6 Uncommon Apps for Busy Worship Leaders

  Speaker 1 Here are six uncommon apps for busy worship leaders. If your life feels hectic and chaotic and ministry feels all over the place and your brain feels like it’s on fire like mine does most of the time, these six apps have helped me so much. Now, these are not the common worship leader apps. If you want those, I have a whole other video about that, like my favourite Metronome, my favourite Tuner, my favourite Bible app, my favourite Team Communication app. So I will link that below. These are apps you probably have never heard of, but they have made such a big difference in my very busy hectic life. The first app is called Grinola AI. This app transcribes transcribes all of your meetings. Anytime you’re doing a Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting, I’ll just put my laptop in the middle of the meeting and hit record or transcribe, and it’ll transcribe the entire meeting. And then when I’m done, it will automatically create notes for that meeting. And this works both on Zoom and in person. I use it every Monday for our Monday huddle inside the Worship Minister Training Academy, and it summarises the entire meeting, and it generates these beautiful notes that you can then send to the people who are at the meeting.

Speaker 1 You can even chat with your meeting notes, and you can even use it to generate things blog articles, and it’ll write a blog article about whatever you talked about in that meeting. So it’s a very helpful tool, granola. Ai. The next app is Note Plan. I just found this app, and I am mind blown. It syncs all your Apple calendars, all your calendar events, and all your tasks and notes in one app. It brings everything together. And my favourite part about the app is that I can drag different tasks into empty blocks in my day. And that way, I know exactly what I should be working on at any given time. This has allowed me to really get a grasp on what should I be working on and when? And so no plan has been a game changer for me, and I think it will be for you as well. And if you want to know what you should be working on in any given moment, I want you to grab my Ideal Ministry Calendar template. This template will tell you exactly what you should be working on every day of the week, monthly tasks that you should be doing, quarterly tasks that you should be doing, biannual tasks and annual tasks.

Speaker 1 Everything is laid out for you to build healthy rhythms and systems and routines in your ministry, and it’ll tell you exactly what to work on and when. You can grab that below. It’s completely free. Just click the link below I’ll enter your email, and I’ll send it to you right away. If you get a tonne of emails, the next app is amazing. It’s called Canary, and there’s two reasons why I love this. One, it can summarise your emails. I don’t know about you, but my choir directors, they write tonnes of emails, and I just press summarise this conversation, and then it just generates a quick overview of everything that was said in that whole thread. And so I don’t have to read all this stuff. I’ll use that word. So that is super helpful. And then the other thing that’s really helpful and creepy is you can actually see when people people read your emails. You see these blue check marks? It means that I sent this message to this person. It means that they read it, and you can see specifically when they read the email. And so if somebody on your team is ghosting you, you can see, Hey, this person has read my stuff.

Speaker 1 They know what I’m asking, but they’re ghosting me, and that allows you to have a conversation about it. So Canary email app is amazing. My next favourite app is Loom. Sometimes I don’t want to write an email because it’s too complicated to explain the concept. And so I just record a video and you can just hit Start recording, and it’ll have your head over here in the corner, and you can explain what it is that you want. Some people use it to send out their set notes to their team. They have their planning centre plan open, and they’re describing here the transitions or whatever it is that you’re trying to explain. Sometimes just talking and showing what’s on the screen is way easier than trying to write a long, detailed email. And so Loom has been a game changer for me. I use it literally every single day. If you manage a lot of projects or you have a team, like I lead our creative team at our church, our communications team, and we use an app called Base Camp, and we just switched to it, and it’s been amazing. It’s a very visual app, so you can have all of your projects organised into their own little blocks.

Speaker 1 And then when you just click into the block, you can see, Okay, this is the book. We need to work on the book. It’s got all of your tasks there. It’s got the schedule of when things are due. You can chat about that specific task. You can have a message board. For example, I just got a message this morning. Oh, it’s nothing important. And then all of your docs and files are are right there as well. So everything related to that specific project is housed in that project. And so you’re not sending a bunch of emails or a bunch of Slacks on different channels. It’s all centralised around each project, and you can assign team members to the tasks. And so it’s a great project management app if you have a team that you lead and you’re a project-based team. The next little known app is called Beam. Beam is an AI assistant that sits in the background and you can bring it forward with a keyboard shortcut and use it wherever you’re working. So sometimes you don’t want to leave your task and go open ChatGPT in another window. This is literally ChatGPT wherever you are.

Speaker 1 So you’re working and then you just say, summarise this. And then it’ll do the same thing that ChatGPT does, but it’s right there where you’re working, so you don’t have to break your focus. So Beam is a wonderful app. I’m linking all of these things below. I have two honourable mentions for you that I don’t know if they are incredible, but they’re pretty handy. I mentioned keyboard shortcuts. I use an app called Raycast, and Raycast is very powerful. You pull it up, it’s like spotlight, but it’s super charged. For example, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to open apps. I just open my Notes app by pressing two different buttons. I press a different key combo and it opens my email app. I press a different combo and it opens my other email app. So it really makes moving around your computer fast. Another thing it can do is it can do text snippet. So if I type this keyboard combination, it’ll paste in all of this text for me that I pre-wrote. And so, for example, if I’m sending a choir email, I have a snippet that I’ve already pre-written, and I can just use a shortcut or a short code, and it’ll paste in this common email that I send all the time to our choir.

Speaker 1 So Raycast can do a lot more than that, but that’s how I’m currently using it. And my last honourable mention is a beautiful web browser called ARK. I love ARK. You can see it’s a full screen browser. It has a sidebar that hides. And so all you’re getting is the entire web experience. It has these different spaces so that you can create categories of your work and your life, and different areas of your life are categorised on the sidebar. You can swipe through them, and it even logs you in into different accounts for each of those spaces. And so I love using art. So if you want all of the apps, they’re listed below. Also below, you’ll find my other apps video for the more common Worship Leader apps. And don’t forget to grab that ideal calendar template to help you organise your time and your days and your months and your quarters so that you know what to work on in your ministry at any given moment. So grab that template below. It’s free. Just enter your email and I’ll send it to you. Hope this video helped you. Check out whatever YouTube is recommending next, and I will see you in the next video.

Speaker 1 God bless.