Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of posts by Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of 98 posts
One thing that I noticed immediately when joining Buffer was our emphasis on cultivating positivity. If you take a quick look at our culture deck, you can see the high priority we place on this. Since I joined the team, positive thinking is something I’ve focused on a lot, and it’s been fun to see how spending time with positive thinkers rubs off on me. At the moment, some of us are experimenting with sharing one great moment we had at the end of each day. I’ve found that making this a
Making decisions is something we do every day, so I wanted to find out more about how this process works and what affects the choices we make. It turns out, there are some really interesting ways our decisions are affected that I never would have guessed. Luckily, we can take action to improve most of these. What happens in your brain when you make decisions Obviously lots of things take place inside your brain as you make a decision. What I found really interesting were the various t
Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjusting my own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine will suit your body best, I always find it interesting to see what works for others when planning something new for myself. Amazing routines of 7 successful entrepreneurs In the hopes of
You’ll notice that I made the title of this post sound quite impressive (at least I hope I did!). But the great thing about this story is that anyone can have such an impressive outcome, and it’s not at all as daunting as it might sound. In fact, all these outcomes came from doing small things every day over a long period. I’m a big fan of working smarter, not harder and finding small ways to make my work more efficient. As Buffer’s first Content Crafter about two years ago, I got the chance
As I was brainstorming ideas for my last post on the Buffer blog, I started reflecting on what I’ve personally learned during my time at Buffer. My writing process is considerably different today than it was when I joined Buffer nine months ago, so hopefully you can find some nuggets in the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned that might help you as well. Slow beginnings When I first joined Buffer, Leo had been running the Buffer blog pretty much on his own: he wrote or sourced th
I often get asked about my research process for the Buffer blog. For my science and life hacking posts in particular, I rely heavily on scientific research to back up my points, so there’s a lot of research to be done. Unfortunately there’s no secret sauce or magic bullet when it comes to this process. It’s mostly just a matter of time and practice. I do have a few tips to share about where and how I find the sources for my research, though, so hopefully you’ll find these useful. Finding the
We’ve written about creativity a few times on the Buffer blog, but it’s hard to keep track of everything we learn about it. One day I’m adjusting the temperature in my workspace, and the next I’m trying to put off creative work until I’m tired. If you’re in the same boat, and you find it’s difficult to remember what will improve your creativity and when you should do your most creative work, hopefully this list will help you get it all straight. 1. Your brain does better creative work when yo
We’ve looked at a few different strategies to help remember the names of people you meet on the Buffer blog before, but there’s lots to say about memory. It turns out that science is continually finding new connections between simple things we can do every day and an improvement in our general memory capacity. Memory is a complicated process that’s made up of a few different brain activities. Here’s a simplified version to help us understand how the process takes place: 1. Creating a memory
Psychological theories often feel a bit too complicated for me (I’m sure there’s a theory that explains why that is) but I’ve come across a few that are simple enough to understand and that I think of often, particularly when dealing with other people. I thought it might be fun to take a brief look at a few psychological theories that are especially relevant for business, marketing, leadership and overall communication skills. Keep in mind I’m no professional psychologist, so if you’re keen to
I wrote a post recently about ways that you can work smarter, not harder. As I worked through the list of techniques I’d collected, the post became so long that I had to split it in half. Here are even more suggestions to help you make your day more productive without putting in extra hours. 1. Limit your to-do list I’ve written about the history of the to-do list before, and how to write a great one. One of the most counterintuitive but effective methods I’ve found for increasing my producti
“I’m delighted to admit that I’ve failed at more challenges than anyone I know.” — Scott Adams A friend told me recently about a colleague who is entirely open to feedback. When she’s told that she did something wrong, my friend said, she just starts over. She doesn’t take feedback personally, and she doesn’t feel upset about getting anything wrong. When I heard that story, I thought to myself, “I wish I took feedback that well.” I can’t imagine anything better than an attitude like that, espe
Although there are some people who advocate for dropping all your goals or focusing on systems instead of goals, I’ve never managed to fully give up on setting goals for myself. In fact, I just finished my monthly review today, where I looked at how well I did on the goals I set for myself last month and set some new ones for the month ahead. As I was doing this, I started to wonder whether I was doing myself any favors by reviewing my progress monthly. I had a look into the science of measuri
