The idea behind this blog is to help people involved in the media ministry of their churches. This post however could be a help to anyone on the go. Due to the nature of my job, I find it hard to accomplish everything during normal business hours.  Some of my most productive hours are long after others have gone to bed.  Because of this, I need tools that help me to work from home as much as possible.  Here are 3 of the tools that I use often to work on the go and at home.  All these are supported on both a mac and a pc.

1.  Logmein.com

Logmein is an incredibly valuable tool for me.  Almost every day of my life, after my kids go to bed I work a bit from home.  And almost every day of my life, I need something from my computer at work.  Logmein enables me to log into my computer at work via the internet.  When you log in, you see your computer as if you are sitting in front of it.  For the most part, it is very fast.  I usually don’t do much work through logmein, but I do email myself files or put files in my dropbox (#2 below)  I love it, because I have complete access to my computer and all my files anywhere I have access to the internet.

Computers I control remotely

Screen shot of my laptop at home controlling my desktop computer at work

2.  Dropbox

Dropbox is another extremely useful free tool. Dropbox creates a folder on your computers that stays synced via the internet.  If I want to work on something at home.  I just drop the file in my dropbox folder and when I open my laptop at home, it automatically updates my laptop with that file.  It is very simple to use.  Just put the files you need in the dropbox folder.  Dropbox also makes it easy to share files with people. (For instance, here’s a picture I took of the California Coast) I don’t have to host the files I want to share, just drop it in the drop box.  There are many other cool features you can check out online like file backups and shared folders (we use this in the office when we are working on a project together).  You can get 2GB free.

3.  Delicious Bookmarks

I am constantly on the look out for ways to help us do more for the cause of Christ and do things better and more effectively.  Because of this, I bookmark many sites that help me accomplish the above.  I have been using Delicious to bookmark web pages for years.  If there is an web page I want to bookmark, I use delicious.  When I want to bookmark a site, I simply “tag” the page.  I assign tags (like keywords) that help me find the page later on.  For instance, if I was to bookmark the How to Live Stream Your Church Service blog, I may choose to tag it with the keywords, “blog”, “tutorial”, “streaming”, “internet”, and “video”. That way when I search my tags for “streaming” and “video” I can easily find it.  Because delicious is internet based, you can access your bookmarks anywhere.  I don’t use the social aspect of delicious, just a way to store all my bookmarks.

Delicious screen shot

I hope that this post was a help.  Please feel free to comment and share anything that you use as well.

Michael Moyer