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I’ll never be a great woman. Fortunately I’m married to one, so my first-hand experience is enough to know what it takes. 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

I’ve waxed on about eloquent systems for tracking the tasks you need to do every day. I’m still a huge fan of Omnifocus, and it’s my repository for tracking all the things I need to do and would like to do. 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, [footnote]Even though they should totally have Do Not Disturb enabled if they are iPhone users[/footnote] 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. ...

I’ve always enjoyed photography, but I’ve never considered myself a photographer. I can’t pull off toting around a massive DSLR and snapping pictures of people without feeling creepy. 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. 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. 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. ...

For most of us, our priorities are dictated by the most urgent crisis that needs fixed. 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,[footnote]That is to say, basically anyone who does anything other than physical, manual labor, but many of them likely experience this in some ways as well[/footnote] 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. ...

I just took our car in for preventative maintenance–an oil change, a few filters swapped, a new belt, checking brake pads, a thorough overview that I can’t do on my own. 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. ...