Darn Tough Socks

At some point in a man’s life, he realizes that holes in socks are inevitable and so continuing to pay for socks that are going to get holes in them is a bit of an endless cycle of disappointment. That is, until that man discovers Darn Tough Socks. These merino wool socks aren’t cheap (around $16 for a low-cut pair and around $16 for a mid-calf pair), but they have a lifetime warranty. I’ve gotten holes in a few pairs, I ship them back to Darn Tough and they give me a credit to get new replacement socks. You’d think you’d save money with this system, but I’ve found it’s hard to stop buying these socks because they’re just that good. They feel and look great and the merino wool keeps your feet dryer and significantly less funky smelling.

My favorite low cuts are the No Show Lightweight Athletic and my favorite calf height are the Hiker Boot Midweight Hiking.

Get the socks at DarnTough.com or find an occasional sale of up to 25% off at GoBros.com.

AirPods Pro

If you’ve ever had your ears nearly separated from your head due to the sudden sensation of a headphone cord catching on something, you already know that wireless headphones are a dream come true. The big bummer about wireless headphones is that the connection is often finicky and the batteries rarely last long enough to make it through the day. AirPods are not like normal wireless headphones. If you’re an Apple user, you’ll get the added convenience of your headphones automatically connecting to whatever device you’re on, so you can switch between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac and your headphones just know which device you’re using and it connects to that device automagically. No drilling down into a bluetooth menu or watching the connection dial spin around endless–these things just work. The AirPods Pro also have noise canceling, which is an especially handy feature when you’re rocking a wailing infant. Bless your ears with these bad bones and there’s no going back to the wired past.

Snag AirPods Pro on Amazon for the best price.

Threads 4 Thought Triblend Hoodies

It took me many years of regular hoodie wearing to realize that the weight of a hoodie might just be the most important element. The triblend hoodies from Thread 4 Thought are the perfect hoodie because they are the perfect weight. They are warm enough for the fall and winter, but they aren’t too warm to wear in the spring or on a summer evening as things cool down. The material is super soft and it comes in tons of colors. This is my Steve-Jobs-black-turtle-neck equivalent and a wear one of these hoodies almost every day.

My favorites are the triblend full-zip and quarter-zip

Baron Fig Confidant Hardcover Notebooks

Committing to a journal is a serious endeavor. It helps if you’ve got some nice paper where you can scratch down your deepest thoughts. It’s a bonus if the journal has a nice binding and a book mark. Baron Fig notebooks have all that along with nice, thick pages, a few perforated removal pages in the back, and a clean, timeless design that makes you want to display them on your shelf when they’re not open on your desk. You can select from the small pocket sized journals, medium flagship journals and plus nearly full-page sized journals, and I love all three for different reasons. You can also choose from blank, lined, or grid paper in a variety of colors as well. Once you use one of these notebooks, there’s no going back.

My most used is the flagship size blank journal, but I love the plus for sketching and planning.

Sakura Pigma Micron 05 Pens

If you’re looking for a quality pen to go along with your quality notebook, the Sakura Pigma Microns are it. They’re especially handy if you’re a lefty and you don’t like smearing ink across the side of your south paw. These archival ink micron pens come in a variety of thicknesses, and the Micron 05s are my favorite. (Anything thinner than the 05s are so thin they sometimes scratch or cut the paper.)

Snag them on Amazon in a variety pack or just the 05s.

Codenames Pictures

This is the type of game even people who don’t like games can get into. It’s a mixture of creativity, mind melding, and risk to beat your opponents. The replay value is incredibly high because the possibilities are endless. The black and white artwork is incredible, and I think this is the best iteration of all of the Codenames games.

Buy it at your local game store or Amazon.

AirTags bluetooth trackers

I’m the kind of a guy who always puts his wallet in a different place in the house because I love the thrill of not being able to find it right before I’m ready to walk out the door. Fortunately, Airtags make my life a bit less chaotic. Airtags are better than any other bluetooth tracker because if any iPhone passes by, it will show you the AirTag’s location. With billions of Apple devices roaming the earth, there’s never been a better network to find your lost stuff. It also has cheap replaceable batteries that last for up to a year, so you don’t have to worry about recharging them frequently or replacing them entirely when the batteries give up the ghost. My favorite place I’m using one of these babies is hidden on my bike.

Pick up a one-pack or 4-pack.

Meross Garage Door Opener (with HomeKit)

Did you know that just about any garage door opener can be converted into a smart garage door for under $50? You don’t even need to send it to garage door school. You just buy a Meross Garage Door Opener (with Homekit, if you want to be able to tell Siri to open your garage door), connect a few wires to your garage door opener, and plug it in. You’ll need a tiny bit of wiring know-how to install it, but it really is as simple as connecting a two wires to your garage door opener unit. It’s incredibly convenient to be able to walk out of the house without any keys knowing I can just tell my phone to open my garage when I get back. We’re living in the future, you guys.

Order here to educate your garage door.

Scribd

Scribd is like Netflix for books. I know that libraries were the original Netflix for books, but Scribd gives you access to its entire library, including audiobooks, without having to wait behind every other person in your town who wants that book. The Scribd catalog of books runs incredibly deep for Christian books, including things like commentaries and scholarly resources, and there are tons of popular books too. We get our money’s worth on an annual subscription in the first few months of the year.

Download the app and use my referral link to get 60 days for free here.

YNAB

We’ve been zero-based budgeters for over a decade now, and we have used YNAB (short for You Need A Budget) for almost that entire time. It’s still my absolute favorite app for budgeting. The de sign is incredible, you can update your budget on any device, it syncs with your bank accounts, and they are constantly adding new features. If you’re serious about getting your finances in order, this is worth the subscription fee many times over.

Check out the rest of the features and get started here.

The post My Favorite Things appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Even the most cautious internet shopper is defenseless when hackers steal information from websites that store your payment information.

What if there was a way to have a unique credit card number for every website you used? Then, if (read: when) you get hacked, you only need to shut down that card number. You wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of contacting your bank and getting a new credit card, followed by the pain of re-entering your payment on every single site online.

Enter an online shopper’s best friend: Privacy.com.

Privacy connects to your checking account and allows you, via a website or app, to create unique credit card numbers for each merchant you use. You can set cards for recurring or one-time use and you can attach weekly, monthly, yearly or per charge dollar limits to them as well. Setting limits can keep you from breaking your Amazon.com budget. It also prevents companies from jacking up the price of your subscription without you noticing. (I’m looking at you, cable companies / internet providers). You can only use each card with one merchant. Privacy locks cards to one store or website to keep someone from using your card somewhere else.

When to Use Privacy

Maybe this sounds neat but you’re not quite sure how you’d use it. Let me share a few of my favorite use cases.

• Websites I’ve never used before and inherently don’t trust. Using Privacy significantly lowers my risk, especially if I use a one-time use burner card that can only be charged a single time.
• Websites that make it difficult to cancel your subscription. I’m looking at you Beachbody.com. Let it be known that your ridiculous “phone-in-72-hours-before-your-plan-expires” policy to cancel an online video subscription is anathema. You’re the worst.
• Places where I have to give my number over the phone. If you are calling a florist or spa to buy a gift for someone and have to give out a credit card number over the phone. No worries that the flower lady will do something suspicious with your card. (No offense, flower lady).
• Websites with trial subscriptions I might forget to cancel. Hi, Spotify!

Recently we ordered a stroller adapter online and later got a notification that it was on backorder. In the meantime, I found the adapter somewhere else and ordered it so that it would arrive sooner. The original website wouldn’t let me login to cancel the order (!), so I just shutdown the Privacy card for that account. I got an email that my payment didn’t process and just ignored it. I knew Privacy had my back.

Other Great Features

I really appreciate being able to create a burner card for one-time use. If you know you’re only going to use a card one time (like in the florist example above), you can set the card as a burner. With a burner card, once a single payment is processed, another transaction can’t go through. This is the best option for websites you don’t trust and probably won’t order from again.

You can also pause cards without canceling them, in case you want to save a merchant to use for later, but don’t want any fishy charges potentially showing up in the meantime. You can set Privacy to alert you when a transaction is attempted. That way you’re always on top of what’s happening with your card.

There are credit card companies like Final that are doing the same thing, but then you need to sign up for a new credit card, and Final has foreign transaction fees. If you’re addicted to getting points with your credit card purchases, Privacy will likely disappoint you since it’s linked to your checking account and there isn’t a rewards program.

I don’t use Privacy for every website or merchant, but I love using it for subscriptions, giving a card number over the phone, and on websites I probably won’t order from again. Power to the consumer, baby.

You can search your cards to find the one you need to shutdown via the handy iOS app or on the website.

Click this link and you get $5 just for signing up (and I do too). Not a bad deal to keep your bank accounts safe online.

The post Privacy.com Review – Unique Credit Card Numbers for Online Shopping appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

But! Even with all of these social networks, I’ve come across a new-to-me service1 that’s quickly become my favorite: Goodreads.

At its core, Goodreads is an app to manage books you’ve read, are reading, or hope to read. The premise of Goodreads is personal reading management with a twist–you can see what your friends are reading too.

Goodreads encourages you to rate what you’ve read on a five-star scale, and after you rate 20 books, it starts suggesting other books in similar genres that you may enjoy.

It’s highly integrated with Amazon reviews and syncs with your Kindle highlights too, thanks to its acquisition by our favorite online retailer in 2013.

A Simple System for Sorting (and Discovering) Books

I don’t care what all of the popular books are on Amazon, but I am curious to see the most popular books among my friends. Most of us are far more likely to watch a movie, buy a product, or try a new restaurant because of a personal recommendation rather than just pursuing what’s popular for the masses. That’s what makes Goodreads fantastic–I can see what my friends are reading, read their reviews, and even comment or message and ask questions right inside the app.

There are tons of other goodies inside of Goodreads. A few of my favorite features include:

• Tracking start and finish dates for books you’re reading
• Auto-updating your progress based on where you left off in Kindle books (if you want)
• Setting a reading challenge for a calendar year and helping you track your goal
• Following your favorite authors

Maybe these features sound interesting, but a joining another social network doesn’t seem worth it and adding all of your books is overwhelming. But you can start small and still enjoy the benefits of Goodreads.

Getting Started

My encouragement is to start by rating books you loved and those you hated. That’ll help Goodreads get a feel for other books you may enjoy and the genres you dabble in. I’d shoot for hitting 20 books so that you can start receiving automatic recommendations.

I highly encourage linking your Amazon and Facebook accounts to your Goodreads account to quickly sync books and add friends. You can add all of your Facebook friends en masse, but I don’t recommend that since lots of people have a dormant Goodreads account. 2 On the Home tab of the app, you can see what your friends are reading or have recently rated and then tap to add those books to your lists too.

The Goodreads app is simple and makes adding books a breeze. You can scan a barcode of a physical book you’re reading or just search for it and add it to one of your three default shelves–read, currently reading, and to-read. You can add more shelves if you want, but I like the simplicity of the defaults. If you’re a particular person (that’s me, I get you), Goodreads even shows you all the different editions of a book, so the cover and page numbers match the book you’re actually reading.

The mobile app is great, but the desktop website version has additional features including:

• Displaying how many books ahead or behind you are on your yearly reading challenge
• Seeing your most read authors
• Finding duplicate listings of books on your shelves
• Comparing books read with your friends

The last feature, comparing books, is probably my favorite. To see how your reading list compares to a friends, navigate over to Goodreads.com and click on a friend. On your friend’s profile you can click compare books and see what you have both read or hope to read and compare ratings too. Goodreads will even tell you how similar your tastes are in books.

Wrapping Up

I know I’m late to this reader’s social paradise, but maybe you tried Goodreads and gave up or haven’t given it a shot yet. I think you should check it out. I’ve read more because of Goodreads, and it’s proven a whole lot more edifying than most of my time on social media.

One final suggestion: take time to write a simple review–even just a few sentences–on why you liked or disliked a book. Leaving a short review forces me to personally process what I thought about a book. I’m also more inclined to start reading a book that a friend reviewed.

You can find me on Goodreads here.

The post Goodreads: My New Favorite Social Network appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Here’s a quick roundup of my favorite apps that are on sale for Black Friday first for iOS, then for the Mac.

iOS

Due (an alert wizard with natural language input)

For tasks that have to be done at a certain time (putting out trash cans for weekly pick up, reminding someone of something at a certain date or time) and recurring reminders, there’s nothing better or simpler than Due.

I’ve spent a whole blog post convincing you of how amazing this app is, and with a 40% discount, it’s irresistible.

Universal app for iPhone and iPad, normally $4.99 on sale for $2.99.

Drafts (pushing anything you type wherever you want it to go)

One of my most used apps and so beloved that it resides in the dock of my iPhone. I use this app multiple times every single day, and the magic you can perform with text through this app is unreal.

I called it the point guard of my iPhone, and I can’t imagine not having this little Kyrie Irving on hand.

This isn’t a Black Friday deal, but the price has been lowered from $9.99 to $4.99 and is a universal app for iPhone and iPad.

LongScreen (the extended screenshot tool you need for iOS)

Have you ever wanted to screenshot an entire webpage but ended up snapping a dozen different photos and creating a mess on your iOS device?

LongScreen is here to save the day. It enables saving an entire webpage as a screenshot, all stitched together, panorama style.

I don’t use it often, but whenever I need it, I’m glad it’s there.

Normally $2.99, on sale for $0.99 as a universal app for iPhone and iPad.

Paprika (an amazing recipe manager)

I’m married to true kitchen maestro, and she saves all of our family favorite recipes in Paprika. If you ever cook (really, ever) and want to save recipes, this is the place where your best Pinterest finds belong. Tags, search, favoriting, rating and more comes along with this recipe manager.

We use the grocery feature daily, which syncs perfectly and quickly across devices, so when my wife adds to the list, it shows up on my phone. You can even choose a recipe and have it add whatever ingredients you’re missing to your list automagically.

