I wrote on Monday that I would mouth-kiss a 95 year-old mustachioed smoker, if he were the man who invented routing numbers and direct deposit. That’s how excited I am about the prospect of setting up auto-draft in my life, and the resulting calm it produced in my ministry life. For the record, I stand by that statement.
But what if I could auto-draft things other than money? What if my ability to automate my ministry life extended beyond the checkbook? Oh, happy fantasy! Come along, on a trip through the strange landscape that is my brain.
Appointments.
In ministry, it seemed that I was always scheduling some type of appointment. If it wasn’t a support appointment, it was an appointment with some student, or volunteer, or fellow missionary. As previously noted, I have the organizational skills of a poorly trained orangutan, so unless it involves flinging poop, I am going to need outside assistance. (I really don’t like where that sentence took me, for the record…) The ability to have my schedule autofill with appointments would be fantastic. Coincidentally, I found a method that nearly does autofill my calendar, thanks to the magical power of the internet. I have a meetwith.me page. It auto-populates my Google calendar. Believe it. That was a free tip. Ill make you pay for the next one.
Room Reservations.
I probably spent 2 years of my life out of the past 8 doing something involving reservation of room space on a college campus. One campus I worked at had (this is not an exaggeration) a five step, three-signatures-needed process for reserving any room. And you had to do that every time you wanted the room. Another campus would only let you reserve the next three weeks of a particular room, so you had to go every week to ensure that you still had your meeting room for three weeks from this Thursday. The room reservation office at one school made the DMV look like a pleasant, positive work environment. So yeah, if I could automate just one thing, it’d probably be the room reservation portion of my ministry life. A room that I didn’t have to work 32 hours to secure? Pure ministerial bliss. Now maybe i can make the meeting that takes place in it worth attending!
Reimbursable Expenses.
If you’ve been around me for more than about a day, you’ll note that my numerical gifting ends at about double digits. If I have to add anything without a calculator, You’re going to need to hand me a piece of paper, or a Ouija board. (math is demonic, I tell you.) So filling out forms for reimbursements is about a 6th circle Dante-level treatment, for me. I bought the rubber chicken and the 5-gallon tub of mayonnaise for a skit, Mr. IRS man. Can’t you just give me some tax-free money for it, all automatic-like?
That’s all I’ve got for now. What are some things in your life you wish you could automate? Let us know in the comments.