Life Hacking
A collection of posts on Life Hacking
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
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
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
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
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
When we shared this image from the @buffer Twitter account a while back, it got me thinking. The Tweet resulted in over 1,000 retweets, which seems like an indication that it resonated with a lot of people. There’s a key difference between knowledge and experience and it’s best described like this: The original is from cartoonist Hugh MacLeod , who came up with such a brill
Everyone knows that particular feeling of dread that accompanies a lull in conversation at a party, networking event or even a job interview. You’ve already covered the usual small talk and then – oof – you hit a dead end. What now? Even the most extroverted among us know that being a good conversationalist doesn’t always come easy – but there are some experts who have had more practice than the rest of us. Writers, journalists and others who interview sources regularly have developed tried a
One of the key parts of our culture at Buffer is a focus on self-improvement. We each pick an area to improve on each week and share our daily progress and challenges, making it a social, supportive way to adjust, create or change our habits. There’s still a lot of work to be done for self-improvement to be effective, though. I’ve been through a bunch of different improvement focuses in the last few months, including positivity, running, reading more and learning French. Each one has been fun t
I’m a big fan of music, and use it a lot when working, but I had no idea about how it really affects our brains and bodies. Since music is such a big part of our lives, I thought it would be interesting and useful to have a look at some of the ways we react to it without even realizing. “Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche Of course, music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below, so we’re only scratching the surface wit
How much time do you spend consuming information that you have no intention of taking action on or that you don’t care deeply about? For example: the nightly news cycle of local crimes, the endless stream of Facebook and Twitter updates, celebrity gossip, reality TV shows, Buzzfeed articles. The list goes on. In this age of information overload, your life can be filled with irrelevant or unnecessary information in an instant. And here’s the main problem: After a while, these information sour
I’ll confess up front: I have terrible posture. It’s been bad since I was in high school at least, and probably for even longer than that. It’s one of those things I keep in the back of my mind as something I know I should do, but never get around to, like eating more vegetables and sending more postcards. It’s really interesting to explore commonly-held assumptions for the Buffer blog, because I often find out surprising things. Researching how our posture affects us was no different. If you’r
Ah, ideas. Who doesn’t want more great ideas? I know I do. I usually think about ideas as being magical and hard to produce. I expect them to just show up without me cultivating them, and I often get frustrated when they don’t show up when I need them. The good news is that it turns out cultivating ideas is a process, and one that we can practice to produce more (and hopefully better) ideas. On the other hand, often times great ideas can also just come to us whilst in the shower or in another
Recently, I read a great book and promised to mail it to a friend overseas when I was done… about nine months ago. Today, I finally wandered down to the post office and mailed it, because the alternative was working on this blog post. This is classic procrastination at work. If you’ve noticed yourself doing this as well, you might have explored “cures” for procrastination, or tips to improve your productivity. I’ll admit, I’ve spent many hours procrastinating by exploring these very things. And
When I wrote a recent post for Buffer titled 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, I didn’t even consider the possibility that striving for happiness might not be in our best interests. Who wouldn’t want to be happier? Happiness isn’t necessarily bad for us, but I did find out recently that happiness alone isn’t enough for us to feel fulfilled. Sadly, chasing happiness is really common these days, and most of us don’t realize why being happy isn’t enough for us to be sat
It doesn’t matter how you choose to live your life — whether you build a business or work a corporate job; have children or choose not to have children; travel the world or live in the same town all of your life; go to the gym 5 times a week or sit on the couch every night — whatever you do, someone will judge you for it. For one reason or another, someone will find a reason to project their insecurities, their negativity, and their fears onto you and your life, and you’ll have to deal with it.
Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Especially as we strive for continued self-improvement as we build Buffer’s social media management platform, if we look at our values, being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thin
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 building
How would you like to be able to recall the name of a client or associate you just met? How would you like to go to the bank and not fumble for your account number every stinking time? Everyday scenarios like these are classic examples of our need for memorization. The function of memory has so many more applications, too—public speaking, schoolwork, studying, research, the list goes on and on. Memorizing is a key function in so many areas. Imagine if we could be better at it. Would you belie
One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do. On many occasions I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that’s the complete wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally impossible for our brains to handle 2 tasks at the same time. Recently I came acr
One of the great things about our focus on transparency at Buffer is that we get to help other people learn from our experiences. We love learning from others as well, and since we got so much out of our round-up of counterintuitive advice, we wanted to find out even more about what other people have learned from experience. This time, we wanted to learn about the darkest moments of successful and famous entrepreneurs and what their lesson has been. Without any further ado and in their own wor
Stress is something I’ve been intimately acquainted with since I was a teenager. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to a high standard, and often end up losing sleep due to stress. Since I’m working on decreasing stress in my life, I thought it would be interesting to look into how it actually affects our bodies and our brains. Here’s what I found out. Stress is normal, and sometimes even good for us Stress affects pretty much all of us at some point in our lives. The f
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