I highly recommend the iPhone and iPad versions, but the Mac version is killer too 1.

iPhone version normally $4.99, on sale for $2.99, iPad version normally $4.99, on sale for $2.99 and the Mac version normally $19.99 on sale for $9.99.

PDF Expert (a PDF wrangling extraordinaire)

If you ever do anything with PDFs, you can’t go wrong with PDF Expert. You can highlight, reorder, sign, organize, sync to Dropbox and other cloud services and edit PDFs in a way iBooks simply can’t.

If you need a better way to organize and edit PDFs, this app is a lifesaver.

Universal app for iPhone and iPad, normally $9.99, on sale for $4.99.

Mac

DaisyDisk (the prettiest way to see what’s taking up your precious hard drive space)

Ever wonder what exactly is hogging all that space on your Mac? DaisyDisk is the app you’ve been searching for.

DaisyDisk scans your hard drive and tells you exactly what is sucking up space and where you need to go to remove it.

It’s beautifully designed and incredibly helpful, especially if you’ve got a tiny drive to manage.

Normally $9.99 on sale for $4.99 on the Mac App Store.

TextExpander (the fastest way to type a little and get a lot)

I’ve gushed about my love of text expanders in general in the past, and TextExpander (proper) is my favorite app of the bunch. It allows you to sync across devices and has, to date, saved me from typing over 120,000 characters and five hours of typing time. That makes my fingers very happy.

I’m not a fan of the subscription model, but you can snag 20% off a full license without subscription with the code MDM20.

TripMode (a tethering data saver)

If you ever use the hotspot on your phone to connect your computer to the internet, TripMode is absolutely clutch. It allows you to pick the apps that can connect to the internet so you’re not burning through your limited tethering data by backing up with Backblaze or syncing massive files to Dropbox.

Right now it’s 33% off with the code SAVEDATA. The $5.27 you’ll spend is nothing compared to an overpriced data charge on from your wireless provider.

Blockbuster Kit 2017

I snagged the precursor to this kit in 2016, and I can’t recommend these four apps highly enough. $60 is a chunk of change, but for these apps alone you’re saving $40 off of sticker price, and a few other apps are tossed in as well.

Beamer 3

If you want to stream movies from your Mac to your AppleTV, using Airplay leaves you with laggy videos and out-of-sync audio.

I don’t know how it works, but Beamer is able to send perfectly synced videos across your Apple devices.

Should an app like this be necessary? Absolutely not. But it’s a beauty when it just works.

Let’s hope and pray Apple buys this app and integrates it into future versions of macOS.

Boom 2

If the sound coming out of your Mac speakers has disappointed you, Boom is the app you need.

Boom does some voodoo magic and allows your speakers to pump out significantly more sound. Be careful, because there’s a possibility of doing damage to your speakers if you crank them too high, but for increased sound, you Boom brings the noise.

WALTR 2

If you think iTunes on your Mac is more of a bloated mess than your stomach after Thanksgiving dinner, WALTR is the solution you’re looking for.

WALTR allows you to sync songs, music, PDFs and more wirelessly to your iPhone or iPad. It works so simply it’s unbelievable. And it loads instantly, so you’re not waiting for iTunes to boot up and then tell you an update is available.

If you ever wrestled with iTunes and lost, WALTR is the teammate you want to tag in.

YouTube Converter

Want to snag a YouTube video to use during a presentation? Want to save a video for on the go (and with the wonders of WALTR sling it into your iOS device)?

YouTube Converter beats the socks off any online option out there. I’m not advocating for stealing videos, but when you need to save videos for future Internet-lacking areas, this is the tool you should turn to.

The post My Favorite Apps on Sale for Black Friday appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

That’s a broad question. Perhaps a narrower but maybe not easier-to-answer question is, “Where do you primarily find your identity?”

Here are some options:

• Spouse
• Parent
• Career
• Wealth
• Status
• Power
• Body
• Sibling
• Child
• Achievements
• Sexuality
• Freedom
• Faith

Every person you know fits into one of those categories.

The problem is, almost all of those identities can be taken from you.

Your spouse can pass away or leave you. Your child, parents, and siblings can and most certainly will, one day die. You can lose your job and your wealth overnight. Your status is always in flux, and likely if you lose your spouse, job, or wealth, you’ll lose your status too.

Your power or influence over others will eventually wane and no matter how much you have, you’ll always want more, as with wealth and status. Your body won’t always look the way it does–gravity is undefeated in that battle–no matter what pop up ads and spam emails say.

Your achievements will dim with time and will become less important. A corrupt government or invading force can axe your freedom. Your sexuality, over time, will impress fewer people and fulfill you less and less, especially in the pursuit of “sexual freedom.”

The single thing identity that can’t be pried away is your faith.

Specifically for Christians, our identity is in Christ.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1

We are permanently united to the person of Jesus through saving faith in him. This foundation is unshakeable. His promise is unbreakable.

Death cannot strip this away.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38–39

Jesus has defeated the final enemy. His victory has already been counted and established.

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
1 Corinthians 15:54

If the Biblical claims and promises of Jesus are true1 it is the only identity worth building your life upon.

But death takes nothing from the one who already has eternal life.

And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
John 17:3

Don’t build your life on something uncertain. Don’t live for something that will, in the end, merely fade away. Take hold of the promises that Jesus offers, for death claims everything else.

The post The Only Identity You Can’t Lose appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Me too.

One of my favorite bloggers, Tim Challies, created the 2016 Reading Challenge to give direction to people who want to tackle more books this year.

Here’s a link to the 2016 Reading Challenge. He’s got plans for 13, 26, 52, and 104 books. You can click the image below for a larger view.

I’m currently tackling the 52 book challenge, aiming for a book a week to keep pace.

If your year of reading hasn’t started out how you hoped, never fear! You can start fresh today and still easily tackle 13 or 26 books, or if you’re ready for a quicker pace, you’ll need to read a book a week plus squeeze in an extra seven somewhere along the line.

Instant is in and tweets and status updates are easier to digest because of their low caloric value. But book readers continue to be influencers and leaders because books change and sharpen minds.

I had to do a little retrofitting to make the books I read so far fit this list. It’s going to take more planning going forward to make it all work, so that’s my next task.

Here’s what I’ve read so far in 2016.

Completed in 2016

1. The Damascus Countdown – Joel Rosenberg The final book in The Twelfth Imam trilogy. My friend Grant got me hooked on Joel Rosenberg, who some call the “modern day Nostradamus.” I’m not sure his interpretations of some biblical prophecies are completely accurate, but he writes captivating Christian thrillers.
2. The Speechwriter – Barton Swain A hilarious tale of being a speechwriter for former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, you’ll laugh a lot but probably walk away from the inside view of a political office with a more jaded perspective.
3. The Third Target – Joel Rosenberg From ol’ Joel’s newest trilogy, a first-person perspective of a journalist meeting with leaders of ISIS and navigating reporting on a peace process in the Middle East. One of my favorite Rosenberg books.
4. Awe – Paul David Tripp – Tripp says our problem with worship is that we aren’t in awe of God and his love for us, so we look to other things (money, sex, relationships, work) for temporary satisfaction. I agree with the premise and recommend the book because I see the battle happening for my awe daily in my own life.
5. Stuff Matters – Mark Miodownik A fascinating look at the everyday materials that make up our world. Miodownik’s passion for the seemingly mundane (like paper and concrete) help you appreciate the simple stuff we take for granted.
6. All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr A captivating historical fiction novel set during WWII from the perspective of a young blind girl in Paris and an orphan boy in Germany. Doerr crafted some of the most incredibly, descriptive prose I’ve ever read, and the story is a simultaneously heart wrenching and beautiful picture of humanity.
7. Do Over – Jon Acuff Acuff melds helpfulness and humor in an amazing way. I was highlighting like a madman and note taking nonstop in this book about taking charge of your career, and laughing the whole way through. I’ve already given this one away as a gift.
8. Fool’s Talk – Os Guiness The great-great-great grandson of the famous brewer helps us think about the role of apologetics and persuasion in evangelism, tackling big objections to Christianity and sharing interesting anecdotes along the way. Fairly intellectual, but a helpful guide on evangelism in a pluralistic, postmodern world.

Currently reading

• Triggers – Marshall Goldsmith I have a habit for reading books about habits. Goldsmith is an executive coach who helps people who dominate the business world handle that nagging problem of behavioral change, and he only gets paid if they’re successful. Chockfull of “of course!” wisdom on changing habits and behavior, but helpful because of the sheer simplicity.
• Future Crimes – Marc Goodman We’re currently watching Person of Interest and I’m reading this book, so I’m ready to go off the grid entirely and smash all of my internet-connected devices. A pessimistic but realistic look at the reality of everything being hackable, and what that means in a world of hackers, criminal masterminds, and organized crime. Eye opening and fear inducing, and if you don’t have eternal hope for the future, well, I don’t know how you make it through this one without being entirely freaked out and saddened at the state of our world.

THE LIGHT READER (13 BOOKS)

• A book about Christian living (Awe – Paul David Tripp)
• A biography
• A classic novel
• A book someone tells you “changed my life”
• A commentary on a book of the Bible
• A book about theology
• A book with the word “gospel” in the title or subtitle
• A book your pastor recommends
• A book more than 100 years old
• A book for children
• A mystery or detective novel
• A book published in 2016
• A book about a current issue

THE AVID READER (26 BOOKS)

• A book written by a Puritan
• A book recommended by a family member
• A book by or about a missionary
• A novel that won the Pulitzer Prize (All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr)
• A book written by an Anglican (Fool’s Talk – Os Guinness)
• A book with at least 400 pages (The Damascus Countdown – Joel Rosenberg)
• A book by C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien
• A book that has a fruit of the Spirit in the title
• A book with a great cover
• A book on the current New York Times list of bestsellers (Stuff Matters – Mark Miodownik)
• A book about church history
• A graphic novel
• A book of poetry

THE COMMITTED READER (52 BOOKS)

• A book from a theological viewpoint you disagree with
• A book written by an author with initials in their name
• A book that won a ECPA Christian Book Award
• A book about worldview
• A play by William Shakespeare
• A humorous book (The Speechwriter – Barton Swain)
• A book based on a true story
• A book written by Jane Austen
• A book by or about Martin Luther
• A book with 100 pages or less
• A book with a one-word title
• A book about money or finance
• A novel set in a country that is not your own (The Third Target – Joel Rosenberg)
• A book about music
• A memoir
• A book about joy or happiness
• A book by a female author
• A book whose title comes from a Bible verse
• A book you have started but never finished
• A self-improvement book (Do Over – Jon Acuff)
• A book by David McCullough
• A book you own but have never read
• A book about abortion
• A book targeted at the other gender
• A book by a speaker at a conference you have attended
• A book written by someone of a different ethnicity than you

The post The Challies 2016 Reading Challenge appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Here are a couple resources to make things just a tiny bit easier to follow through on one of the most worthwhile things you can do this year.

1 – Tracking a Reading Plan Across Your iOS Devices

Reading Plan is a free, simple app for starting a bible reading plan. You can customize:

• the plan you’re using
• when you started your plan
• which app the passage will open up in on your device
• alerts and reminders for reading

  
It’s not the prettiest app, but it gets the job done. 

There are hundreds of plans available to download through the application.

My favorite features are:

• the ability to mark all days before today as read (great if you’re using the app to track a plan you already started or have been reading but forgot to mark it complete)
• auto scrolling to the last place you left off

The syncing across iOS devices isn’t speedy, but it works. I’ve used other trackers that have lost my progress and been a pain overall, but Reading Plan has been solid.

2 – Additional Ribbons for Marking Your Physical Bible

I’ve been using the M’Cheyne Bible reading plan for the last few years. It’s a 4-chapter per day plan, and each chapter is in a different part of the Bible. I love getting to spend time in different genres and sections of the Word, but it’s a hassle to always flip around in my paper Bible.

Fortunately, I have a smart friend named Big Al who googled “how to add extra ribbons to your bible” and made me an aftermarket ribbon marker and now my Bible looks like this.

  
Here’s what you need to make your own:

• a Bible with a binding (i. e. leather is ideal, but basically not a paperback)
• ribbon (3 colors, assuming your bible already has 1 ribbon)
• scotch / clear tape
• scissors
• a business card or piece of cardstock paper
• bonus: a lighter if you’re into fire

1. Measure your ribbons against your Bible and make them at least 6 inches longer.
2. Cut the business card to be about 2 inches tall and 1 inch wide.
3. Tape the ribbons close together / overlapping and side by side, using about an inch worth of tape vertically for extra hold.
4. Open your Bible and insert the card with ribbons in between the pages and the outer binding, at the spine of the book. You may need to trim your card to get it to fit. You’ll want it to be just smaller than the gap so it doesn’t slide too much.
5. Stuff the card into that gap, pushing it down at least an inch or two
6. Cut ribbons to length
7. Use a lighter to burn the ends of the ribbons so they don’t fray. Use a wet rag to put out the flame if you don’t want to burn your fingers (don’t use the wet rag if you do want to burn your fingers). 

Here’s a shot of the card sliding into the binding.

  
Anything I can do to reduce the friction of actually opening up my Bible is worth that effort.

The post Two Simple Resources for Tracking Bible Reading appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

But there’s a new brew method in my life, and we’ve been going steady for nearly two years.

Meet the Chemex.

If we were judging brewers by their covers, there’s no doubt the Chemex could win a beauty contest.

But beyond that pretty hour-glass figure is a simple way to brew the cleanest, most delicious coffee you’ve (likely) every had at home.

The Chemex is just a fancy pour over (meaning you physically pour water onto the grounds which are in a filter). What makes the Chemex special is its filters. These unique, thicker filters remove any bitterness from the coffee.

If you’re ready to dive into amazing coffee, you might get held up wondering how to use this thing. Here are my Chemex instructions for how to brew and what equipment you need.

