I love my iPad, and I am working on a way to make ios devices my default workflow. In other words, I’d love to get stuff done away from my computer. I have begun to do about 80% of my work from either my phone or my iPad. This means that I need to figure out the best way to do the work that I need to do.
Most of my computer or “device” work is either writing here (or on my Spanish blog or other one), communication by email, text message, or social media, reading, or some other work that is mostly administrative or related to teaching youth ministry.
I’m always looking for ways to make things easier for me, and I have found an app that I love because it is simple yet powerful. That app is Drafts for iOS.
Drafts is Simple Yet Powerful
The simplicity of Drafts is that you open the app (which is fast) and start typing. You don’t have to worry about whether it is an email, a blog post, a journal entry, a quote you want to remember, a message you’re going to send via SMS, or whatever. You simply open Drafts and start typing. When you’re finished typing you can decide where you want to store or send what you just wrote.
For me, the draft usually either goes to Evernote or is sent as an email. I have begun to compose almost all of my emails in this little app. Sometimes I send them right away, and sometimes I save them to send later.
In Drafts, you can set up different actions that send your drafts to either different apps or different web services. Below is a screenshot of my Drafts for iPad screen, which has some of my Drafts actions.
My Actions in Drafts
I have many actions set up in drafts, and some of them are complex, but the most basic ones I have are:
- Email
- Email my boss
- Email my colleagues
- Email our administrative assistant
- Email my students
- Markdown Preview
- Send to Due
- Tweet as drpoulette
- Tweet as minjuvenil
- Post to Facebook
- Search on Google
- Search on Amazon.com
- Text my dad
- Message my wife
- Save to Evernote
- Add to my agenda for staff meeting
- Add to my ongoing list of blog post ideas
- Send to Day One
There are a whole bunch of custom actions you can set up on Drafts, including Evernote actions, Email actions, Message Actions, Dropbox Actions, and URL Actions. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and hopefully I will be able to write more about these later. For now, however, I would suggest you download the app and give it a try.
Since I’ve been using it, I’ve come to wish that I could find an equivalent of Drafts for my Mac.
As I type these words, one of my friends and colleagues at the Seminary in Mexico City is fighting for his life. Some time ago the doctors detected a tumor in Martin Pereda's head. He has been getting treatment, has gone through surgery, and now they found another one. He is currently in a coma, and we are all praying like crazy for healing for him and peace for his family.
I'd appreciate it if you'd pray for him, too. In fact, I beg you to stop reading this for a minute and pray for him.
I wanted to write about something important today, and it has to do with my friend Martin. I have never had him as a professor, never gone to drink coffee with him, or even really spent a significant amount of time with him. I've only been to his house once.
However, I consider him a great friend. I would guess that most of the professors, students, and staff at the Seminary feel the same way about him. There are two things that stand out to me about Martin, and they are two things that I think every leader needs to have in their life.
The Power of a Giving Thanks
Martin Pereda was the first person to ever thank me for coming to Mexico and investing in the youth of his country. I will never forget the day that we passed by each other in the hallway at the office and he gave me the traditional Mexican handshake/hug, looked me in the eye, and said, “Thank you for leaving your country to come and work with our churches so we can reach young people. It is something we need badly.”
We don't do what we do for recognition, but sometimes it is good to hear a thank you from someone. Martin reminded me that day how encouraging it can be to hear a genuine “Gracias.” I hope that I can follow his lead and thank those in my life who deserve to be thanked.
The Power of Prayer
When I first came to the Seminary, I thought that Martin Pereda was a strange professor because he would go around to everyone's office and sit down with them, talk, and then pray really loudly for a long time. He is one of those guys who talks loudly to God, almost shouting out to God for the person who is sitting right across from him.
However, I have come to love that about him. Pereda knows the power of prayer. He knows that prayer not only moves God but moves us. He knows that praying with someone is a huge encouragement both to them and to the one who is praying for them. I want to implement that in my life as well. As E.M. Bounds said, “What the Church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use – men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.” The church needs more men like Martin Pereda.
These two things (and others) are things that make Martin my friend. They make me feel like I know him and have spend tons of time with him. The truth is, he is a man of impact.
He is an example worth following.
Recently I’ve been taking some online courses at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This is part of my “leveling up” to get into a doctorate there. Since I’m pretty busy, I’ve decided to use Evernote to organize my classes. It’s pretty easy. I thought I’d show you what I’m doing. Using this system, you could use Evernote to organize any online course you’re taking.
What is Evernote?
If you don’t know what Evernote is, I would suggest that you take a look at this video. Basically, Evernote is a service that lets you save everything, with the idea that, with it, you can, “Remember everything.” That comes in pretty handy for a Seminary student. Plus it’s available on every format. Watch the video below if you’re not familiar with the service. If you already know what it is, keep reading.
