Instagram is an amazing platform. You can use it to meet new people, see new places, find inspiration, and even grow your business if you are so inclined. In other words Instagram is an app that can open the world to you and, as such, a proper review of the entire app would take seven thousand of words at minimum. In this article, a mere three thousand four hundred words, I want to focus on one key feature of Instagram, the Story.

My iPhone is a tool that I love to use. As such, I take particular care to make sure that my home screen is set up to work for me (link to taking back my iPhone). Each month I plan on sharing my home screen with you all as a way to let you know about any new cool apps I’m using, to provide my thoughts on productivity and technological usefulness, as well as to provide an online archive for myself of how I was thinking and working in the past. Ultimately, however, I hope you will find these posts helpful and informative.

We live in a time where access to information and other people is ubiquitous. Need an answer to a question? Google it. Want to know what your friends are up to? Check their Social Media profiles. Want to communicate at all hours of the day with co-workers? Email them, Slack them, assign a new task on the company Trello Board.

This constant access has its benefits but it can also cause stress, ruin our work focus, and cause mental health problems. Our lives can easily become overrun with the requests for our time, attention, and focus whether they be from other people or from the apps and services we rely on. This is not right. Technology is supposed to work for us not against us.

I'm making a concerted effort to write more.

It's something that I love to do but have been neglecting over the past two years in pursuit of other things (video making and podcasting). No more! Writing is my first and true love when it comes to creativity and expression. So I'm forcing myself to write on a regular basis and publish the results either here or on my Medium page depending on the topic. 

This selection contains some very underdeveloped thoughts on patience and growing up. I really want to dig more into these topics but in the spirit of putting my thoughts out there, here we go.

The concept of iterating on ideas is a fairly common one. You start with the initial idea, critique it, tweak it, review it, and then start the cycle over again until you are ready to execute on it. You can find the concept of iteration in design, cooking, architecture, music, writing, heck, you can even find it in parenting. 

Anything that starts as an idea and ends as an action or product is better off when it goes through iterations. No idea is perfect at conception.

I've been debating, internally, about what it means to live a life of consequence. By "live a life of consequence" I mean that I want to be able to use the time that I have to do things that have gravitas and staying power in my world. I don't want to get to the end and regret how I chose to live my life. 

We only get one shot at this.

That truth is, if I'm honest with myself, really at the heart of this internal debate. I've got one shot to live my life and I'm already 30 years into it. Have I mentioned that I have a child now too? 

What it takes to be a minimalist writer is much less than what it takes to me a minimalist surgeon. A writer needs a pen and paper, the surgeon requires many more tools. So minimalism isn't about the number of things required but about the idea: "what I need and nothing more."

Clutter slows things down, it muddies the water, it creates burden. I don't like being slowed down, I don't like muddy water, and I don't like being unnecessarily burdened. I want the freedom to act, buoyed by the requisite tools, so I can accomplish the goals at hand.

This is my ideal situation. Only the things I need and nothing more.

The spirituality craze may be picking up a few atheists as well, as young people in the U.S. are keeping God but throwing out the Church.