One of my favorite leadership books is Keith Ferazzi's Never Eat Alone.  If you've not yet read this book, go pick up a copy and read it tonight.  It presents a comprehensive plan for networking that forces you to evaluate the time you spend with others.

Along those lines I try to live my daily life by this principle.  It's rare to catch me eating out of the car or running home to grab a bite.  I always try to engage someone for lunch and dinner (breakfast sometimes too!).

Enter a new webtool from TimeBridge called, MeetWith.me – a scheduling tool that in summary allows you to ask someone to meet you (say for lunch, coffee, etc.) and suggest up to 5 possible times to do so.  In a quick response email that requires no sign-in by your email buddy, they can say yes or no to the 5 suggested times.

Some amazing applications are possible for the local church:

• Small Groups: You can also coordinate social outings. I added everyone's email address and suggested 3 times for an upcoming group date we've been trying to schedule.  As responses come in we can quickly coordinate the best time for everyone.  The system emails anyone who hasn't responded every 24 hours until they respond or you tell it to stop (i.e. a "nag" reminder!).
• Staff Pastors: Especially for those without an administrative staff: put your schedule out there for everyone to see! For instance I've signed up myself as Pastor Clark and linked it to our church's website, facebook, and it's in my email signature as "Let's get together"  I linked it to my Google Calendar and when I've got an event on my calendar it simply reports "Busy" to the public!
• Volunteer Meetings: Someone sick or out this week – built in web and teleconferencing make this a powerful tool in catching up with others that may be out of pocket.

The basic tool is very user friendly and easy to setup in about 3 minutes.  After you spend some time with it you will begin to see the implications of just how feature-rich this software is for ministry.  Take a look – MeetWith.me