How much coffee do I use?

The magic formula for us is using 15 grams of water for every 1 gram of coffee beans / grounds. That’ll give you nice-tasting, not-too-bold, not-too-watery coffee. We have an 8-cup Chemex (with the wood collar, naturally) and we normally brew 50 grams of coffee (750 grams of water) which produces 3 mugs full of coffee (2 for me and 1 for my more caffeine-sensitive wife).

What temperature of water?

Start with 195° Fahrenheit for my American friends or 90.5° Celsius for the rest of the galaxy.

Depending on the surface you put your kettle on, the temperature will start dropping rapidly. You can keep the kettle on a burner to keep it warm, or just pour quickly (but not too quickly, noted below).

How Should I Put in the Filter?

I’m glad you asked.

You should wet the filter (I just swish it under running water) and center the side of the filter with 3-folds directly over the lip where the coffee pours out.

Lots of people complain that the Chemex hiccups (and I did too!) until some genius on the Internet mentioned that if you put the 3-sided part of the filter over the pour spout it leaves a gap for air to release. Surely this was done by design, so that pour spout is also an air escape.

How much water should I add at a time?

With the first pour, if you’re using freshly roasted, freshly ground coffee, the coffee should bloom (i.e. puff up). I normally start with 150 grams, and once the bloom collapses a bit and the water has mostly dripped through, I add 150–200 grams of water at a time.

If you add a bunch of water all at once (say 400+ grams), your coffee will probably taste murky, like you just found it in a closet of your grandma’s mothball-ridden clothes. I’ve done that on more than one occasion and basically cried the rest of the day.

Don’t get too zealous with your pouring. It’ll ruin everything.

How long does it take and in what order should I do everything?

The entire process, with heating your water (mega fan of the electric kettle, which makes things much quicker), grinding coffee, and adding water should take about 15 minutes. The process is mostly dependent on how quickly the water heats up and how much coffee you’re brewing.

I do things in this order:

1. Heat the water in (electric) kettle
2. Measure whole beans on a scale
3. Grind the beans coarsely
4. Wet the filter and put in Chemex
5. Add coarse coffee to Chemex
6. Check temperature of water and begin adding when it hits 195°
7. Add water 150 – 200 grams at a time
8. Drink like a champion

What grind of bean should I use?

Medium-coarseness is ideal.

If it’s too fine, your coffee will turn to mud in the filter and get clogged and taste awful.

If you use coffee that is too coarse, the water will drip through too quickly and the coffee won’t have much taste.

Adjust accordingly.

What equipment do I need?

These five items are listed in order of importance. Picking them all up will set you back around $215, which is no tiny investment.

I suggest getting started with the Chemex and filters along with a kitchen scale, so that you can accurately brew. That combination will set you back $90, assuming you already have a way to heat water via a standard tea kettle or electric kettle, and you’ll have to grind the beans at the store or shop you purchase them in.

Chemex and Filters

Surprisingly, if you want to use a Chemex, you need to have one in your possession.

For $70 you can snag the classic 8-cup Chemex (for the thirsty / party people out there) and a pack of 100 filters.

It’s way cheaper to buy filters at a local hipster coffee joint (normally around $10 / box of 100) or World Market (shocking, right?). Amazon, for some reason, rarely has fair prices for filters.

If we’re getting particular, I like the square unbleached filters because they look cooler and are easier to grab and chuck in the trash when you’re done brewing.

Chemex Bundle: 8-cup Classic Glass Coffeemaker and 100 Circle Filters for $69 at Amazon

Chemex 8-cup Coffeemaker for $60 at Amazon

100 Square Non-Bleached Filters for $18 at Amazon

Kitchen Scale

To start, hands down, you 100% should buy a cheap kitchen scale. It will take your coffee game to the next level overnight.

Any scale with a decently wide base will do–just make sure the Chemex can rest safely on it. I also prefer a scale that measures in grams, but hey, whatever mass-measuring system that floats your boat will do. The 8-cup Chemex fits perfectly on the EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale.

EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale $20 at Amazon

Thermometer

This may seem silly, but burning your coffee is easy to do. Please, for the love, don’t pour boiling water over your grounds. That’s just wrong.

This $10 Weber one has served us well, but be careful not to submerge it fully under the water.

As a bonus, it works as a meat thermometer too.

Weber 6492 Original Instant-Read Thermometer $10 at Amazon

A Burr Grinder

Fancy burr grinders can set you back hundreds. If you want to start with a more reasonably priced grinder and you’re not afraid to use a little elbow grease, this $22 Hario hand grinder will get you going.

We’ve been using this low-end1Cuisinart Burr Grinder for years. It’s not good enough for a coffee shop or espresso, but for the Chemex you’ll be just fine.

Hario Coffee Mill (Hand Crank) $22 at Amazon

Cuisinart Burr Grinder $65 at Amazon

Gooseneck Kettle

For just over $40 you can add the most unnecessary yet somehow life altering tool to your coffee crafting collection: a gooseneck kettle.

Most kettles have a normal spot and pour from the top, meaning you end up with about half of the water you brewed on the floor, counter, and your toes (if you brew barefoot).

The Gooseneck, like a gentleman and a scholar, has an appropriately named gooseneck spout that pushes the water from the bottom of the kettle so you can pour like a decent human being, not wasting a drop of your perfectly brewed water and being able to properly wet all of the grounds in your Chemex evenly and fairly, without discrimination.

Hario V60 Gooseneck Kettle for $42 at Amazon

Wrapping Up

It’s a big step forward to dive into a coffee apparatus that takes more time than a standard automatic coffee maker or, heaven forbid, a Keurig. But the Chemex process is a delightful one and your taste buds (and friends you share with) will undoubtedly thank you for it.

Barebones Chemex Equipment ($90)

• Chemex Bundle: 8-cup Classic Glass Coffeemaker and 100 Circle Filters for $69 at Amazon
• EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale $20 at Amazon

All-In Chemex Equipment Setup ($206)

• Chemex Bundle: 8-cup Classic Glass Coffeemaker and 100 Circle Filters for $69 at Amazon
• EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale $20 at Amazon
• Weber 6492 Original Instant-Read Thermometer $10 at Amazon
• Cuisinart Burr Grinder $65 at Amazon
• Hario V60 Gooseneck Kettle for $42 at Amazon

Simple Chemex Instructions and Recipe

20:1 ratio, water to coffee | 195° F brew temperature | 3 cups = 35 grams of coffee grounds and 700 grams of water

1. Heat the water in (electric) kettle
2. Measure whole beans on a scale
3. Grind the beans coarsely
4. Wet the filter and put in Chemex
5. Add coarse coffee to Chemex
6. Check temperature of water and begin adding when it hits 195° F
7. Add water 150 – 200 grams at a time, using a ratio of 20 grams of water to 1 gram of coffee grounds
8. Drink like a champion

The post Chemex Instructions: The Best Way to Brew Coffee appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

In fact, I own multiple design programs but often reach for Typorama because it’s so fast and simple. It creates images as good or better than what I would on a computer in less time.

When you open the app, you’re brought to the main screen which prompts you to choose a background and displays free-to-use images (using Pixabay as a database) along with a search bar. You can peruse the near-endless list of images by scrolling down, or you can search for an image type of your choice.

If you aren’t looking for a specific image to put your text over, scrolling is a great start. These images seem to be curated based on the quality and popularity.

You can also import your own images and slap some text on it.

Here’s what I love about that app that sets it apart from others:

• free-to-use, integrated image search
• custom options for sizes optimized for Instagram, Facebook, iPhone wallpapers, and more
• 30+ included text / font styles for overlaying on your image
• fine tuning tools for image adjustments–filters, overlays, color enhancements and every color you’d hope for with a color picker for text
• Text tools to easily 3D rotate the text to have it align with an object in the photo to create a multi-dimensioned look
• An eraser feature to make it look like the text is behind a portion of the image

Here’s an example of one of my favorite uses of Typorama, utilizing the eraser tool for added depth.

Check out their Instagram feed to see the magic people are creating with Typorama.

What makes Typorama special is that it’s simple, speedy, and makes a person without design skills look like a pro.

With font options like Cutesy, the app doesn’t exactly scream masculinity, but there are plenty of options for whatever style of image you want to create.

I sometimes use Typorama in conjunction with another design program. I’ll create the text overlay using the transparent option (the first option when you open the app), save it, and email it to myself to do more design work on my computer.

My biggest gripe is that there isn’t a way to save images and go back and edit the text style later. Once you leave the image you’re working on to go to another, you can’t go back and tweak the text–you’re stuck recreating from scratch.

A quick tip: each font or text style has multiple options for how it will display, so each time you click on the same font, you’ll get a slightly different design style.

I’d love to be able to fine tune the styles more, but simplicity beats customization here.

I most commonly use the app to create lock screens with verses on it. My wife designed the first image and the second I slapped together in less than a minute.

The app is free but displays a Typorama watermark without an in-app purchase of $2.99. That in-app purchase unlocks all text styles and the watermark designer.

The post The Simplest Way to Create a Graphic With Text Overlay on iOS appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

iOS offers an option to change your search engine under Settings ? Safari ? Search Engine. There you can choose from:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is the only search engine in the list that doesn’t track and store your search results. That means they aren’t targeting you with ads or trying to sell your data to marketers.

I like having more control over who has my information and search history, but what sold me on DuckDuckGo is a unique feature called bangs.

DuckDuckGo enables you to search certain sites directly by using an exclamation point followed directly by the website shortcut. 

For example, if you want to search for Nike shoes on Amazon, you type !a Nike shoes and DuckDuckGo automatically redirects you to Amazon.

DuckDuckGo supports over 7,500 bang searches, and I bet a number of your favorite sites are already listed there.

What makes this feature extra cool is using it from Spotlight on iOS.

1. Pull down from any screen to bring up the search bar
2. Type your bang search (e.g. !w Akron, Ohio)
3. Click Search Web
4. Boom. Your on the website (in this case Wikipedia) that you used the bang search for.

Here’s a video of the bang search in action on iOS.

Sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn’t work as well as Google for search (especially when looking up Flight status). Never fear! You can use the Google bang search !g Delta flight 122 and voilà, you’re taken to Google.

The extra good news about this is that DuckDuckGo uses an encrypted Google search, so that your results aren’t traced. The power of Google with the privacy of DuckDuckGo.

Here are the bangs I use most frequently:

• !g Google encrypted search
• !w Wikipedia
• !yt YouTube
• !a Amazon
• !wirecutter The Wirecutter

The post Faster, More Secure Web Searching on iOS appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I want to focus on not being distracted by social media and giving my full attention to the people around me.

Jim Elliot’s quote continues to resonate with me.

Wherever you are, be all there.

I haven’t come close to fully living that out yet. But I’m working on it, with a lot of help from The Focus Course by Shawn Blanc. Shawn is a prolific writer about creativity, focus, intentionality and runs a few of my favorite websites: Tools and Toys and The Sweet Setup.

What is The Focus Course?

The Focus Course is a 40-day online course that helps you:

• get clarity about what you want to be doing
• get real about what you’ve actually been doing
• plan for what you want to do
• and helps you take action to be where you want to be and become who you want to become.

The course is split into five modules.

1. Foundations
2. Honesty
3. Clarity
4. Action
5. Planning

This course stretches beyond the scope of focus and gets to the heart of living a meaningful, purpose-filled life. It’s about being intentional about how you live and work, putting your values at the center of everything, and making a lasting impact with the one life we have here on earth.

Who Is It For?

Anyone who wants to live with more focus and intention.

I wish I would have taken this as a college student, so I could have more fully lived out the principles embedded in this course.

I’m grateful I took this course as a young professional with a newborn (I started the course in the hospital just after our daughter’s birth!). It will continue to help mold and shape the person (and dad) I want to become.

I’ll retake this course as I grow in my career, my marriage, my relationships. As I start side projects and tackle areas of my life I want to continue to grow in.

Basically, if you have a pulse and want to increase your focus, make a difference, and live a more  purposeful life, The Focus Course is for you.

How Long Does It Take?

Each day takes about five to ten minutes to watch the video or read through the content, but there are additional exercises and assignments you’ll need to complete, which is where the true value comes.

As a warning, the second module about Honesty takes lots of extra time and effort, but it will help you live in reality and see who you want to be and become. It takes serious discipline to keep trudging through days 12 – 17 and finishing the tasks you need to. I promise it is worth it.

Altogether it’s a 40-day course, and I love the way the course is set up. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and having to diligently work through each day and each module means you’re chipping away at bad habits that have been built over a lifetime.

Extras and Improvements

Beyond the daily modules, there are all kinds of assessments for finding what’s distracting you, if you’re addicted to notifications and checking your inbox, extra articles for going deeper in areas like personal integrity, daily habits, tips for how to use your Mac, how to overcome the fear of missing out (FOMO) and a whole lot more.

Shawn continues to improve the course and invest in it heavily. Shawn recently released version two of the course, which adds a video to every single day.

It’s beautifully designed and you can cruise through the course with any device. My personal preference is on iOS. You’ll be able to see all the modules you’ve completed and see your progress as you go through. There’s also a members forum section where you can provide feedback, connect with others, and share what you’re learning and processing.

Favorite Aspects

The most valuable portion of the course for me was thinking about the person I want to become. If a morning manifesto is what is true about yourself, then crafting your values on Day 10 of the course is what guides you in who you want to become.

The course drips with authenticity, attention to detail, and beautiful design. I didn’t know an online course could look so good. Shawn pulled out all the stops in an effort to make the packaging look as good as the product.

I’m a huge fan of the additional articles and assessments for increased productivity I mentioned above.

I’ve started working through the course again to start 2016.

Is It Worth the Money?

In short: absolutely. I fully believe an investment in ourselves in an effort to make a greater impact on the world around us is one of the best ways we can use our hard-earned cash.

