Leo Widrich

A collection of 186 posts by Leo Widrich - Page 4

Life HackingJan 1, 2013
The Science of New Year’s Resolutions: Why 88% Fail and How to Make Them Work

Wanting to change yourself and better yourself is a beautiful and inspiring thing, I believe. And it turns out that’s also how most other people think: 50% of all Americans for example set themselves a New Year’s resolution. That’s pretty amazing! What’s not so great is that according to the researcher Richard Wiseman, 88% of all those set resolutions from half of America and probably lots of other people in the world fail. That’s 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed minds each and

ToolsDec 29, 2012
The Top 10 Secret Buffer Hacks and Features: Supercharge Your Social Sharing in 2013

2012 is almost over and it’s been an absolutely crazy year here at Buffer. We launched a brand new iPhone app and web app and tons of new app integrations . Amidst developing all these new things, our team has also built in some nifty secret hacks and lesser known ways to use Buffer. To make your sharing even more awesome and to give you an edge over everyone else, here are the top 10 hacks and hidden tricks to ta

Buffer NewsDec 11, 2012
How to Get the Most out of the New Buffer iPhone App

With the brand new web app we are launching today, we’ve got another special gift ready for you, just in time for Christmas. The brand new Buffer iPhone app has hit the app store today. We’ve made tons of improvements and revamped the app to work with some exciting new features. Most importantly, you can do nearly all the things you can already do from the web app in the iPhone app now too. The Buffer iPhone app is

Buffer NewsDec 11, 2012
The Complete Guide to the Brand New Buffer Web App

What a crazy few weeks here at Buffer HQ in San Francisco to make everything work out in time for Christmas. The last thing we wanted to happen was for you to not get your shiny new presents. And fortunately, it all worked out. The brand new Buffer is ready today. We’re launching both a brand new web app and iPhone app today. So without, further ado, let’s dig in and have a look around about what’s new: Easily

Self-ImprovementNov 29, 2012
The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains

In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards. So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented “sandwich,” the name for two slices of bread with meat in between, became one of th

Online MarketingNov 9, 2012
10 Simple Ways to Get More Customers Using Psychology

So here is a simple question, what do you need to do, to get more customers? The intuitive response that most would give to this topic (me included), are a good product, good marketing, good customer support and so forth. But what if we could actually look into our customers heads to truly understand how we they are thinking? That’s exactly what our great friends, Gregory Ciotti over at HelpScout have done, to produce this fascinating in

Buffer NewsNov 6, 2012
3 Awesome New Ways to Share All Day Long With a Full Buffer

Every week, over 1 million posts are shared via Buffer. It’s an amount that always blows my mind. At the start of Buffer, it took 6 months to send 100,000 updates. Now there are more than 140,000 posts every single day. With so many updates being sent through Buffer every day, it can still be difficult to keep your Buffer full, day in day out. So, to make your life easier, we’ve started to get Buffer into various news reading apps you and lots of others have asked for. Today, I’m super excited

5 Most Important Writing Lessons Learned After Pivoting Our Blog Twice

The story of why we started a fully focused content marketing strategy here at Buffer is actually one that isn’t glamorous at all. It was born out of pure necessity that we couldn’t get any press coverage for the launch of Buffer. For the first few weeks I was on board, I tried restlessly to do one thing: get the top tech news sites to do a write-up about our newly launched app. It didn’t work out at all. Pitch after pitch I emailed got n

Buffer NewsOct 27, 2012
A Smarter Way to Read and Share on Your Mac – Pocket and Buffer Team Up

If you are a proud Mac owner yourself, you’ll know better than anyone that finding a good newsreading Mac app is hard (apart from Reeder). Fortunately, all of this changed this week, as Pocket have released their brand new Mac app to read or watch any items you have saved later on. The app comes packed with tons of details that allow you to make reading across different devices easier and more powerful. Luckily for all Buffer love

Life HackingOct 17, 2012
How Your Productivity Is Determined by What You Eat

Every 7 years our body will change completely. This means that each and everyone of your cells will have been renewed and exchanged for another one that your body has produced. I was always amazed by this. And science suggests that this gives us a unique chance to change and erase any mistakes we’ve made in the past. How? Through a focus on the food we eat. Fortunately we don’t have to wait 7 years. Day-to-day changes to our diet can have a massive impact on our productivity. Something like thi

Buffer NewsOct 3, 2012
How to Automatically Archive All the Links You Share to Twitter and Facebook

Update: Sad news – on September 6, 2015, Kippt shut down for good. Every day, well over 250 million Tweets get posted.  This happens alongside 4 billion Facebook updates and comments. And yet, finding Tweets that you have shared a few weeks ago is almost impossible. Not to speak about the non-existent Facebook search. A lot of solutions let you archive or bookmark a link separately, after you’ve shared it. Personally, I’ve found that this can be a huge hassle to use two separate apps for shari

Buffer NewsSep 27, 2012
How to Post Your Tweets at a Better Time From the Top Twitter Clients – TweetCaster and Buffer Team Up

