Improving, Even On-the-Go: 16 Things The Buffer Team is Working On This Week

Travel is a high priority for lots of us at Buffer—it’s a bit ingrained in our culture, and it’s always a great experience to see the world and broaden your geographic and cultural horizons.

Travel is also the time where it can become a challenge to hang onto good routines, habits and improvement goals.

With a number of Buffer team members on the move these past few weeks, it’s inspiring to see core habits that stay strong regardless of where in the world we are—and it’s fun to watch new goals and improvements created out of the experiences we have in new places.

Here’s what each Buffer team member is working on this week! (Psst: We love chatting about each other’s improvements, too. See all of our comments here.)

Don’t forget: We love hearing your improvement goals, too—tell us about them in the comments so we can cheer you on and learn from your goals!

Buffer team improvements

Dave – Some wonderful learnings from my previous weeks plans: Let the sleep goal slip a little when somewhere new, too much excitement and so much to do! A late evening sunset river walk is too good an opportunity to miss. Will certainly go back to my 8hr sleep goal at home :) Activity goals are easily accomplished with all this exploring, I’m on a streak that I’m keen to continue. And I have been so happy with the opportunity to use my French skills, my mind has been stretched to the limits of my language abilities and it has felt so good :) My plan is to enjoy the rest of my time here to the max, and then when I’m home to settle back into a more health and sleep focused routine, for the remaining week, to take time to reflect with gratitude for the amazing opportunity to work and to travel.

Mary – Similar to last week, I’m working on taking on the slower-paced island lifestyle on Maui. Road biking is quite nice here as it feels like none of the cars (passengers) are in a rush. Where I’ve been working is about 40 minutes downhill and the ride is surrounded by sugar cane fields with the ocean in front. I’ve been using this time to reflect on all the good things. :) I’m also focusing on expressing gratitude to each of these great people on Maui who have welcomed me into their fam. More tangible goals are to send two letters this week and drink 91 oz of water every day! Missed this last week.

Dan – I’ve been on a great step streak since I was at the beach last week. Trying to continue this while hanging out in SF. It’s been great walk so much again, just like I used to in NY. My sweets challenge is over, but I think long term I’m going to try to keep it cut down like I have been! This week+ in California has been great in keeping my serious level down. Now I’m just trying to keep laid back and being a little more random in life, hoping to get out of my comfort zone more often.

Patrik – This week is looking a little bit choppy with me while I help my mom with her move to Tennessee, so I’m looking to double down on my core improvements: sleep, exercise and reading. With sleep I’m going to aim for 8 hours with 5,000 steps each day and at least 20 minutes of reading.

Niel – I had a super week for my running last week: 2 x 8km and 1 x 10km (the latter I ran under 1h!). That was a great milestone. This week I’m taking it a bit slower with 2x8km and 1x7km. I’m also exploring some more Chinese learning strategies. Still haven’t found one that I can keep going with :)

Rodolphe – This week I’m aiming at keeping that meditation routine (4 times a week), going through some admin tasks that I’ve held back for too long (paperwork :-)), support France national team (they played on Monday and are back on Friday) and trying to be more mindful about my meals and water intake, since it has recently slipped a little. Well-being it is!

Octavio – This week the aim is to continue with last week’s goal of reading for at least 30 minutes per day and exercising on a daily basis, although it might get a bit complicated since I’ve added a few more activities to cover these days. I also want to have a daily meditation time, for at least 5 minutes, it may not sound like much now but it would be a great improvement from previous weeks, where I had no time scheduled for this activity at all :)

Kevin – Getting up earlier will be one of my key improvements for this week. The sun comes out pretty early and stays out pretty late, so I’m going to get up one hour earlier than usual. This will leave me with some time to rollerblade, which I love to do! Another one is to run at least twice a week because I’ve been slacking a bit while lifting weights. I think I’ll feel even better if I add some running into the equation as well as improve my skills playing floor ball.

Colin – I made a concerted effort to get all my inboxes to zero on Monday so my target for the week is to keep them that way. So far so good – I’ve come to realise that having a bunch of emails clogging up my inbox is like something constantly nagging away at the back of my mind. So being on top of things feels incredibly liberating. The combination of my to-do list and empty inbox is helping me to feel (and more importantly, be) more productive!

Courtney – It was a lot of fun to finish up my minimalism challenge and write up my thoughts on it (in my first ever Medium post!) I’m excited to keep those principles top of mind moving forward. I went 5/5 in my wake-up-before-6am goal last week, and I’d love to keep going with different productivity tactics each week, blogging about each when they’re concluded (so I’m already a little behind there!). This week I’m focusing on the Pomodoro method and I’m hoping to be a bit strict about it to see how it changes my productivity.

Nicole – Been working on cutting out the clutter and am really feeling the freedom from it! This week I want to work on managing my energy level — I’ve been feeling drained the past week or so (not sure if it was from fighting off a bug or something else…) So shooting for 8 hours of sleep each night, taking at least two breaks a day to walk around and adjusting my schedule to find my peak productivity.

Kevan – For the past couple weeks, I’ve been toying with the act of making a tomorrow to-do list when I wrap up work the night before. I write down the important things I need to do the following day, then that is where all my energy goes first thing in the morning. The times I’ve done it have felt great for productivity – I just need to do it consistently now! I’m hoping to write out my to-dos daily this week. Kind of a monthlong goal of mine has been being present and intentional with family, and I’ve found one way to achieve this is to get back into the habit of taking pictures of our adventures together. It helps keep me on the mental lookout for opportunities of fun, laughter, memories, etc.

Joel – Last week I succeeded in hitting the gym 5 times and doing my morning meditation and stretching 4 times. This week I want to keep those up and try and hit 5 times for both. I am also trying to improve my sleep and get over 7 hours a day. I’m going to experiment with going for my evening walk slightly earlier (around 8:30 pm) to try and have a little longer in bed. I might also try a face mask in addition to ear plugs (which have been helping a lot). A final little one is to keep up my streak of walking 10k steps per day.

Carolyn – The theme of this week is “reflection,” 2 ways. 1: taking the time to intentionally think through my day, week, and accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities. 2: Choosing which parts of the world, and my environment, and relationships, to reflect back into the world. I’ve been feeling lately like I’ve just been a mirror, sending back whatever comes my way, and I want to be more selective about what I send back into the universe and the people around me. I am working on choosing to reflect the positive, and uplifting, and hopeful. (Also, getting weekly average steps above 10.5K, I missed it last week! And, I’m starting a 30 day challenge for July of intermittent fasting M-F.

Åsa – This week I want to make sure I cook a little bit more rather than eating out or eating cereal/porridge. I can feel how this is impacting my energy levels. My evening routine has also been slipping a little bit lately so my other goal is to get back to this one. Stretch, time to reflect and be grateful and then read before bed.

Brian – last week I had a buddy in town visiting, which meant a few more meals out than I’d normally like to have. This week will be about cutting back, getting into a good cook-at-home routine and pushing back towards more well-rounded meals. Had fresh fruit for breakfast this morning – a good start! I’ve also been having a tough time getting into a decent sleep pattern, averaging 5-6.5 hours per night. I think this needs to get higher soon, as I can certainly feel the mental fog creeping in.

Adam -Still looking to continue my improvements of Running, Reading, and Code Academy. I feel like I am starting to sound like a broken record with these three, but it really has been rather nice to take some goals and continue to push them. This week I am aiming to hit 4 miles in a run (3.3 was a previous week furthest), finish up Code Academy HTML Basics (25% left), and toss a bit of reading into the evenings.

Want to share your own improvement goals? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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