If it wasn’t worth the money, I would have asked for a refund. Shawn backs his course up with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

This is a course about intentionality, focus, productivity, making an impact, and living with purpose, all rolled up together. I can’t think of a better way to start the new year.

I can honestly say the cash I dripped on The Focus Course was far and away the best money I spent in 2015. I’m excited to get back into the course again this year.

If you aren’t sure you’re ready to invest a few hundred dollars on the course, Shawn offers a free course called The Elements of Focus with a 16-day email series that will give you a taste of the full Focus Course.

If you decide to sign up for The Focus Course, I’d be grateful if you use my affiliate link. I can’t recommend the course highly enough, and I’d love to hear from you (jshirkman at gmail dot com) if you decide to check out the course.

The post The Focus Course Review appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I’m aware of the irony. Bear with me, please.

I’ve shared that notifications can’t satisfy us. Unfortunately, that truth hasn’t sunk in yet.

Nevertheless, I continue to internally yell “Validate me!” with each post to the Internet.

I’d be lying if I didn’t have the same urge with this post. If I didn’t want you to tell me that you agree or that it was really inspiring.

Most of the time when I share something online, I want to help people or be encouraging. But underneath that well-intentioned shell, I long to hear other things.

Tell me my ideas are good.

Tell me my picture is beautiful.

Tell me my baby is adorable.

Tell me my life is awesome.

I hate that I don’t always share things to share joy or to be helpful, but instead to seek approval and find my sense of self-worth in likes and retweets and online praise.

I forget so easily that thumbs up and shares can’t satisfy me. No statistic can make me happier. No amount of kind comments will give me joy that only Jesus can bring.

Recently, I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter less often 1 . I still have an urge to open an app, check the notifications, and see who is mentioning or praising me.

I once heard that checking Facebook is the modern-day equivalent of opening the refrigerator when you’re bored. Sometimes I check social media and forget why I went there in the first place. It’s like taking a bite of cold pizza from the fridge when you weren’t hungry to begin with.

I don’t want to live for temporal status updates. I’m tired of unsatisfying nibbles at day-old deep dish.

1. I don’t want to let a constant stream of non-vital information consume my life. The majority of posts will be completely irrelevant in a day or so and 99% will be irrelevant in a year, yet I return to it day in and day out because the habit is so ingrained.
2. I don’t want want to let the amount of attention a post gets decide how proud or satisfied I am in that moment.

At the same time, I want to celebrate with people, congratulate those I care about, and share in the joy of others.

This is a tricky, fine line to walk. I’m grateful for people’s kind words. I’m thankful that people love me and my family and encourage our socks off regularly. But I don’t want those likes and comments to dictate my life or be the source of my joy, hope, or approval. I want to reserve that place for Jesus alone.

I don’t know your motives. I don’t know why you post the articles you do or share pictures of your vacation or your lunch or your baby or your baby eating lunch on vacation.

It’s totally possible that you have good intentions. Maybe you’ve never even considered why you post what you do.

For me, I know that I don’t always have the best intentions.

I know that I don’t always share things because I want other people to share in my joy but because instead because I want other people to bring me joy or to be jealous of my life.

One more like. One more comment. One more favorite or retweet. That’ll do it. That’ll scratch my itch.

It never does. It can’t.

I don’t know what the solution to this is. For now, I’m spending less time on social networks. I don’t do much to promote blog posts and I’ve turned off comments from this blog because I let them turn into tiny altars of praise to me.

I want to share ideas. I want to be helpful. I want others to share in my joy and see my gratitude. I just don’t want to share things as a means to a selfish end.

I want to combat the lie,

“If I share this and get enough attention for it, I will be happier.”

I don’t want to use my baby as a prop for praise. I don’t want to publicly share my gratitude for my wife so that people will be amazed at my gratitude. I want use social media to be a good tool instead of an unruly master.

I want my validation to flow from who Jesus is and his love for me, not from what other people think of me, whether it is incredibly kind and encouraging or rude and hurtful. Life isn’t more difficult in the digital age than in the thousands of years prior, but it sure has gotten more complicated.

Human nature hasn’t changed. We’re always trying to turn things–good or amoral–into something to worship or as tools to be worshipped with. That’s a heart problem, not a technical issue.

___

So what am I doing inlight of all of this? To start, when I have the urge to check social media, I (try to) do something else, like:

1. writing down an idea or thought for a blog post2
2. praying for something or someone
3. texting a friend some encouragement.

I haven’t perfected doing these three things by any stretch, but, wow, the ideas have been flowing much easier when I give myself space to think instead of pacifying a split-second of boredom with tweets and posts.

I’ve also created a Workflow from the 39 things you can do instead of checking social media.

This is a tough battle to fight because I am the enemy. My nature is the problem, not the platforms or tools or other people at the water cooler. I’m not ready to call it quits, but something has to change.

The post Why The Internet Can’t Validate Me (But I Try to Let it Anyway) appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

At least, that’s what it seems.

Last week I was chatting with a student who, from the outside, appeared completely apathetic about spiritual matters. I’d asked him a number of questions and it didn’t seem the conversation was going anywhere, but instead of trying to force something that wasn’t there, I kept asking questions to try to find an opportunity to genuinely connect with him about faith.

And then I asked him, “What do you think about when you’re alone?”

He said, “I’m probably not the guy you want to ask. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what happens after we die.”

Actually, my friend, you’re exactly the person I wanted to ask.

At times, in conversations with friends or family, it seems we have to latch onto any opportunity, no matter how small, because we believe these opportunities come once in a lifetime.

“This is it! This is my one and only chance to tell them that Jesus loves us and that he died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead and offers eternal life to those, and only those, who believe in him by faith!”

That approach, which I’ve taken plenty of times, is like trying to kick down a door at the moment someone opens it up just to peek around the corner and see who is knocking. It’s difficult to recover from the carnage that a kicked-in door brings.

But if God is at work in someone’s heart, I believe he’ll continue to work and move, like a prybar against a stubborn nail–twisting, turning, and loosening–until the tension releases and the board comes free.

Trying to rip up something in one fell swoop that’s been stuck a certain way for years or decades is a frustrating process. But intentionally working at it, easing, nudging, putting pressure in the right places, looking for gaps and opportunities? Well, that’s a process with a greater likelihood of success and a lower chance of frustration, injuries, and broken pieces.

Intentional questions with focused listening are the carpentry-equivalent of a hammer and nails in sharing our faith. Asking and listening are the keys to finding opportunities and side doors to people’s hearts. Often bad experiences and emotional barriers keep people from opening the front door of their hearts to the message of the gospel. Our genuine care and concern as we hear from can show us the path to the unlocked side door.

For some of us, we need patience as we explore alongside these friends, relatives, schoolmates and co-workers. Asking  more questions instead of jumping to sharing our perspective and opinions often reveals root of what they are thinking and feeling.

• Why are you thinking about that?
• When did you start asking that?
• Have you come to any conclusions?
• What keeps bringing you back to that question?
• Have you always thought that way? What changed your mind?

We also need to have the courage and boldness to walk through the open door when we find it. When they ask us what we think or when we see a clear opportunity for the gospel, we cannot shy away.

This is an art, not a science. There’s no single formula for number of questions + time spent listening = gospel opportunity. Fortunately, as God has given all Christians his Holy Spirit, we don’t have to figure these things out on our own. As we listen to others, we need to listen to the Spirit and look for opportunities he opens up.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11

God has set eternity into the heart of every single person. Innately, we all know there is a Creator, and there is a hole in our soul that only he can fill.

We have to live in the tension of life being short and fleeting, and knowing also that every person’s journey toward Jesus is a process–some much longer than others. We must pray and ask for wisdom, boldness, open hearts, and open door.

I’m finding that people are more spiritually open than they may appear at first. It’s just not the front door that’s unlocked.

The post Finding the Side Door to People’s Hearts appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

It’s the first rule of using the Internet. Nothing good happens there, and there’s a 99.9% chance you’ll be wishing you could get those precious few moments back that the comment section ripped from your fingers. Now you’re fuming because KoolGuy2596 said all (gender, faith, race, and / or nationality that describes you) are idiots.

It’s not the Internet alone that makes people say terrible things, but it sure helps.

And why is that?

Because it’s anonymous. 1

It’s the same reason that we wish the most horrible kinds of evil on that person who cut us off in traffic.

We lose sight of reality. The reality that crazy commentators and wild drivers are humans. We have no personal connection with them–only an emotional reaction to something they said or did. 

That person writing comments thanks to the magic of the Internet? That’s your political enemy who you must destroy. Not a person.

That guy driving recklessly? He’s a homicidal maniac willing to unleash his vengeance on whomever he wills so he can make it to work on time. Not a person.

A person behind a veil is hard to view as a person. And the Internet and cars and other things that don’t allow us to come face to face with other people are most certainly veils that keep us from seeing clearly.

Veils bring anonymity.

Anonymity is a problem because we feel we can get away with anything–either in the form of an improper comment, action, or a just-as-bad reaction.

So if anonymity brings rage and fear and truckloads of frustration, what is the solution?

Accountability.

When we know that we will have to face repercussions for things we’ve said or done, we have a much stronger filter. We think about what we’re saying. We keep in mind the emotions of others. We feel empathy instead of unleashing our anger. We may become angry, but often times we’re at least slower to sin. Feeling angry isn’t the problem, it’s our response that gets us into trouble.

Accountability changes things because we care how people view us. And this extends far beyond comment sections and road rage. Anonymity is one of the greatest partners of sin. If we think we can get away with something and no one else will find out, we’re more likely to do that thing when tempted. The reality is, people almost always find out, and even if they don’t, God already knows.

There is no lasting anonymity. We have an option to choose accountability and choose to remember our humanity and need for mercy.

This is a reminder to all of us.

The people behind a veil are people. They are broken. They make mistakes. They need grace.

And when we’re the person doing the irritating? Well, I encourage reminding others of your humanity whenever possible.

A hand wave as a gesticular, “My bad!” when you cut someone off in traffic makes you a lot more human. You’re less likely to be on the receiving end of a string of profanities you won’t actually hear. Instead, you look like a seasoned wartime negotiator and bringer of peace rather than a despicable psycho with a penchant for taking out innocent drivers.

As for commenting on the Internet, there’s no way to bring humanity to that situation. Stay far, far away.

The post Anonymity vs. Accountability appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Our subconscious is constantly processing things for us so we don’t have to think about how to brush our teeth or shower or the way to drive to work.

Or how to be impatient with people who frustrate us or how to sit on the couch and watch Netflix instead of exercising or how to waste money on frivolous purchases.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been thinking a lot about habits. I’ve written about developing new ones and recorded a podcast on habits, and I’ve encountered a number of books focusing on these tiny building blocks that dictate so much of what we do.

I’m convinced that habits are one of the most important things we can focus on if we want to live a life of purpose, because they are a powerful force that are constantly moving us further and further in a direction and becoming more deeply ingrained with each passing day.

Just think about the things you do each day.

How many of them are truly new things? You likely eat similar foods for breakfast, take a shower at a similar time, hang out with some of the same people, ask the same questions, do repetitive tasks at work. And we don’t seek out novel ways to do things when we already have a way. I’m not trying to find a unique route to commute to work–I’m going the way I always go because it’s the easiest.

The classic quote,

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”

emphasizes our habit for habits.

Good or bad, the more we do something the easier it is to do it again.

So how do we start making changes? 

Start small. Do it daily. Swap the bad for good.

Leo Babauta shared what this looks like in the fitness arena. He suggests “leveling up” and starting at a point so simple it’s almost offensive.

The leveling up idea is a form of habit creep, a perfect name for building on tiny habits coined by James Clear. By starting with something incredibly small, totally doable, and building from there, you increase your likelihood of building lasting habits.

New Year’s Resolutions fail because we want to go from couch potato to marathon. We try to move from not-even-a-micro-blogger to a novelist in a single swoop.

The leap is too great and our habits are dug too deeply.

The easiest way I can think of to start making changes is to do the smallest thing possible that moves you toward your goal and do it every single day. That’s how I taught myself guitar. Start small, do it every day.

Ideally it follows something you already to every day, so that the new mini-habit becomes automatic. Start the new habit right after you wakeup, or right after a shower, or right after dinner. Whenever you decide you’re most likely to have the time and motivation to do it, connect it to a trigger so the process becomes automatic.

As Christine Carter says in The Sweet Spot

“Do a thirty-minute yoga video twice a week” isn’t a habit. It’s a to-do item for your task list because there’s no clear trigger and therefore no clear automaticity.

That was a huge paradigm shift for me. If I’m only doing something occasionally, with no clear trigger, it’s a to-do item, not a habit. And while good habits can be developed, I’ve never heard of good to-do items.

Phase 1: One Small Change, Every Day

To start, answer these two questions:

1.What’s the greatest change you want to make in your life?

2. What’s the tiniest thing that moves you closer to that change?

If it’s losing weight, just walk around the block one time. Just once, not twice. Not yet.

If it’s writing, write just one sentence.

Stronger relationships? Start by encouraging one person with one sentence.

A deeper relationship with God? 2 minutes reading the Bible.

After a week, increase everything a tiny bit. Two laps. Two sentences. Four minutes. Don’t try to make a big leap.

You aren’t doing yourself any favors by overcommitting and under delivering on the promises you’ve made to yourself. Slow and steady, my friend.

Phase 2: Swapping the Bad for the Good

Once you get into this new routine, then look for something that is actively working against your goal, and let that bad thing be a trigger for a good thing.

If it’s writing a book, then the time you normally waste when you should be writing should be your trigger to sit down and write.

If you’re trying to lose weight, when you’re tempted to eat junk food, do your lap around the block or drink a glass of water instead.

Once you’ve used that bad trigger to start doing that tiny thing that gets you closer to your goal, and you’re doing that with a majority of success, find another thing keeping you from your goal, and swap that out.

Little by little, swap the bad things or barriers to your habits with a tiny good habit that moves you closer.