Now that you know what Evernote is, let me show you how I am currently using it to organize my Seminary classes.
Seminary Stack
First of all, I have created an Evernote notebook for each of the courses I’m taking. They are in my handy “SBTS Courses” stack. A stack is just a collection of notebooks. I have a lot of stacks in Evernote, because I have begun to use it for everything. My “SBTS Courses” stack contains (right now) five notebooks. One is for general Seminary information, and the rest are each class. Each class gets its own notebook.
Course Notebooks
For each course I’m taking, I set up a separate notebook. In that notebook, I place all the files I will need throughout the semester. Sometimes, I download the video lectures and place them in Dropbox (they are too large to save in Evernote). Then I create a checklist for the class, which includes a link to the individual note for every assignment and lecture for the entire semester.
My checklist note looks like this (click the image to see it bigger):
As I listen to the lectures, I keep my notes in separate Evernote notes. After I listen to a lecture and take notes, on the checklist, I link to the lecture notes so I can easily find them and search through them when I’m studying for an exam. With Evernote Premium, I can search PDF files, which makes it easier to search through the reading assignments that have been given in a certain class.
Reading Assignments
Many of my classes assign readings of articles, which are typically given in PDF format. The good thing is that I can drag and drop a PDF into Evernote, link it to the assignment on my class checklist, and then, when it’s time to read that particular article, I just click the link and it shows up on my iPad or whatever I happen to be using at the time. I don’t have to go to my class website to access it again. It’s just right there in Evernote.
I also have the ability to annotate the PDF, which makes it easy to highlight or underline important parts of the articles. Below is a screenshot of an annotated syllabus for my hermeneutics class.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m very satisfied with how Evernote has helped me stay organized and on top of my classes. It’s a handy tool that I have come to love, and I think any student could use it to be very organized in class.
What do you think? Could you use Evernote for class? How could I improve my use of it for my purposes? Comment below with your thoughts.
If you follow along here, you already know that we were in desperate need for a new van. Last year, we started a campaign to try to raise some money to purchase a van that we could use everyday in Mexico City. We were overwhelmed by our friends as they poured on the support of our family. So when we returned from the USA in early December, we started the hunt for our new ride.
After many “downs” and very little luck, we finally found a van that suited our family’s needs. In fact, it is so much more than we could have asked or even imagined. The van is well taken care of, has all of the service receipts, and everything checks out great. Our lawyer friend who was helping us check it all out was extremely enthusiastic about this van. It is perfect.
We always joke when we rent vehicles that it would be nice to have a radio that told you what was playing. That might not be anything new to you, or you might not even consider it a blessing, but as I pulled away in our new van and put on the radio, I realized that God takes care of little things as I could read the artist and song that was playing on the radio at that time.
God takes care of us, and we have seen it time and time again in this journey on the mission field. As one of my friends told me, “See…it was worth the wait.”
We are getting to the end of the year when almost every Christian I know resolves to read the Bible through again the next year. I'm not sure how many times that has been one of my yearly goals. Do you do that?
If you are like me, you get into periods of your life in which you read the Bible like crazy, only to be followed by times when you go for a while without reading it like you should. Sometimes, I think, we don't realize what our Bible study is actually supposed to do for our lives. We sometimes just do it our of habit or because someone else has told us about its importance for our lives.
God's goal for us has to do with so much more than just reading through the Bible in a year.
One of my theology professors gave me me this idea of how theology is meant to function. The Bible, or our study of theology, is supposed to impact our head, heart, hands, and habitat.
Let me explain:
- Head: God's Word is to renew the way we think. Our sinful minds think a certain way, but the Bible is meant to come into our heads and cause us to think God's thoughts. We are to meditate on Scripture in order to reprogram the way we think and align our thoughts to His thoughts.
- Heart: The truth of the Bible is to reside in our hearts so that we come to love the truth that we know in our minds. The affections, or the part of us that values things, must see the truth of the Bible as something that is precious. Our hearts come to love what God loves and hate what He hates.
- Hands: After coming to know God's Word in our minds and loving it with our hearts, we begin to live according to those truths that we have come to know and love. Our actions are influenced by our affections, and having come to love God's truth, we will begin to live it out with our hands.
- Habitat: When we live according to what God's truth tells us, we begin to have an impact on our habitat. Our families, coworkers, friends, and neighborhoods will be impacted as our lives are restructured according to the truth of God.
As you begin a new year, may you resolve to allow God's Word to influence your head, penetrate your heart, guide your hands, and impact your habitat.
