will stay out of trouble.” - Proverbs 21:23

Simple wisdom. Difficult execution.