Wrapping Up

This is all easier said than done. I don’t have this all figured out, but I really do believe it is this simple.

Start small. Do it daily. Swap the good for the bad.

These are the tiny dominoes that will lead to a massive chain reaction that won’t change your life overnight, but will change it tremendously over time.

When you’re building good habits, time is your friend.

Don’t try to become a super hero overnight.

Ambition is admirable but persistence pays off.

A life lived with consistency and focus on the right priorities leads to a life of purpose. Habits help you get there.

The post Three Tiny Steps to Building Lasting Habits appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Choosing how and where you’ll host your blog online seems like the most important thing when you’re starting out.

The reality is, actually writing and consistently posting, no matter where you do it, is far and away the most critical aspect.

Nevertheless, you have to put your blog somewhere, so here are your best options for where to call home on the Internet.

Normally people want free, modern, and simple. That’s not an option. So, start by choosing no more than two, and feel free to skip ahead to the two that scratch your itch.

Free + Modern

WordPress.com

A solid first option is WordPress.com. Lots of people start here, and it’s usually indicated by YourName.wordpress.com. It’s free and offers relatively modern themes.

Here’s what you (might) hate:

• You can’t customize everything. That means certain fonts, sidebars, headers, locations of random things are more or less set in stone, and, if you have a proclivity for tinkering or perfection, this will potentially drive you crazy.
• It’s intuitive, but not the most intuitive. There’s lots of tweaks you can make, but it can be frustrating to find certain settings. WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform, but there’s confusion between WordPress.com and WordPress “Self-Hosted” (which is what I use and is neither simple nor free, but we’ll get to that later).
• They are going to try to upsell you. The default address will be YourName.wordpress.com and if you want YourName.com, you’ll have to pay around $30 a year. And if you want to change certain settings, that’ll cost you another $15 a year. That’s how the freemium model works. If you’re ok sticking with YourName.wordpress.com (which is fine, for a start, and you can always change it later) it’s not a bad option.

Medium

The next option in the free and modern category is using Medium, started by the man who starts all the big blog platforms, Ev Williams.

Here’s what you’re working with:

• You have basically no options as far as what your site looks like. Fortunately, it’s really clean and well designed. Another neat feature is that people can comment easily and on specific portions of the text which, if you’re pro-comments, is pretty cool.
• They just launched a way for your to use your own own domain–that’s YourName.com–which is great if you’re into having your name on things.
• Your address will be medium.com/@twitterhandle, if you don’t pay for a domain.

I like Medium but you have no control over appearance. It’s super intuitive and free, but yeah, it’ll always be “owned” in the sense that it is medium.com by Medium and not you (unless you host it yourself, which is a different, more complicated story).

It gives you more exposure because you can “tag” your posts so they show up in different collections on Medium.com and other people may find it and share your post.

This is a good option if you want more exposure, but aren’t concerned with having complete control or don’t care about making it your own and just want a place to write.

Verdict: in the free and modern options, WordPress brings more flexibility and control while Medium is prettier with less hassle.

Free + Simple

Blogger

This is the blogging purgatory owned by Google. My advice here: don’t do it. It’s ugly, limited, and, well, I have a moderately low view of Google because they could kill their products at any moment.

I have never used blogger but have an immediate gut reaction of “I can’t trust this” when I see .blogspot in the domain name (which is unfair, but hey, at least I’m honest).

This is most certainly not modern, and doesn’t even deserve any other analysis.

Verdict: stay far away.

Simple + Modern

Squarespace

This is the part where free falls away. Squarespace will set you back around $8 – $10 a month. We are knee-deep into this at the Shirkman household. Niki uses it, we use it for our (semi-defunct but still relevant) podcast, and for our ministry site.

It’s easy (mostly), beautiful (definitely), and, in my opinion, worth every penny because of the tech support alone.

When you pay for online services, they help you! Which is amazing, because tossing your computer out a window because you don’t understand why your blog is broken is a real thing.

And, Squarespace throws in YourName.com for free if you pay for a year in advance. If you use the code GIMME10 you get 10% off your first year if you pay upfront. So what would be $96 is now $86.40 or ~$7 / month.

For a quarter a day you get prime internet real-estate with support, tons of free built in themes, and the ability to customize your hearts content.

You can have a 14-day free trial of Squarespace to check it out and see if it is what you’re looking for. Again, not free, but meets the novice blogger’s needs and then some in my opinion, plus all the help you can ask for via their tech support.

WordPress Self-Hosted (For Masichists Only)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the option I’m currently using, which is WordPress Self-Hosted, also known as WordPress.org. You have to pay for hosting and a domain name (that means a place to put all of your files and something like YourName.com) to pull it off.

This is the most professional option, and the option your favorite bloggers (ncluding this one) likely use. Unfortunately it’s a nightmare because if anything breaks you have to figure it out on your own. That doesn’t happen too often, but if you are into tweaking and adjusting and trying to make things perfect, you’ll absolutely want to curl up into a little ball and cry at some point.

If you’re really into freedom in the blog design sense, this will do everything you ever dreamed of, and the only cost is your sanity as you wade through the pool of utter confusion trying to tweak tiny settings and then blowing everything up accidentally in the process.

I use Site5.com which is a fine hosting services. It’s not the fastest, but it is pretty reliable and is a great place for someone to start. As long as you don’t become Seth Godin big overnight, you’ll have no worries here as far as your website not crashing down into a heap of burning flames because you didn’t pay for enough bandwidth.

Hosting will cost you about $5 / month if you pay for two years in advance, which is a big commitment for a beginner, but go ahead and put your money where your mouth is and let that financial commitment drive you to consistency. There are a few other hosting services that are cheaper than $5 / month, but now we’re just splitting hairs.

I have my domain name registered through Hover.com (but Site5 can do this, and it’s free for your first year). I prefer Hover’s interface for domain names, and they incredible support that will get you all set up if you have any questions.

Verdict: Squarespace if you want ease and help at a slightly higher cost or WordPress Self-Hosted via Site5 if you want complete control, even if it drives you crazy.

Wrapping Up

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you choose. Mega-successful blogs like postsecret are on blogger and people read it. I just hate happen to hate Blogger because I’m a sucker for good design.

The easy part is fiddling with what site you’ll use, the hard part is writing and doing it consistently.

Writing and posting publicly in this way has helped me refine my thoughts and think more clearly more so than basically anything else.

If you’re considering writing a blog, I really hope you’ll write and write consistently (even if that’s once a week) because the Internet always has space for people sharing things they are passionate about. If you do start a blog, I’d love to know (and know what platform chose!) so send me a tweet with the link so I can check it out.

Having your own corner of the Internet is an amazing gift. Steward it well.

The post The Best Options for Starting Your Own Blog appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I’m a chronic checker of email and social media, and though these things can be beneficial, they can also be an absolutely ridiculous waste of time.

So I came up with a list of things I can do instead of checking my email or Twitter or Facebook. I hope it’ll be helpful.

It’s hard to flat out stop something, so let that checky urge be a cue for you to do something different. Also, it can’t be too hard of a thing or you won’t do it instead.

So, turn your phone face down (unless the task tells you otherwise) and give something on this list a shot when you’re tempted to waste time on the social network de jour.

Save the good ones. Print this list. Add it to your home screen. Steal it and add your own. However you want to use it, it’s yours.1

1. Pray for wisdom.
2. Text a friend to encourage them.
3. Read one page of a book.
4. Drink a glass of water.
5. Get up and walk around the room.
6. Come up with one idea.
7. Stretch.
8. Write one line in your journal.
9. Ask someone nearby how their day is going.
10. Doodle.
11. Take a picture of something. 2
12. Clean your workspace.
13. Add something to your bucket list.
14. Write down a task you might forget.
15. Check your calendar for upcoming events.
16. Take five deep breaths.
17. Offer to help someone around you.
18. Thank God for another day.
19. Write down three things you’re grateful for.
20. Edit a picture you took.
21. Delete an app you don’t use from your phone.
22. Start that thing you don’t want to start.
23. Find a piece of clutter to give away.
24. Write a note to someone, just because.
25. Do a push up.
26. Clean something small–like your glasses or computer screen or water bottle.
27. Pick one thing you have to get done today and start it.
28. Read a quote you’ve saved.
29. Memorize the first few words of a passage of scripture.
30. Think of a mistake you made today that you can improve on.
31. Write your first line of your morning manifesto.
32. Re-read part of your morning manifesto.
33. Think of a habit you want to start.
34. Break down a hard task by taking the first tiny step you can take to tackle it.
35. Make a to-do list.
36. Turn on your favorite song.
37. Read an old journal entry.
38. Take a minute to think about a problem you haven’t solved yet.
39. Write down a childhood memory.

The post 39 Things You Can Do in 60 Seconds Instead of Checking Social Media appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

We all have the same amount of hours in the day, but we will all have a different number of days.

In the end, however, all of our clocks will eventually strike midnight. The carriage becomes a pumpkin, the spirit leaves the body, and that’s that. For now. 1

Day to day we are all equal, but how we spend our days is where the difference lies. A woman who dies at 60, who spent her days wisely, surely had a fuller life than a man who lives to 100 and squandered the majority of his days.

In The Focus Course, Shawn Blanc reminds us of the reality that everyone is using their time somehow.

Next time you go to the store, look around at everyone you see. Each one of those people has been spending all 168 hours of their week ever since they were born. I’ve been spending all 168 hours of my week, every week, since I was born. And so have you. You don’t get to not spend your time doing anything while you wait to decide what it is you want to spend your time on. Those moments will be spent, one way or another.

Everyone spends all of their time–every day. That’s a simple observation, but it struck me. No human is exempt from using their time.

We can spend time, invest our time, squander our time. We say we “save time”–perhaps through taking shortcuts or using “life hacks”–but there is no way to store up that saved time. I can’t take an hour from today and tack it onto the weekend. All of it, today only.

I sound the budgeting trumpet frequently, but I poorly budget my time. I do the things I need to, have systems to take care of my most important tasks, set reminders so I don’t forget the tiny details throughout the day, but I rarely enter a day with a clear picture of how I’ll ideally spend my time.

More often than not, time happens to me instead of me making things happen in my time.

___

Time may be money but money is not time. At the end of our lives, we can’t pay to tack on a few more hours or days of life.

Midnight is coming. It always does.

This isn’t about carpe diem. It’s about a revelation. A realization that each of us is using our time somehow, each and every day, and that we have no choice but to spend it. Time is more Brewster’s Millions than Groundhog Day–it’s all getting spent and there’s no doing it over.

So what do we do about this reality? To fix the problem, we need to find the problem. Let’s get to work.

___

How to Start Spending Your Time More Wisely

1. Track (How You’re Spending Your Time)

Spend a week tracking how you spend your time. The more precise the better–I’d say if you can track what you do each half hour, that would be a great start, but getting down to fifteen minute chunks is even better.

This process is hard. I tracked my time for the aforementioned Focus Course. It’s a brutal process to precisely document your day, and I think the process can be skewed because you’re tracking your time. I don’t want to write down that I just spent 30 aimless minutes scrolling through a news feed. That’s embarrassing. But it’s reality. So write it down.

You could use a spreadsheet, a notepad, or another app–whatever is easiest for you.

I used Drafts and this key–which will automatically install if you have Drafts on your iPhone or iPad–which inserts the time in HH:MM format and made tracking a bit easier (but by no means easy).

Doing this for a full week will give you a better feel for how you’re regularly spending your time.

2. Evaluate (What You Spent Your Time Doing)

Once you’ve tracked your time, now comes the ugly part–evaluation.

• Are you spending time doing things you want?
• How are you wasting your time?
• Are you working enough?
• Are you working too much?
• Are you ignoring your family?
• Are you doing things that move you toward your goals?
• What are the things you want to be doing but don’t do?
• What are the things you want to stop doing but haven’t?

It’s eye opening. Perhaps encouraging for you, or maybe a bit sickening. As our School House Rock friends remind us, “Knowledge is power”.

Look for the activities you did daily. Identify changes to make. Highlight the areas you’re pleased with. And then, let’s start adjusting.

3. Adjust (to Spend Your Time in an Ideal Way)

Now that we know how we’re spending our time and in what ways we would like to improve, we start taking baby steps.

Be gracious. You’re not going to nail this in one fell swoop.

Start with one area that you can improve on. Maybe it’s a morning or evening routine.

This week, swap one thing you want to stop doing (or spend less time doing) with one thing you wan to spend more time doing. That’s it–one thing for this week. Once you’ve swapped one activity for another, wait a week, help that new change stick, and next week make another small change.

I always find it easier to swap something good in place of something bad, instead of just trying to drop it outright. When it comes to time, there is no elimination, only replacement.

You can stop checking your email 20 times a day, but you’re going to have the urge, and what will you do when it hits you?

Make sure you create some times of cushion or margin as you draw up an ideal schedule and begin making changes. Expect unexpected things every day.

Wrapping Up

Years of bad habits won’t change overnight. But a little progress each day will make a huge difference at the end of a year. Compound interest is a force to be reckoned with.

The process of budgeting your time is harder than budgeting your money.

We’ve only been wasting money for the majority of our adult lives, but we’ve perfected wasting time over our entire lives.

The trenches of squandered seconds are deeply dug. You can’t climb out of this pit in a day. But each moment we have a choice. We can change our habits. We have control over our choices and how we spend our time.

We don’t know how many days we’ll have, but if we’re breathing today, we can do our best to make the most of it.

The post How to Start Spending Your Time More Wisely appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

One of those things is searching the web for a person or term I come across but I’m not familiar with on iOS.

If you want to look something up without using Siri1 , which, is handy but in general quite shameful in public place, you have a couple of options.

Let’s say you’re reading an article in an app that isn’t Safari–Reeder, Pocket, Instapaper, any news app–and you want to look up a person the article mentions. There are three options. And one that you’re probably not using takes the cake for fastest, but it’s a bit hidden.

