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Hey Everyone -

Below are two of the things I absolutely LOVE about Halloween:

and ….

Happy Halloween
Fred

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Hey Ya’ll -

You know that old saying “the family who prays together stays together”? I’ve adapted that to the blogging staff. I’m excited to announce the blog of my Senior Pastor, Boss (Trumps), and friend, David Yarborough at DavidYarborough.Com. I’ve known David for years, but I’ve only been serving under him at SSCC since March and it’s been awesome. He’s an inspiration, a great leader, a great communicator (hear the podcast), and best of all - he’s genuine and authentic. He’s transparent, funny, witty, and serious when he needs to be. So check out his brand new blog at DavidYarborough.Com and subscribe via email or RSS if you’d like. It would be cool if all you “FredMcKinnon.Com” folks would leave him a comment on his first post to welcome him to blog world.

As I’d mentioned in a previous post, Travis Paulding (our Tech Director) recently joined the blogging revolution last week. Already he’s gotten tons of hits and pageviews, and his content is good stuff. Travis will tell you “I have nothing to say”, but that’s bunch of ********** (rubbish). This guy is talented and has done the homework.

Speaking of, I’ll finally get to help show some of the media projects we’ve been working on. Checkout the Testimony Video that was used this Sunday in church … it’s on Travis’ blog (this post).

Props and kudos to Chris Moncus, our Associate Tech Director. He designed the blog for David and he’s the one I stole those cool screenshots from. I’d post a screenshot of his blog here, but he didn’t make one for himself. Chris is a great coder, designer, photographer, web guy - his list of talents goes on and on … bass player, guitar, etc, etc. (oh, did I say friend, husband to Amanda ..) But he’s recently made his blog more focused on church media, so check it out at ChrisMoncus.Com.

Finally, don’t forget our Associate Worship Director, Shannon Lewis. Shannon has more blogs than I have businesses (and that’s a lot of blogs), so I wont’ try to list them all here. But the main blog that focuses on worship is called “For What It’s Worth” … Shannon has a pretty large readership on his blog, and has several other blogs you can learn about by visiting his site.

It’s not that we feel like we’re authorities on anything … but one thing I can say for certain. God is doing some incredible things here at SSCC and we’re all privileged to be part of it. Having our fearless leader (David) and Travis join the blogosphere makes it lots of fun - it’s a great way to hear and see what may be bouncing in our heads … just because we are in the same building doesn’t mean that we always share what’s going on. I hope you enjoy seeing what we’re up to as a church staff, and who knows - the relationships we build through reading, commenting, and dialog could help us all be better “Kingdom Builders”.

What say you?

For the Kingdom,
Fred

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Hey Everybody -

Welcome back to the On Leadership Series. This post is Part 2 of “Budgeting Time”.

Thanks for the many comments and conversation still happening over on Part 1. One resource my Mom (folks, it’s a blessing to have your parents read your blog and leave comments, let me tell ya!) pointed out in the comments is a book called “Ordering Your Private World” by Gordon MacDonald .. apparently, this is discussed there. It sounds like a great read, and since I’m visiting my parents this weekend so I can see family and do some deer hunting, I hope to at least digest those chapters while sitting up in a tree hunting!

(note: affiliate link)

One of the things we discussed back in Part 1 was a “Web 2.0″ way to budget your time. Sadly, I cannot find anything that would be of much use. What I’m looking for is a nice web-based interface where you can track your time throughout the day. For example, I’d like to be able to bookmark it, login, and add “7:oo - 8:00 AM: family time/breakfast/devotion” and color-code that to a given category (ie. Family). Then, from 8:00-9:00 AM I’d add (blog/writing) and color code that to the “BLOG” category, etc. I’m telling ya - if someone can code this, let’s go in together and make a portal … it would rock. For now, I’m auditing my time using the Google Notebook extension for Firefox. Then, I’ll manually add that into a spreadsheet to do the real time calculations … I’ll be auditing my time for the next few weeks to get a real picture of just what I do, what I don’t do, and what I should/shouldn’t do!