It’s finally here, one of the most requested things has gone live today: Buffer is now integrated with the biggest Android and iOS Twitter client TweetCaster. Keeping your Buffer topped up with lots of awesome Tweets and retweets should be made easier than ever before. All you have to do is be browsing through your TweetCaster app on your Android or iPhone and add everything you find useful straight into your Buffer with a single click. We’ve also looked into the other goodness that TweetCaste

Buffer NewsSep 19, 2012
How to Create and Share Your Own Beautiful Online Newspaper – Scoop.it and Buffer Team Up

If you are anything like me, then every day, you are finding lots of amazing content out there on the web. Of course, sharing the best bits and pieces with your followers and friends is an awesome of staying in touch with a large network. One thing, that I’ve always loved to do though is to put all these amazing articles and videos together on a dedicated site for everyone to browse through. Scoop.it lets you do exactly that and you can easily collect websites and create a beautiful newspaper o

Buffer NewsSep 18, 2012
Brand New Buffer Analytics for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

What does it take to make analytics actionable, easy to understand and absolutely accurate? When we were brainstorming the latest analytics feature here at Buffer, this was the key question we asked ourselves. Our key goal with Buffer is not to build every feature in the world that has anything to do with sharing, but really to only focus on the few core aspects where we

Buffer NewsAug 30, 2012
How to Find and Share the Most Popular Links for the Topics You Are Interested In

“Bottlenose is to social networks what Google is to the web.” Is how Bottlenose CEO Nova Spivack recently explained the brand new version of its site. Intrigued as I was, I went ahead and checked out what the team has been up to. Bottlenose features now a real time search engine that queries all public information from Social Networks, groups and displays them in algorithmic order of importance. The result?

Life HackingAug 23, 2012
What Happens to Our Brains When We Exercise and How It Makes Us Happier

Exercise has been touted to be a cure for nearly everything in life , from depression , to memory loss , Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and more. At the same time, similar to the topic of sleep [https://buffer.com/resources/how-much-sleep

Buffer NewsAug 21, 2012
Why Buffer Integrated With App.net From Day One

It’s been about 1 week now, since App.net has reached their funding goal via a Kickstarter like funding process. They’ve raised a total of $803,000 from the original $500,000 that were sought to raise. Around the same time as Dalton Caldwell, App.n

Customer ServiceAug 16, 2012
10 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew About Them [Infographic]

What does it take to deliver outstanding and above and beyond customer service? The simple answer we’ve found: An incredible understanding of how your customers think. Spending lots of time with your users and customers every day is one of the most important things I believe. Interestingly, a lot of the time, delighting users and delivering happiness isn’t at the top of everyone’s to do list. Seth Godin put it more succinctly then I ever could in a recent post [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seth

Buffer NewsAug 14, 2012
Kippt and Buffer Partner for a Smarter Way to Save and Share Your Links

Update: Sad news – Kippt shut down on September 6, 2015. Since the very start of launching Buffer, quite a while ago , there were a few things that you and lots of other users have requested time and time again. One of the things was to have an archive of all things that you have ever Buffered. This always made a lot of sense. You find something amazing on the web, that you want to share. Well, you also want to fi

Life HackingAug 8, 2012
How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?

Every one of us, on average, will be sleeping 24 years in our lifetime. That’s a pretty long time if you ask me and makes it even more important to know exactly how the phenomenon of sleep impacts us. And still, there are so many unanswered questions evolving around sleep and how much we need of it. In fact, Most of what we know about sleep we’ve learned in the past 25 years. One of the biggest problems I’ve discovered is that sleep is such an over talked topic. We get the general idea that we

Buffer NewsAug 2, 2012
The Buffer API Is Ready: Check Out 15 Awesome Apps You Can Use to Share With Buffer

When we first started out building Buffer, we were a tiny app. You should see how things were back when we started out super lean . Since then, we have focused on one aspect with our company only: How can we make sharing links, videos and images to your social networks easier and more po

Life HackingJul 17, 2012
A grand experiment: What one thing would you tell your younger self?

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” – Jean-Paul Sartre In the few years I’ve lived, there were countless mistakes I’ve made. Now, I’m not at all a person of regret. I stand up, fall down, get up and fall down again. I’m sure you are the same, that’s what has got you this far in life. And yet, every so often I get this urge of thinking “if I only knew this a few years ago”.  That one bit of advice to face that challenge, finish that exam, get that job or start that business

Customer ServiceJul 3, 2012
7 Ways To Stop Satisfying Customers And Start Wowing Them

How well are we doing in terms of customer satisfaction? That seems to be a pretty standard question when it comes to dealing with people who are using your product or service. Satisfaction? I’ve always felt that focusing on “satisfying” someone who is using what you have built is pretty lame. It’s quite demotivational actually. It doesn’t get me excited to get up and “satisfy” that next user who comes in. And neither does the person I have spoken to go away, telling everyone how satisfied they

Life HackingJun 26, 2012
What Multitasking Does to Our Brains

We all know this and have heard it hundreds of times. To work efficiently we have to single task. No multitasking. And yet, we let it slip. We end up eating lunch in front of the TV with our laptop open. We browse Twitter and Facebook while sending emails and chatting in multiple Gchat windows. We know we really should be focusing on just that one assignment, blog post, proposal or piece of code but we just can’t. For the vast majority of us, multitasking by working on different things at the