Option 1 – The Classic

1. Tap and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
2. Tap Copy
3. Press the home button to go to the home screen
4. Find Safari
5. Open Safari
6. Tap on the address bar
7. Delete the current content in the bar
8. Tap and hold or double tap
9. Tap Paste
10. Tap Go

That’s not hard, likely because you’ve done it hundreds of times. It’s just 10 crazy steps for a simple search. We can do better. We must do better.

Option 2 – The Enlightened

1. Tap and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
2. Tap Copy
3. Press the home button to go to the home screen
4. Pull down
5. Click and hold or double tap
6. Tap Paste
7. Tap Search Web

30% fewer taps, but there’s one more option that beats the socks off of both of these options, but it’s tucked away in the far corners of iOS.

Option 3 – The Hacker

1. Click and highlight the word(s) you want to search for
2. Tap Define
3. In the bottom right corner tap Search the Web

That’s it! Crazy, right? It’s not even close in terms of how much better this is than the other two, more commonly used, options.

I just came across this tip fairly recently, so I’m still getting used to using it, but it’s so much faster than the other two options it’s hard to believe they all accomplish the same task.

The post A Secret, 3x Faster Way to Search the Web on iOS appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I’ve never been a faithful journaler.

For a season, I did a good job of writing down prayer requests, what I was learning, and the occasional event. That season was short lived.

But for nearly the last month, I’ve written down something in the form of a journal every single day.

Not bad for an unfaithful journaler. Here’s why and how I picked journaing back up.

Why Should We Journal?

The benefits abound, and it’s amazing how journaling can benefit us in relation to the past, present, and future.

To Pause and Reflect (The Present)

It’s easy to live each day, keeping your head down, doing the things you need to, punching in and punching out for work, making dinner, taking care of the kids, and then you look up one day and your kids are going to college, your 20 pounds overweight, you haven’t read the Bible or prayed in weeks. You don’t recognize yourself any more.

The daily grind can keep us from reflecting on how we’re doing and what’s really going on.

Journaling is an opportunity to pause, reflect, and correct course as necessary.

In a busy, constantly connected world, it’s hard to take a moment to ourselves, move beyond just treading water, and see how we’re really doing.

Journaling is that quiet opportunity to have a meeting with yourself and make a few observations.

To Learn and Prepare (The Future)

Once we take the time to observe, we have an opportunity to learn.

It’s hard to judge our progress if we don’t measure it.

You know the old “measure twice, cut once” rule of woodworking?1 It applies in life and journaling too.

One bad day doesn’t mean our life is falling apart, and one good day doesn’t mean we’re on track to do all we hoped.

Consistent journaling allows us to compile a history of the ebbs and flows of life. How we’re doing, what we’re thining about, struggling with, and looking forward to.

It’s an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, build on our successes, and continue down the path of becoming the people we want to be.

To Look Back and Remember (The Past)

The faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

Humans are a forgetful breed. At times, I can hardly remember why I walked into another room.

Journaling allows us to look back and remember laughing with our spouse, kind things people said, and, most importantly, the goodness and providence of God.

Memories are meant to be cherished. Forgotten memories are impossible to relish.

Everyone has something in their life to look back and be grateful for. Journaling helps surface that gratitude more frequently.

Why Don’t We Journal? (and How Do We Fix It?)

Ok, so maybe you’re sold on journaling. But why do most people have the good intentions of keeping a journal yet fail to follow through?

It Takes Time

Like every activity in the world, journaling takes time. The problem is, it’s the natural resource most of us (claim) we are most acutely lacking.

Thinking about filling up a whole journal is daunting.

But what if we started with just writing down a single line? That seems doable.

We’re an ambitious bunch, and most people, when trying to form new habits, go way overboard.

You want to lose weight so you buy a gym pass, work out for 2 hours, and never go back again because you can’t walk right the next morning.

With journaling, start small. A sentence or two is a great start. At the end of a month, you have 30 more sentences than you did last month, and at the end of the year, you could have lines and lines filled.

Solution: Start small.

Write one line each day, and if you have an extra minute here and there, jot an extra line.

A sentence from every day of your year beats the socks off one mega paragraph from that one day. You’ll have a greater scope and view of your life and year if you jot it down bit by bit.

It Takes Effort

But what will you journal about? After deciding you’ll be committed to actually keeping a journal, knowing what you’ll write about is the next most difficult task.

This is an easy fix: have a set list of questions you can easily respond to in a moment that helps you evaluate your day, see where you can improve, go to bed grateful.

Solution: Create a list of questions

I recently mentioned a few questions I use to evaluate my day in my evening routine. I’ve since added one more. Here are the questions I answer at the end of each day. The first is about the past, the second concerns the present, the third helps me for the future, and the fourth is about preparing for the next day.

1. What did you accomplish today that was important?
2. What are two things you’re thankful for in your life right now?
3. What’s one thing you wish you did differently today that you can improve on in the future?
4. What is the one thing I could do tomorrow to make it a successful day?

It Takes Consistency

Journaling is only valuable if you do it consistently. For me, I need a reminder or I won’t do it, and I need it to be easy or I won’t follow through.

Solution: Set a reminder and have your questions pop-up

I’ve been using Day One to record my daily responses to my four questions. There’s an option to set a reminder so I get an alert at the end of my day to fill out my journal. Every day at 9:10pm, Day One tells me to do what I said I would do.

This little timer has helped me stay consistent and accountable to myself. Getting into the habit of keeping your journal at the same time each day makes faithfulness to your goal even easier.

I hop into Day One, type my Text Expander snippet which generates my four questions, and I take 60 seconds to fill out my mini-journal. That’s it. This is still a young habit for me, and I don’t want to do it. Four questions can improve my perspective and still give me something significant to look back on.

It Takes Organization

If you wrote your journal on scrap pieces of paper that you didn’t hold onto or organize, you’d be awfully frustrated when you wanted to go back and reference your notes from previous days.

A paper journal is the most classic way to keep a journal, but I don’t think it’s the easiest.

That’s why I suggest the aforementioned Day One.

Solution: Use Day One

Day One is absolutely gorgeous. The app is well-designed, available for Mac and iOS, has the ability to set reminders, use tags for simpler searching, favorite certain posts, add pictures, and add entries into the past.

Honestly, I’ve started using Day One in the way I used to use Evernote because it’s simpler to navigate and I’m more likely to actually go back and look through Day One. It syncs perfectly across devices, allows you to see the days you actually wrote something at a glance, and even imports location, time, and weather data if you’d like.

Day One is well worth the $5 on iOS and $10 for the Mac.

You can’t put a price on remembering your memories. If you could, I think it’d be for than $15.

Wrapping Up

Starting a journal is something you’ll never regret. You can start now or start 10 years from now and wish you’ve been doing it your entire life.

Start small, answer a few of the same questions every day, stay consistent by setting an alert, and use a beautiful app or journal to make the process more enjoyable.

You won’t regret it.

The post Why to Journal and How to Start appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I can’t tell my wife often enough how much better (and better off) I am because of her influence on my life.

Today she’s celebrating 27 years of living on this planet, and I wanted to share the significant lessons she’s helped me learn and ways she’s still helping me grow.

Acting Wisely

At times I have the sinful urge to give someone a piece of my mind (GSAPOMM), which, if it was a spiritual gift, I would be gladly exercising regularly.

Unfortunately, GSAPOMM isn’t exactly a loving or encouraging thing to do. So instead I just tell Niki I would like to GSAPOMM and she says something wise like,

“Is that a loving thing to do?” or “Do you think Jesus would give that person a piece of his mind?”

Sometimes I say, “I think in this situation Jesus just might do that,” but since I can’t be sure, I default to keeping that comment to myself.

Her helping me act wisely extends beyond stopping me from being an unloving jerk. She helps me make wise financial decisions, health decisions, and overall increases my wise decisions tenfold. 

Balancing Grace and Truth

When it comes to grace and truth, I lean heavily toward truth. Niki, however, walks the tightrope beautifully, and has perfected the hug of grace with the nudge of truth.

She tells it like it is, but in a way that is fully loving. It’s an amazing balance she’s struck, and a perfect quality for a wife and mother. She exemplifies Jesus in the way she loves people with these two traits held in perfect tension.

Bringing Joy Everywhere

I laugh the most with Niki. We love to laugh and we do so together frequently. She also loves celebrating people, bringing even more joy and fun to everyone around.

She’s an easy person to have fun with because of how she lives out the 1 Thessalonians 5:16 mantra to “Rejoice always”. Our life is filled with joy in so many ways because of her orientation toward joy. What a difference in makes to lean in that direction and let it overflow into the lives of others.

How to Be an Encourager

No one encourages me more than Niki. She affirms me in a myriad of ways every single day. She regularly writes me notes, tells me how grateful she is for me, and specifically tells me ways she’s seeing me grow.

I feel like I can take on anything when she reminds me of the gifts God has given me. She’s a tangible example of God’s love for me in how she helps me see the best in me.

Her belief in me is so obvious, and she invests in me and my development by asking thoughtful questions, investing her personal money in helping me grow through books and resources, and goes out of her way to help me thrive.

I can encourage people better because of how she encourages me.

Increased Compassion

Compassion surely wasn’t the trait that won my wife over when we were dating. If compassion was a class, I would have been reading the Cliff’s Notes and barely skating by.

Because I care for Niki, I can’t help but be compassionate toward her, and seeing that being compassionate isn’t so bad, it made it a whole lot easier to extend that toward others.

But her compassion for others overflows, and I’m easily swept away by the love and care she feels for others.

I think, with her help, I could at least pass a class on compassion today.

Resting Well

I’m not a workaholic, but I could easily do something work related every day of the week. Niki helps me take a sabbath by pursuing godly rest herself.

She does an amazing job of doing things that give her life–like baking, hand lettering, going on walks, reading a book) and that reminds me that I need to do things that give me life so I can be fully charged for the week ahead.

She is so intentional about us resting well as a family to honor the Lord and to take care of ourselves, and I rest better because of her and whenever she’s around.

Seeing the Other Side

When I see things my way, I can rarely see how another human could possibly see things differently. Turns out, my way isn’t the only way (and certainly isn’t always the right way).

Niki helps me see what others could be thinking or feeling, because her and I approach things differently. She has helped me see things more clearly countless times. I appreciate her grace and wisdom in showing me the other side. (As an added bonus, she never rubs it in when she’s right).

Walking Closely with the Lord

I greatly admire Niki’s walk with the Lord. She faithfully reads the Word, journals her prayers and observations, and is constantly encouraging me through what she’s reading.

She’s almost always the first to suggest we start family worship after dinner, and the first to propose praying about something when we need more grace or wisdom or courage than we currently have on hand.

She boldly shares her faith with others, and she prayers fervently for the people in her life. I personally benefit in significant ways because of her pursuit of Christlikeness.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, I’ve got it really good, and I’m different man because of the years we spent together. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and she’s done all these things in a mere 27 years. Impressive.

She’s the definition of a great woman, and I thank God he’s given her to me for the journey we’re on together.

An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.
Proverbs 31:10

The post How a Great Woman Changes Your Life appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

After a mere three weeks, I’m already going to the well of fatherhood for spiritual analogies.

Our daughter has made the transition to parenthood incredibly easy for us–she only cries when something is wrong–90% of the time it means her diaper is dirty or she’s hungry, which are also the only times I cry.

The thing is, as she’s crying and one of us is holding her and getting ready to alleviate her hunger or discomfort, she often starts sobbing uncontrollably. We’re ready to meet her needs, we know what’s wrong, but she doesn’t have the awareness yet to understand she just needs to wait a few more seconds.

“I know, sweetie. I know what you need. Your crying can’t speed up the process any more and your flailing is actually making this more difficult than it needs to be. Just trust me, I’m working on it. I’m here.”

I say those things (sometimes not so patiently, and many times, surely, she doesn’t hear me at all over her wailing) but it doesn’t help yet.

One day it will. One day she’ll have a better understanding, a greater and deeper trust. She’ll realize that she doesn’t need to cry harder or longer or louder. She just needs to trust her father and let him do what he can but she can’t at that moment.

The Father is in control. He knows what he is doing. We may cry and scream and say we can’t take it any more, but we’re in His hands and He has not left us. His job is caring for us, our job is trusting Him to care for us.

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
–Matthew 7:11

We who are evil still know how to love and care for our children. We want to give them good things, and at the very least we want to ease their pain and comfort them. How much more does the Father in heaven desire to do that for us!

Cry, sure. Make your need known. He asks us to do that. But losing control because our need hasn’t been met yet and flailing about thinking that will make it better won’t fix it.

Present the need. Call to the Father. Ask for His help. And then let Him do what only He can do.

The post Crying for the Father’s Help appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

There’s a classic 60s song by The Who called Pinball Wizard about a blind kid who “sure plays a mean pinball.” I like to think of Alfred as channeling that kid and unleashing him on your Mac instead of some movie-adapted, silver-ball bouncing, quarter eater.

I’ve mentioned Alfred before in my list of tools, but I haven’t gone on to explain why it’s such an amazing app.

If you’re a Mac user, perhaps you’ve used Spotlight (which you can open by clicking Command – Space). It’s a basically engine for your computer.

Spotlight has some great additional features too–beyond just searching for files–like currency conversion, contact lookup, launching applications, and more. But it can’t hang with Alfred, which is a super-charged launcher that does everything from searching specific websites to saving all the things you’ve recently copied.

You can try out Alfred for free, but to really get to the next level you’ll need the Powerpack for 17£ (~$27). Here are my favorite Alfred features and workflows.

Clipboard History

I don’t know how I lived without this. Copy and paste is a function most grandmas are familiar with, but having the ability to go back a few copies to something you recently Command (?) – C’d is a huge convenience. I do this when I write a long bit of text on the web, in case a form doesn’t submit properly and I lose all my work.