I accepted the invitation by Jordon Fowler @ Northwood Church in TX (WorshipTrench.Com) for a walk through of Vitalist - a GTD (Get Things Done) system he brags about. Thanks for the phone time, Jordan! I walked away with pretty much the same lackluster thoughts I’d had before .. that Vitalist is nothing more than a glorified “to-do” list which I could pretty much just keep doing in iCal. However, Jordon encouraged me that it’s better because of the ability to divide your tasks into “Contexts”. So, I’m going to try it for a few weeks and see how it works. Vitalist is free, so check it out. Just FYI, my contexts that I have established for the moment (still adding and modifying as I learn my schedule) are:

• Family
• Personal (devotion, exercise, etc)
• SSCC (church)
• Highest Praise (music production, podcasts, TheWorshipCommunity.Com)
• HPP Enterprises (my e-commerce/e-biz sites)
• HPP Publishing (the licensing/publishing arm of HPP)
• Home (To Do, etc)
• Music/Creative Time (recording, writing, composing music)

I’m sure these contexts will become more and more refined.

So, one of the important things I’m learning is that we should get our “To Do” list and separate it into Contexts. This way, we can not be so scattered and can focus on a given context for a while. Multi-tasking can come in handy when necessary, and you can even multi-task within the “to-do” of a given Context, but I can understand how we’d be more efficient if we stay within a given “context” for a while. In other old-fashioned, well known ways of putting it … “if you wear several hats, don’t wear them at once”.

Practical example: I dedicated 8:00-9:00 this morning for “blog time”. I finished my “Weekend Recap” post earlier, and started to move on to my next “Task”, but decided to honor this time commitment and to stay within “context” during this hour. As a result, I decided to write this post as a draft that I’ll release later today. Chances are, I’ll be in another “context” later today .. I’ll be wearing a different hat (the SSCC one most of the day, or the Music/CT one) and it would break my productive “stride” to attempt to write all of this. I can tell that it will be productive - I’m in “writing/blogging mode” and devoting this entire hour will be productive and beneficial.

So, start thinking about your various tasks, and what “hat you wear” to accomplish them. Let’s call those hats “contexts” for now … how about sharing your list of “contexts” or “hats”. Just don’t forget the “hat” that you take off in respect as you kneel and pray.

For the Kingdom,
Fred

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Hey Everyone:
Well my Bulldogs DID IT! They finally beat the Florida Gators. It was an awesome game. I certainly didn’t expect us to win - much less, win by 12. But we had an awesome time. We were given free club seats by a guy in our church - Section 238, right between the 30-40 yard line. I guess we were about 10-12 rows under the Box Seats - you can barely see the box seats behind Joy and I in the pic below.

Highlights of the game would include the first touchdown where the entire Georgia team cleared the sideline and flooded the field, as if they’d just won the National Title. This caused two penalties for “excessive celebration”. We discover after the game that it was orchestrated all along - Coach Richt told the team if they didn’t get a penalty for celebration after their first score that he’d have them doing early morning runs all week!

In case you missed it - here’s a clip showing the celebration .. it was AWESOME to be there!

Probably the other cool highlight was after the ballgame - Coach Richt finished doing all his mid-field greetings and ran to the student side in front of the band and just stood there cheering them. Then, he ran over to the 50 yard line where his wife was in the front row cleaning up the “water tables” .. and he grabbed her and laid a big ole’ smooch right on her, in front of the stadium - the place erupted. He loves his team, he loves his wife, and most importantly, Coach Mark Richt loves his Savior, Jesus Christ.

Yesterday was another great service at SSCC. I’ll be posting a video worship confessional soon so please stay tuned. Our set list included:

• Shackles
• Sing To the King
• Free (Todd Fields)
• Blessed Be Your Name
• I Need You More (Lindell Cooley)
• Nails in Your Hands

This is a busy week. Watch the blog later today and the rest of this week for a continuation of “On Leadership, Budgeting Time” and I will begin daily installments of the official, “UNVEILING” of the O Holy Night Saga. It should be a fun week here at fredmckinnon.com

Hopefully I’ll be announcing the release of Pastor David’s blog, too. Chris is busy working on getting the theme customized .. not like he doesn’t already have plenty of work going on.

How was your weekend?
Fred

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