I’ve noticed that the way I spend my lunch break affects how productive I am for the rest of the day: how quickly I get started once I get back to my desk, how effective I am in the first hour after lunch, and how I feel throughout the afternoon. Luckily, we’ve been writing about ways to improve your day for a while now: from tips on making your environment more conducive to creativity to pushing through writer’s block. Why shouldn’t the humble lunch break get the same treatment? I gathered th
Constraints can seem like the last thing you’d want for a creative project, but they’re actually beneficial when it comes to doing good work. If you’ve ever faced the common writer’s hurdle of the blank page, you’ll know what it’s like to be paralyzed by innumerable opportunities. What restrictions do is take away some of the choices available to us, and with them, the paralysis of choice that stops us from getting started. We love trying things that seem counterintuitive at Buffer, but we espe
Today’s post was supposed to be about how to have an effective brainstorming session. Unfortunately, when I started researching brainstorming and what it’s really all about, I nearly put myself to sleep. I’ve never come across so much talk of meetings and rules and conference rooms in a topic that supposed to be creative. Then again, that’s part of the problem: brainstorming was actually designed to be a method for solving problems. Creative ideas might be needed to solve problems but generatin
“Routines are important, but only if you make them your own. Simply copying someone else’s routine probably won’t work.” — Jeff Goins Although I’ve researched daily routines and habits often, I still find myself constantly coming across great ideas from other bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurs about how they manage their time and productivity. Productivity and using time wisely is always on our minds at Buffer as we develop our social media management tools. In fact, “work smarter, not hard
One of the things I love about the culture at Buffer is the emphasis on working smarter, not harder. Our team is all about getting plenty of sleep, exercise and recreation time so that our time spent working is as productive as it can be. Working harder can be an easy habit to slip into, though. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off at the end of the day, or to take time out on the weekend and stop thinking about work. With a startup of my own to run, I find this even harder to manage lately. Whene
I know exercise is good for me. I know it’s important for my health and happiness and that it’s necessary for general fitness. That part’s easy — we hear about how we should exercise more all the time. What I didn’t realize was how being inactive is really detrimental to the brain and body. I didn’t understand all of the specific ways regular activity can be beneficial, either. With a little digging around, I found some research that made me realize there’s much more to exercising than just ge
“The best things we know and love started as tiny things.” — Joel Gascoigne Buffer’s CEO, Joel, wrote a post not too long ago about the importance of starting small with new projects. He makes some great points about how easy it is to see the finished product of someone else’s hard work and forget about how long it took them to get to that point: “It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of products and brands contributes and is vital to what they are today.” Joel goes on to
I’ve written about how creativity works in the brain before, and I found it really useful to understand this process. Or, I should say, multiple processes. There’s so much going on in the brain during creativity that science is still trying to pin down exactly how it all works. What we do know is which three parts of the brain work together to help us create and come up with new ideas: The Attentional Control Network helps us with laser focus on a particular task. It’s the one that we activat
I’ve noticed lately that my mind has been wandering a lot so I wanted to see how attention works and how to manage it better. It turns out a lot of us have wandering minds and struggle to stay focused. In fact, when we’re reading, our minds typically wander anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time. Voluntarily keeping our attention on one thing continuously can take a lot of effort, so it’s not surprising that I struggle with this sometimes. Luckily, there are ways to keep our attention span
One of the most fun and useful things I’ve been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers. Luckily, there are lots of tools being created lately to make automation much easier for those of us without a solid understanding of how our computers really work. Sometimes repetition is good for us [https://buffer
I was reading an excellent book recently when I came across the concept of the “Big Five” personality traits. I’d never heard of these before but I found them fascinating. You’ve probably taken personality tests in the past—the Meyers-Briggs test is a popular one. The Big Five are more often used in scientific circles for personality research, so I think they’re handy to know. I also enjoyed reading about the implications these could have for managers or anyone in charge of groups of people (te
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