You can set the clipboard history to remember the things you’ve copied and pasted as far back as 3 months, or set it to forget everything every 24 hours. You can scroll back and then use a keyboard shortcut (like Command – 7 if I wanted the grinning emoji in this case) to bring that item back as the current item copied to your clipboard.

For security, you also have the option of ignoring apps like 1Password so it doesn’t get saved into your cliboard history.

With the Powerpack add-on, you can even search your clipboard history.

Emoji (Powerpack)

I’m a pretty big fan of emoji, and with this Emoji Search Alfred workflow, I just type in emoji and then search for the type I’m looking for. There isn’t an easy way to get to emoji on the Mac (other than going through Messages), so I love being able to search, copy, and paste the emoji I need through this workflow.

ESV Bible Search (Powerpack)

I love being able to search for keywords from the Bible if I’m thinking of a passage but can’t remember the book or verse number. This workflow enables searching through the ESV Bible with the shortcut esvs.1

Let’s say I type in esvs followed by the word trust. I’ll get a chronological list of verses like this.

If you know the passage and just want to copy it to your clipboard, just type esv and the book, chapter, and verse. If I type in esv Phil 1:21 I get:

Phil 1:21
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

1Password Integration (Powerpack)

Speaking of 1Password, you can connect Alfred with my favorite password manager to launch and fill websites right from your keyboard once you buy the Powerpack.

Just type in 1p and the name of your login, smash your enter key and watch your logins fill automatically. Crazy fast password filling.

You can also enable a setting called “Show in default results without keyword” which means you don’t have to type the 1p part and can get straight to typing in the website you want to launch and fill.

Ooopsie Focus (Powerpack)

The shortcut for adding a new task to Omnifocus is Control + Option + Command + Space, which is really handy. However, sometimes I don’t have the app open.

If I press the Quick Add shortcut and Omnifocus isn’t open, the Oopsie Focus shortcut, originally created by Shawn Blanc, will open Omnifocus and then the Quick Add window. It’s a nice catch that makes using Omnifocus even better.

Here’s a link to download the Alfred workflow for Oopsie Focus.

Spelling

I am an awful speller. Because the Internet exists, I don’t lose much sleep over it. Instead, if I’m writing something and I’m not sure how to spell a word, I trigger Alfred, type spell and then give slap in my best guess of the word I’m trying to spell correctly. 2

I have to check for the word restaurant3 just about every day.

Website Specific Searches (Powerpack)

One of my favorite workflows for Alfred is being able to search specific websites. I often want to reference old blog posts, but I don’t always remember the link.

So I type jshirk and then a few keywords, crush enter and Alfred brings up Safari with my website loaded with relevant search results based on the keyword I typed.

A few other favorite sites I use this for, some of which come built-in with Alfred, are:

• Amazon
• pons (for the Pons.com dictionary)
• stock (for stocksnap.io images)
• wiki (for Wikipedia)
• IMDB
• rotten (for RottenTomatoes)

Wrapping Up

If I’m honest, I don’t always remember all of these shortucts that Alfred offers.

Using your mouse isn’t a crime, but it’s a whole lot faster to use your keyboard. Let Alfred do the heavy lifting and be amazed at how much easier it is to find information, launch applications, and take care of things, like the best butlers do.

To find more workflows others have created, check out the Alfred ForumsHere and Packal.org. Here are the workflows I mentioned that aren’t built into Alfred (e.g. 1Password integration, spelling, clipboard history) in one spot:

• Emoji Search
• ESV Bible Search
• Oopsie Focus

The post Using Alfred: Becoming a Mac Keyboard Wizard appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

With a newborn, our picture count is skyrocketing. A little person that looks like you is an exciting subject to photography.

We want to share those picture with our friends and family, but we don’t want to go overboard on social networks and we want to have a sense of privacy as well.

We’ve been using iCloud Photo Sharing, which is built into the iPhone and iPad operating system, and it feels like the perfect solution for us.

1. We don’t have to text the pictures to grandparents individually each day.
2. We can add (or remove) people at will.
3. People can still like and comment on photos, as long as they are an Apple user.
4. You don’t need an Apple device to view the photos.

Here’s how to set up a photo stream to share with your family and best buds.

1. Head to the Photos app and click Shared at the bottom.
2. Press the + in the top left corner or New Shared Album at the bottom.
3. Name your album and click Next.
4. Choose who you want to share it with by typing their name, email address, or phone number and then clicking on that person. You can add multiple people this way. (Note: only Apple device owners can gain access through this link.)
5. Tap Create.
6. Open your album and click the + in the gray box to add photos.

If there are (sadly) some windows or Android users in your life whom you still love in spite of their device choices, you can send them a public link to view the photos.

1. In the shared album, click People in the top right corner.
2. Scroll down to the Public Website option and click the button so it is green or enabled.
3. Click the Share Link button that appears after enabling the public website and email or message it to whoever you please.

Anyone who has that link can see the photos, so make sure you only share it with those you want to see it. Make sure they also understand anyone with the link can see it so they don’t post it publicly.

You can turn off the public website in the same area where you turned it on. As the album creator you can also continue to add or remove people.

If you turn the public link off and decide to turn it back on later, it appears the link stays the same, so once it is public there is no way to get a new link–you’d have to start a new album.

You can also unsubscribe from an album that has been shared with you.

The post Photo Sharing Made Simple: Using iCloud Photo Sharing appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

It’s not hard to warm up in the summer.

In fact, if you’re in a part of the world where air temperatures exceed body temperatures, you do everything you can to stay cool.

But in the fall and spring and you see glorious sunlight through streaming through your window, it seems to be as warm as a summer day.

When you head outside, however, you quickly find yourself deceived. The air is cooler than you anticipated and the sun isn’t quite as toasty as you hoped.

But even on those days, if you can stand the coolness long enough, you begin to warm up. You feel the rays. Warmth slowly soaks into your pores.

You can’t rush the process. You can’t make the sun warm you up any faster. But if you give it time, it happens. But there is no substitue for time–it’s the only way to truly feel the warmth.

Spending time reading the Bible is exactly the same. It is the Word of God. It warms us as it reveals who God is and who we are in light of him.

I often want to feel the warmth instantly. To see God revealed quickly. I want a microwave-type heat instead of the slow warmth that the Word offers.

But God’s word is meant to be taken slowly. To be meditated on. We must let it warm us up. We can’t rush it. We can’t force it to elicit warmth that can only be felt by dwelling in it, mulling it over, dawdling with the Father.

I know this is true. I’ve experienced this truth. And yet I still open the Word and expect instant warmth.

Just as the sun’s warmth is (essentially) always the same, so too is the Word always the same. It’s our environment and orientation that changes how it feels as we come in contact with it.

Come and rest in the Word. Take it slowly. The effects will come. It can’t help but change us as we approach it with reverence and expectation as the Holy Spirit works.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
–Hebrews 4:12

The post Experiencing the Warmth of the Word appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

I’ve shared about morning manifestos, starting the morning off with meditation, and about my weekly routines of making sure all my bases are covered, but I’ve never shared about my evening routine.

It’s hard to share about something you don’t have.

Normally my evening routine has been to watch an episode of The West Wing with my wife, floss and brush, and pass out with an alarm set for seven and a half hours later.

That’s pretty weak as far as good habits and meaningful ends to a day go.

I’ve been challenged by Shawn Blanc’s The Focus Course to start being more intentional in the way I live. One of the first assignments in the 40-day course is to simply set out your outfit for the next day.

I often experience decision fatigue, and even making minor decisions the night before–like what I’ll wear the next day and what we’ll eat for breakfast–help my morning start off more smoothly.

Another assignment in The Focus Course was to write down a significant thing I accomplished today and two things I’m grateful for. Those are two incredibly easy questions that orient my heart and mind in a good direction before the end of the day. I’ve also half-heartedly tried to start journaling in Day One more frequently, with, as you can imagine, weak results.

So, here’s the new evening routine I’m putting into effect:

1. Set out my clothes for the next day. I have an alarm set on Due to remind me every day at 9pm to do that. I check the weather on my phone, snag the clothes out of my closet and put them in the bathroom so I’m ready to roll after my shower in the morning.
2. Record in Day One my accomplishment for the day and two things I’m grateful for. I think it’s neat to be able to look back and see the things I’ve accomplished and to build off of the momentum, but that simple moment of reflection alone leads to greater joy.
3. Decide the one thing I must get done tomorrow. I’ve dabbled with three most important things, I’ve made long lists, and it rarely all works out. In order to simplify, I’m shooting for one thing. One big, my-day-was-a-huge-success-because-I-did-this type task that helps me move forward and keep focusing on important things.

Day One is on my homescreen now. I set a Text Expander snippet, which syncs its snippets with Day One on iOS, to plop out the three questions:

1. What did you accomplish today that was important?
2. What are two things you’re thankful for in your life right now?
3. What is the one thing I could do tomorrow to make it a successful day?

I type my shortcut (xend, as in end of day) and that populates into Day One. That creates less friction and means I’m more likely to respond. I get a reminder from Day One at 9:10pm, just after I set out my clothes, and I plop in my responses.

Two reminders, three steps. A simple enough routine that I’m hoping to build an expand on to help put my heart on a path of greater joy, gratitude, and purpose and to live my life with greater intentionality.

I’ve long tried to steward well my days, but I’ve been throwing away my nights. All time needs to be cared for.

Dost though love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life’s made of.
–Benjamin Franklin

The post Starting an Evening Routine appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

However, sometimes I need a quick reminder to do something at a certain time. Because we live in Europe, many times that thing I need to do later is message a family member or friend in the States. because of the 6-hour time difference, I try to be a little more courteous and wait until they are awake, 1 but I don’t want to forget to send the message.

The reality is, if I don’t write something down or set an alert, I’ll probably forget to do it. Now that we’re in the stage of taking care of a newborn, the lack of sleep combined with slew of new tasks to keep a human alive keep me constantly disoriented. But some things, like “Take out the trash full of smelly diapers” or “Pick up batteries at the drug store” seem too miniscule to put onto a digital list or task manager like Omnifocus.

Federico Viticci shares:

I don’t want to save a timer for my pasta or a reminder to call my dad in the same service I use to keep track of articles and collaborative work projects.

That’s where Due comes to the rescue.

Due is a fancy little alarm app that allows you to set alerts to remind you when to do something. It’s essentially a glorified alarm app, with a whole lot more under the hood.

So what makes Due better than your standard-fare alarm on the iPhone? I’m glad you asked.

History Tracking

If I just set a normal alarm on my iPhone, I’d never be able to go back and see if I actually did the thing I was reminding myself to do. However, Due keeps a log of all the tasks you’ve completed.

That means I can go back and reference or search through the list for things like “Mail: IRS Change of Address form” and confirm that I did it. A tiny detail that brings a lot of peace of mind.

Quick Input and Natural Language Input

When you create an alarm in Due, you can quickly choose a predefined set of times, like 9am, 12pm, 4pm, or 9pm, and +1 hour, +30 minutes, +1 day, etc.2 That makes setting an alarm super quick.

You can also use natural language to type in your alarm. If you say 3pm Friday, Due will understand and ask if you want to set the alarm for then. You could also say 2 weeks, 4 months, 1 year, 95 hours–any unit of time measurement in minutes or longer is good to go with Due.

Recurring Tasks

Any time you create a new alarm, Due has a setting to create a recurring alert. I’m trying to build some new habits and start my mornings off with more focus and fewer distractions, so I set a recurring alert in Due for 9pm every night as a reminder to set out my clothes for the next morning. A simple task that doesn’t belong in a task manager but that Due handles perfectly.

Persistent Reminders

I love that Due nags me to finish something if I haven’t completed it. The default setting is that every single minute it will remind me to do the task until I mark it as complete or snooze it for later. I changed the settings from auto-alerting me every minute (which no doubt will not let you rest until you do) to the more manageable every five minutes.

You can turn off auto snooze completely, or set it to remind you every minute, every 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes or every hour.

Pull Down to Search and Create

If you have a long list of alarms and you’re not sure if you already have something set up, you can search Due. Just pull down from the main app screen and start typing. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can create a new alarm from your search, which is a genius feature I haven’t seen anywhere else.

So, if you want to create a new alert, you just push the plus sign on the right hand sign. If you were looking for an old alarm, the results will appear at the bottom and you can edit them, mark them complete, or delete them from there.

Snoozing

Sometimes I set an alarm to remind me to do something, but my schedule may have changed a bit throughout the day. When you get an alert on your lock screen, you can swipe over and tell Due to alert you again in an hour. You can change the Notification Snooze time in the settings. I changed mine to 30 minutes instead of an hour.

Sync Across Devices

Due is a universal app for iPad and iPhone, and you can sync your alarms across devices so that wherever you are, you’ll get your alerts. There’s also a Mac version if you want to get real syncy with it.

I’m not currently using sync because 95% of the time I have my iPhone with me, and since my iPad isn’t always connected to the Internet, there’s a chance it wouldn’t sync with my latest Due alarms. I also don’t want a cacophony of alerts going off for my reminders on all my devices, so I prefer to use Due exclusively on my iPhone.

Wrapping Up

Due App helps automate my intentionality, so I can remember when someone is going to a doctor’s appointment or for another special occasion that came to mind that I don’t want to forget to take action on.

Perhaps you could get away with using the built in timer on your phone, but it’s not as convenient or insistent as Due. It’s so easy to set alarms for sometime in the future with Due, which the iOS timer app can’t handle if that task is more than 7 days away.

At $5, Due is a bit steep for an app if you just think of it as a fancy timer. But if you integrate it into your workflow in the right way, it quickly shows its worth.

As a final note, I thought to unlock all of the features I had to pay $5 for the app and then an additional $3. However, that’s not the case. If you are buying Due for the first time, just click restore purchases and the $5 price tag unlocks everything. 3

Get Due for $5 on the App Store.

