5 signs your church design team (which might be just you) is stressed and 5 tools that can help

Chances are, your church design team is understaffed and overworked.

Check out these 5 ways you can manage stress among your church’s design team (and our five favorite tools/habits to help!).

Unless you’ve invented time travel or a way to stop the sun, you can’t do it all. With so many projects coming your way, it can be hard to know how you’ll get it all done. But how do you know what you can accomplish and what you need to delegate? Use a time management tool to manage your tasks, who’s assigned to them, deadlines, and more.

We recommend:
PowerSheets: Want a yearly system that helps you achieve your short and long term goals? PowerSheets is a goal-planning workbook designed to help you identify and set goals that matter to you.
Focus Planner: Need to keep all your to-do lists in one place? The Full Focus planner offers a sleek design. Each planner covers 90 days at a time, so you can refresh and refocus your goals quarterly.

Whether you’re a small church with a few design volunteers or a church with a sizable creative team, it’s crucial to know who’s doing what, and when it’s due. Got big projects for Easter and Christmas coming up? Start work on them early, and delegate tasks out to volunteers if you can.

We recommend:
Basecamp: If you’re a growing team with multi-phase projects, Basecamp helps you break down your work into individual projects, to-do lists, group chats, and more tools to make things more efficient.
Monday.com: If you’ve got a smaller team that needs a simple interface, Monday.com is an easy-to-use software that can help you track deadlines, progress, action items, and more.

How many times have you gone into a meeting with your team, and left with no more clarity than when you started? Your weekly staff meetings should bring clarity, not more confusion. Divide up your time between recapping items from last week, discussing new topics, and addressing problems to solve.

Try this: At the end of the meeting, have everyone restate one action item they can be working on for the next meeting. Be sure to follow up at the next meeting, too!
Slack: Save time and communicate efficiently with your team using Slack. You can even create different
Loom: Slow typists of the world, rejoice – with Loom, you can record short video messages of your screen, camera, or both, saving you time and effort when communicating with your team.

Your computer just crashed for the 5th time this week (and you’re not sure if you saved that file before it did). There are lots of new software and technologies out there that can help save time and energy, so you’re not scrambling to fix things on Saturday night.

We recommend:
Whether you’re a design novice or a pro, here are four free design tools we love:
Typeform: Get fast feedback and collect better data to with this survey tool
SundaySocial: Create visually stunning graphics and social media posts
Noun Project: Choose from over 3 million art-quality icons
Unsplash: Beautiful, royalty free stock photos

Wasting hours looking for that one file you need from last year? Maybe the last pastor had the file, so you need to create the whole project over again. Avoid the hassle by saving your files in an online cloud service, so you can transfer ownership of files and provide new staff people with access to what they need.

We recommend:
Google Docs: Create, edit, and share cloud-based documents with this free software - all you need to get started is a Gmail account.
Dropbox: Share large documents and files with your team, and collaborate efficiently with the rest of your team.