Belle Beth Cooper

Belle Beth Cooper

A collection of posts by Belle Beth Cooper

A collection of 99 posts

Self-ImprovementSep 4, 2023
11 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science

Looking for some low-lift ways to make yourself happier? Here's some of the best research that we've found on personal happiness.

Self-ImprovementMay 5, 2018
How To Think Positive Everyday: 4 Simple Steps to a Happier Life

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’v

Self-ImprovementApr 5, 2018
8 Things You Don’t Know Are Affecting Our Choices Every Day: The Science of Decision Making

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 thing

OpenFeb 28, 2018
The Daily Routines of 7 Famous Entrepreneurs and How to Design Your Own Master Routine

Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjustingmy 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 [http://blog.bufferapp.com/youve-got-25000-mornings-as-an-adult-8-ways-to-improve-your-mornin

Self-ImprovementJan 28, 2016
How I Became a Morning Person, Read 5x More Books and Learned a New Language in A Year

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

ResourcesApr 1, 2014
How I Cut My Writing Time From 2 Days to 4 Hours

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

Content MarketingMar 24, 2014
How We Research: A Look Inside the Buffer Blog Process

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

Life HackingMar 20, 2014
Sleep Your Way to Creativity And 9 More Surefire Methods For More Ideas

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

ResourcesMar 18, 2014
Remember More of What You Read and Hear: 6 Research-Tested Ways to Improve Your Memory

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 [htt

Self-ImprovementMar 13, 2014
3 Psychological Theories To Help You Communicate Better With Anyone

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

ResourcesMar 11, 2014
5 Unexpected Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder

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 [https://buffer.com/resources/the-origin-of-the-to-do-li

ResourcesMar 6, 2014
The Science of Failure: Why Highly Successful People Crave Mistakes

“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, esp

ResourcesMar 5, 2014
How to Measure Progress in Your Personal Goals: Daily, Weekly and Monthly

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 [https://buffer.gho

Life HackingMar 3, 2014
Lifehack Your Lunch: 8 Scientifically Proven Ways to Maximize Your Mid-Day Break

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

Life HackingFeb 26, 2014
The Psychology of Limitations: How and Why Constraints Can Make You More Creative

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

ResourcesFeb 20, 2014
The Psychology Behind Brainstorming: Why It Doesn’t Always Work and 4 Ways To Get Ideas More Consistently

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

ResourcesFeb 19, 2014
How These Six Highly Productive Bloggers Get So Much Done

“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

ResourcesFeb 18, 2014
5 Unusual Ways to Start Working Smarter, Not Harder, Backed by Science

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

Life HackingFeb 14, 2014
Inactivity: Why Exercise is More Important than Ever

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

ResourcesFeb 13, 2014
The First Version of Google, Facebook, and YouTube and More (and What They Can Teach Us About Starting Small)

“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

Life HackingFeb 13, 2014
How to Optimize Your Environment for Creativity with The Perfect Temperature, Lighting and Noise Levels

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

Life HackingFeb 8, 2014
The Two Brain Systems that Control Our Attention: The Science of Gaining Focus

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.

ResourcesFeb 7, 2014
The Beginner’s Guide to Putting the Internet to Work for You: How to Easily Save 60 Minutes Every Day

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

Life HackingFeb 3, 2014
How The “Big Five” Personality Traits in Science Can Help you Build a More Effective team

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 t