The post Due: Making Sure You Never Forget a Tiny Task appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

We recently picked up a camera to document the forthcoming life of our in-utero baby, and it was time for me to learn the basics so I could actually use this thing. Here’s to moving beyond the automatic modes into the deep end of higher-quality photography.

As I begin, I should note that I feel as qualified to write about these things as Leonard DiCaprio was to assume the role of a doctor in Catch Me If You Can–I’m not sure I can do much other than say, “I concur,” with what I’ve read in other places. I’m going to distill what I’ve picked up and try to make it clearer without being wrong.

This won’t be a perfect or fancy description, and it may not even be technically how it works, but I wanted to create a way to explain to normal humans what the different settings do on a camera. Let’s get to work.

The Three Settings You Need to Learn – ISO, Aperture (f/stop), Shutter Speed

Aperture / f-stop

Aperture is a fancy word for how much light the lens lets in. This is measured in something fancy called an f-stop, which normally looks like this: f/2.2. The smaller the number, the more light that is let in. You can think of it like the lens starting out as open as possible, then as you move on to higher numbers the lens allows less and less light in, until it shrinks down to the size of a pin hole.

Notice that the lower f-stop has a more open aperture, while the higher f-stop (f/16) has a much more closed aperture. Photo courtesy of Mohylek 

Practically, this means that if you have low light, you should use an f-stop with a lower number. A lower f-stop also means things close to you (the foreground) will be in focus while things in the background will be out of focus, giving you that sweet blurred effect that makes things up front pop.

Here’s a photo with a low aperture (f/2.8) and a focused foreground (up-close) very blurry background. This photo has a shallow depth of field.

In slightly fancier terms, f-stop/ aperture also determines depth of field. Depth of field is another way of saying, “How far away are things in focus?” A shallow depth of field means only things close up are in focus, a greater depth of field means things further away are also in focus. 

I’m sure there is an awesome, science answer for why this happens, but I’m happy to know:

Low f-stop (~f/1 – f/3) = lots of light and good portraits with blurry backgrounds

Lower f-stop is better for portraits, because the background is blurred (as long as you’re focusing on something up-close), but you need to make sure you have enough light or the photo will turn out too dark.

This photo has a greater depth of field, so things further away are more in focus.

A higher f-stop is better for landscape shots so you can get everything you’re shooting at in sharp focus.

Shutter Speed

This is probably the easiest concept to understand, because the numbers can be easily explained in plain English.1 Shutter speed is measured in seconds or fractions of a second. So, 1/500 means that the lens opens and shuts 2 in one-five-hundreth of a second. You can move from very quickly, say 1/4000, to something really long like multiple seconds or even minute-long shutter speeds.

Fast shutter speeds–1 / a big number–means things will be caught in the action. If you took a picture of a fan that was spinning quickly, and you couldn’t make out the single blades by your eye, a camera at 1/500 could catch the individual blades. Fast shutter speed is great for sports photos or moving kids.

The photo on the left shows what it looks like to use a slow shutter speed (1 second+). The photo on the right uses a faster shutter speed (but not fast enough to have the cars completely focused.

However, if you have a fast shutter speed, you need to make sure you have plenty of light, or a higher ISO number and/or a low f-stop number (around f/2). That’s because the shutter doesn’t have much time to take in light. If the aperture is more closed (a higher f-stop) then all the light that your camera is getting needs to come through a small opening in your camera in 1/500 of a second.

If you have a slow shutter speed (anything slower than 1/50 and then up into the seconds) you probably need to have the camera on a tripod or surface where a human isn’t holding it. Otherwise, everything will be blurry because the camera is trying to take a picture of exactly what it sees over the entire period while the lens is open. A tripod is sturdier than the most still human 100% of the time.

A few more examples with shutter speed: if you want to make rivers and waterfalls look like they are rushing, use a slower shutter speed (making sure you have a tripod). This rushed water effect happens because everything else in the photo is still, but the water is moving, and because the camera has a multi-second shutter speed, it makes the water look like it’s moving, even in a still photo.

This photo shows a waterfall using a slow shutter speed for the rushing water effect.

If you want to see the water from a water balloon suspended in midair just after it was popped, use a fast shutter speed to get the droplets frozen as the fall.

ISO

A group called the International Standards Organization create, wait for it, international standards for film photography. Before digital cameras, film had different ratings according to how much light the shots were likely to be exposed to. If memory serves, ISO 400 and 800 were common for the classic point and shoots of the 90s.

Basically, the ISO setting just tells the camera how sensitive to be to light. That means ISO can be a helpful factor in making sure you can actually see what you’re taking a picture of based on the light you’re working with.

The lowest ISO number (100 on our camera) is best when you have plenty of light, like direct sunlight outdoors. The ISO number then doubles as you move up–100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, and so on. The higher the number, the more the camera will compensate for a lack of light.

If you’re indoors, you’ll want to move the ISO number higher so that the photos aren’t too dark. Ideally, you’ll always have it on the lowest ISO possible for your situation. ISO and image quality or graininess are inversely correlated–as the ISO goes up, the image quality goes down.

ISO is probably the least important setting because it doesn’t change how your picture will turn out, other than if it is light or dark enough. You can add light when editing a photo as well, which is beyond what the goal of this post is. ISO is more of a “set it and forget it” for the situation you’re in, and then you’ll tweak the other two settings more frequently.

Other Helpful Tips

It’s easier to edit a photo that is a bit too dark than one that is too light. It’s easier to add light than it is to take it away.

Don’t always center things in your photos. There’s a thing called “rule of thirds” which basically means, don’t center things in your photos.

It’s easier to crop a photo to take something out. It’s impossible to uncrop it and add someone in3

Fancy cameras that have big lenses that zoom don’t take the best pictures, because lenses can’t be adjusted perfectly to take the same quality of pictures at each range. So, a lens that doesn’t zoom at all (or doesn’t zoom much) will probably take better pictures than ones that do.

There are lots of settings on cameras to prioritize different settings over others. Sometimes T priority is used which stands for “Time priority” or shutter speed. A priority is aperture priority, which is the light let in, measured by the f-stop.

Try browsing Flickr.com to see other photographers’ photos for inspiration, but also to check their settings. When you scroll down, you’ll see the settings in the bottom right corner, so you can get a feel for how different settings change pictures.

You’ll always be able to take better pictures using manual settings instead of automatic, because the camera doesn’t know what your goal of the photo is. If you never move beyond automatic settings, you’ll never be pleased with your fancy camera.

The post Photography for Complete Beginners appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

• The car won’t start.
• The washer is broken.
• My boss needs a report by the end of the day.
• My taxes are due tomorrow.

For many of us who are knowledge workers,1 our email inboxes and message notifications often dictate our schedules, our priorities, and what we’re going to achieve for the day.

Stephen Covey broadly popularized an idea originally attributed to president Dwight Eisenhower. It’s a matrix of the and the important.

Quadrants 1 and 3 is where many of us spend most of our time–dealing with problems that need fixed immediately and then bouncing from that do dealing with unimportant problems that someone thinks also needs solved immediately. 

The ideal situation is to be in Quadrant 2, where we are doing important things which aren’t urgent. That’s because we’re doing work that matters, but we’ve planned well enough that we don’t have to fly from one urgent problem to another. We have margin in our schedule and life, and we don’t have to focus all of our energy on putting out fires. Urgent and important things will still come up, but far less frequently if we actually live out our priorities and plan accordingly.

We’re doing things that matter, but we’re not stressed because they are so pressing everything will fall apart if they don’t get done.

So why do so many of us feel stuck in doing the urgent things?

Why Do We Do This to Ourselves?

Why do we live in Quadrant 1? Well, because it’s the natural slant of things. As the more kid-friendly version of the saying goes, “Poop rolls downhill.”

If we don’t plan, if we don’t focus, if we just run around from fire to fire, we can’t get out of the crazy cycle, and we’re standing at the bottom of the excrement-covered hill.

Also, our brains love responding to notifications and sounds and beeps and boops.

The ding of a cell phone notification. The icon of more email coming in. Endorphins! Excitement! Maybe that’s the email I’ve been waiting for on my inheritance from a Nigerian prince!

I’m a perpetrator in every way. I’m easily distracted, and as much as I desire to be focused, I let the temporary and urgent take precedence over the eternal and important.

We’re letting other people dictate our lives.

The problem is that at the end of my life, when I stand face to face before God, only I will answer for how I stewarded my life. I can’t shift blame to email inboxes or bosses or kids or spouses. I will have to say, “This is what I did with the talents you gave me.”

The second reason I let other people tell me what to do is because I’m trying to please people. I respond quickly to their messages and their emails, and they probably think that’s pretty neat. I like it when people think I’m neat or efficient and organized, so I let that underlying motivation propel me to check my email 50 times a day.

No one has ever changed the world by being a speedy email responder. Perhaps changing the world isn’t your goal. Well, nevertheless, there are no gold stars for email response time in the real world. The difference between 5 minutes and 5 hours on non-urgent responses is miniscule at best. A timely response is all that’s necessary, 2 and you get nothing but diminishing returns beyond that.

There’s a certain level of adult responsibility, human decency, and things you have to do to keep your job wrapped up in all of this, but what if we only checked our email twice a day instead of twice an hour. What if people had to wait an hour or two for non-urgent responses to text messages? What if we decided each morning our priorities and actually followed through on them?

Personally, I feel like I’m doing my best work when I’m helping others–when I’m sharing what I’m learning, solving problems, thinking deeply about things, and crafting systems that make lives better. But often I’m jumping from fire to fire, helping someone fix something that’s broken and needed to be fixed five minutes ago.

Maybe you’re persuaded. Maybe you’ve decided it’s time to stop working in this crazy way, under mounting stress, without priorities or boundaries.

So how do we fix this?

How Do We Get Out of This Cycle?

1. Take a step back and evaluate what you want to do with your life

If you want things to keep going the way they are, that’s fine. Don’t change anything. Don’t evaluate or define your priorities.

However, if you’d prefer to be more focused and disciplined, then start by figuring our your personal mission and goals.

Write them down. Look them over. Create steps for what it takes to get there.

Then bit by bit, start tackling them. Let the motivation for reaching your goals drive you to change your priorities and stop living for the urgent instead of the important.

2. Start by changing the things that keep you from fulfilling those priorities

If you want to write a book, but you don’t write currently, I’m going to bet against you cranking out a novel anytime soon.

If I spent 15 minutes less on social media each day, I could use that time to start writing a book.

If I processed all of my email twice a day instead of answering it as it comes in, I could save a half hour and use that time for reading or ideation.

Identify your biggest time wasters and stop doing one of them this week, and replace that with a good habit that gets you closer to your goal.

When you feel the urge to check your email or Facebook (or whatever other thing you’re trying to change), do something that gets you closer to your goal.

3. “Train” others in how you best help them

If something isn’t urgent, I’d prefer someone sends me an email instead of a text message.

A text message feels urgent–my phone vibrates, lights up, shows a number on my green message icon, and bothers me until I do something about it. That’s distracting for me. So email is better because I can turn off those notifications without missing an urgent message from my wife.

So, if anyone sends a major request (something that requires more effort than a quick reply), I normally ask them to send me an email with more details. It’s easier to manage an email inbox than a string of text messages.

Training someone in how you best work and respond helps you do what’s important and helps them get what they want too.

It’s a win-win.

4. Create a stop doing list

I need to stop:

• Checking my email so frequently (flesh out ideas instead)
• Visiting Twitter and Facebook multiple times per day (write a piece for a blog post instead)
• Reading ephemeral content (instead pick up where I left off in a book I’m currently reading)

I just wrote those things on a post it note and put them on my desk. That’s a constant reminder to do things that mater.

What if you stopped doing one thing this week that’s forcing you to live in the urgent instead of the important? What a difference one change can make in making a greater impact.

Wrapping Up

Mostly I’ve tee’d off on social media and notifications as the perpetrators of forcing us to live for the urgent instead of the important. That’s because those two things, in their very nature, appear urgent.

Twitter shows you your most recent tweets. Your phone lock screen shows your most recent messages. I can’t ignore something that’s in my face.

Undoubtedly, there are lots of problems with the way we work beyond Twitter and texts. But it’s a start, and it’s a syndrome of a deeper problem that enables us to reach for the low-hanging junk food of quick, fast, instant satisfaction and updates instead of the more important, effort-required tasks that actually make a difference.

The way most of us work is crazy. And it’s up to us to change it.

The post The Problem With the Way Most of Us Work appeared first on Jordan Shirkman.

Our car isn’t new, but when I wash it and clean it, it looks really nice. But no matter how much attention I pay to the body of the car, it won’t change the way the engine runs. It can look great on the outside and be a complete mess under the hood. No number of car washes can make the car run correctly. So diagnostics and maintenance are required.

The same goes for our health. People can look fit and trim, have impressively-low body fat and still have cancer or any number of destructive internal diseases that can’t be diagnosed by a mere outward glance. So medical checkups are necessary.

Everything may appear just fine from the outside. Our kids can be well-behaved, our smiles plastered on in every picture, but simultaneously relationships can be full of bitterness, debt piling up, and sin eating away from the inside out. A soul checkup is in order.

Jesus summed this all up quite nicely in response to a Pharisee’s question about hand washing and ritual cleanliness.

“You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.”
–Matthew 23:26

No amount of exterior cleaning can fix the cleaning that needs to take place inside. No amount of behavior modification can do away with the consequences of sin. No exterior manipulation will take care of the inner problem.

Things may appear fine on the outside, but the inside is what matters. A shiny car with a broken engine is of no use.

We need to seek a checkup with the Lord, to ask him to examine our hearts, to put them in the right place. We need forgiveness of sins no amount of going to church or leading Bible studies can fix. We need to drink deeply from the well of forgiveness of Jesus Christ for our internal self to be made right with God.

Don’t just polish the outside of the cup. Go deeper, check the inside, because that’s what really matters.

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