The main principle is to sort everything into two categories: information and action. If it’s information, process it and get it out of your way. If it’s action, repsond to it or use a to-do list to track it outside of email.

I remember the tail end of our time as a web design company. When we started we did 20 page proposals. I remember pulling all nighters getting a proposal ready. Pages and pages of stuff. What a waste of time.

Towards the end we were doing one page proposals. It didn’t seem to matter. We were going to get the job or we weren’t. Over six years I never saw a connection between length and detail of proposal and winning a job.

Countless forms, contracts, articles, books, websites, apps and more are all guilty of overcomplication. We all suffer because all this complication takes up more time.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but we’re lazy. It’s harder to keep something simple.

We often do things because they’ve always been done a certain way. We don’t ask questions or put in the hard work needed to keep it simple, we just get complicated quickly.

What are your best tools? Your best tools are short, plain Anglo-Saxon verbs. I mean active verbs, not passive verbs. If you could write an article using only active verbs, your article would automatically have clarity and warmth and vigor.

This plugin adds the required javascript for Gaug.es web analytics tracking.

I love Gaug.es for analytics. A beautiful, simple and fast web app.

• Be concise. People are distracted and busy on the web. If your writing is wordy and cluttered, you’re going to lose your audience.
• Get to the point. If you find yourself using certain words because they make you feel good about yourself, stop. Use effective words people will understand.
• Disappear. As a writer, you’re there to tell a story or express an idea. You’re the vehicle, not the destination. Kill your ego and get out of your way.

These ideas are from my writing heros: Anne Lammott, William Zinsser and Seth Godin. They don’t teach people how to write for the web. They teach people how to put ideas into words. If you’re new to the world of web content, just write as if every word matters.

Your readers could care less about academic jargon and corporate lingo. They just want you to write well.

A year ago today, I held my daughter’s hand for the first time. I don’t cry often, but I was weeping with joy.

I didn’t want to let go.

For Karina and I, life has changed since she arrived. We’ve had sleepless nights. There’s little alone time for us. A simple trip to a friend’s house requires almost as much packing as a camping trip.

Those aren’t the only changes. We’ve never laughed so much. There has never been more peace in our marriage. The learning has been nonstop. As parents, God’s grace has been so real.

As a father, I’m so impressed by Elena.

She’s as beautiful as her mother, observing every detail of her world through big, brown eyes.

When we first brought her home, she was so fragile. We held her constantly. Now she walks through the house grabbing everything she can, impatient with our attempts to cuddle.

Words like banana, baby, bear, and bye are in her vocabulary. When we talk to her, she listens and understands.

She has my curiosity and her mother’s determination.

Yesterday was Elena’s birthday party. Just after we sang, I asked the guests to offer prayers of blessing for her.

As we were praying, I started to cry again. My father asked for Elena to receive an understanding of grace and the one who gives it.

God’s grace is the only way to explain the joy we’re experiencing as a family.

Happy birthday Elena Grace Metts.

I can tell when someone is trying to promote their own agenda, when someone truly wants to help or when they’re just trying to find entertainment.

If I can, so can your fans.

People haven’t become less intelligent, they’ve just become further away from each other. Text messages are replacing phone calls. Facebook events are replacing personal invitations.

We’re lonelier than ever, but we’re still looking for relationship.

If your goal is to create an online community for your organization, you can’t stop acting like a human and expect everything to work out.

The ones who succeed make a constant effort to delight and surprise.

There are a lot of ways to go about it, but we settled on using printfriendly, along with their fantastic WordPress plugin.

While the plugin offers a lot of customization, we ran into one small hitch. Whatever icon or link you choose, it’s inserted within the post content itself, while the natural place to insert it would be to the right of the metadata.

Printfriendly provides a great option for this too. You’re able to use the following snippet of PHP to insert it manually into templates:

<!--?php if function_exists('pf_show_link')){echo pf_show_link();} ?>

Fanstastic. Now we can just stick this wherever we want. If you want it to appear only on posts, just throw it in the single.php file.

However, we use often use custom post types on our network, and it would be a pain to have to put the code in each of their templates.

Thankfully, our Canvas theme has a built-in meta manager allowing us to modify the metadata for each post using shortcodes.

All that was left then, was to register the new shortcode:

<!--?php function printfriendly_func( $atts ){
 if (is_single() && function_exists('pf_show_link')){echo pf_show_link();}
}
add_shortcode( 'printfriendly', 'printfriendly_func' ); ?>

Now, we have a handy print-formatting tool available across our network, with minimal setup time.

The FMC has more than 120,000 members in the United States alone, and close to 1 million worldwide. We want to use the web as a place for Free Methodists to gather.

The thing he impressed on me most was a challenge to shoot everyday. At the time, this seemed daunting. It has been seven years since we met, and I realize now that this is the most important piece of advice you can give a young photographer.

Recently, Karina and I moved into the iPhone camp. One of my favorite things about the phone is the camera. The image quality is surprisingly good, and the interface gets rid of any complications. It makes capturing little moments throughout the day easy. Most importantly, it helps me see.

You can have the best camera in the world and take horrible pictures with it. Your eye is what’s most important. Your eye only gets better by seeing through a camera. You only see through a camera by consistently shooting one.

What takes things a step further, is Instagram, an iPhone app which allows you to do some light processing and immediately publish your photo on their network. It also publishes to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other networks. It’s a great way to explore other photographers, and a good way to display your own work.

These are today’s polaroids. Fun photos. Easy to take and easy to share. Easy to learn. Easy to see. All of this eye-exercise trickles down into our client work. The tighter we see the world, the better we’ll perform when the moment comes.

Thanks to a tool like the iPhone, we always have a small, unobtrusive camera with us. A camera I know I can tell stories with, whether we’re going for a walk downtown, or visiting a friend’s new baby.