Blog - Page 93
A collection of 2,567 blog posts
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
“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
I have some really exciting news to share: Brian has become our Product Manager. He’s been in this role for 2 weeks now and even after 1 week he was doing a better job running Product than I ever managed to do. It’s been incredibly fun to work with him and help him thrive in the role, and now it’s time to make things official. How the idea of stepping away from Product came about During our retreat in Thailand I had a chance to spend some time thinking on a hig
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
In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), that’s what Brailsford was asked to do. His approach was simple. Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area re
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in January. With the fantastic responses to previous reports on in revenue , customer happiness and content , we thought we might be able t
Aren’t shortcuts just the best? While everyone else takes the long way, you and your shortcut get to breeze right through, skipping a few steps and feeling pretty smart doing it. Finding a good marketing shortcut feels especially great, considering all that we marketers have to do in a day. That’s why I went hunting for the top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing
In August I was given the amazing opportunity to join Buffer as a front-end developer. At that time I was living in Taipei teaching English. Buffer is a distributed company so while I coded for them I was able to continue teaching. At the end of October, I left my teaching job because I just couldn’t do both jobs for much longer. It left me exhausted with no time for side-projects. Wi
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.
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
The currency of social media is the share. We all want to be the go-to person with the latest news, the most intriguing viral content , or the best hidden gems followers wouldn’t have found otherwise. Some people just have a knack for finding and crafting the perfect share. The rest of us have to work a little harder. Really, great social media sharing is a skill. And like all other skills,
Hi team! I’m so excited to tell you about January. This was a really exciting month for us as we tried several experiments to still deliver lots of happiness during higher than ever volume. What a luxury that Buffer is growing so fast that we can barely keep up with customer emails! Exciting people news I was thrilled to share that Mary and Adam have completed their 45 day Buffer Bootcamp periods and have come on board with us full time [https://buffer.com/resources/two-more-happiness-heroes-jo
I’m delighted to share a strong update for our first month of the new year. I wanted to take a second and publish the email I just sent to our investors this morning. I hope you enjoy the insights into what we’ve been working on at Buffer in the last month and the results we’re seeing. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have any thoughts or questions about what we’re up to! If you want to read about how December went, you can take a look here [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-d
Talking about yourself is hard. Doing it in 160 characters or less is even harder. That’s probably why so many of us end up stressed about crafting the perfect professional bio for Twitter – or LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networks. It has to set you apart, but still reflect approachability. Make you look accomplished, but not braggy. Appear professional, with just a touch of the personal. Bonus points for a bit of humor thrown in, because hey, social media is fun! All that in just a fe
As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer. We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing. As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer!Let’s start off with a brief summary: * We had 355 people apply for engineering positions at Buffer * 2 new engineers joined the team and 2 more offers were made * We launched 1 new Open Source project with Share.JS * There were
This is the 7th article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel , CEO here at Buffer . You can grab all posts here . “Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” – Jim Rohn A long time ago, I came across the amazing quote above, which was said often by Jim Rohn. It stook in my mind, and as the years have gone on, I feel
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
January has been an incredibly exciting month for the Buffer blog. We managed to increase our overall traffic by 32.6% compared to December. We expanded the team and we’re working more closely with the growth team to make the blog more data-driven. Let’s dig into the details! :) Quick summary In January, we had 654,126 Unique visitors (32.6% growth over December). There were 839,846 total visits, resulting in 1,061,032 page views. We had a total 59 Buffer for Business trial starts resulting
As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer. We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing. As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer! Engineering Goals One of the first things Joel and I did at the start of this month was reflect back on how 2013 went and set down some key goals for 2014. At a high level, here are the most important ones. Transparency As a
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer ! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning
This is the 5th post in our series discussing The Habits of Successful people, written by James Clear and Joel Gascoigne . You can read them all here. It was my freshman year of high school and our basketball team had started the season with a losing streak. One day at practice, as our team was struggling to find some confidence and get our first win of the season, our coach pulled us together and said somethi
It wasn’t long ago that Twitter added inline image previews to its official apps, including the web view. Now, Twitter is including more image focus in the latest redesign. On the left-hand side of Twitter’s new web view, your profile and header images are now visible. We’ve done tests on our own Twitter account previously that showed images make a huge difference to engagement: Images aren’t just useful for Twitter, either. Facebook and Google+ posts look great with images in them, and Pinte
In the past six months that I’ve been a Content Crafter at Buffer, I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve also been trying to write regularly on my own blog and for my startup, Exist. That’s a lot of writing. During this time, I’ve also been experimenting with small changes in my workflow, my writing process and the types of content I produce. The result has been an improvement in my writing and a better understanding of how I work best. Hopefully you’ll find some of these things helpful in improving yo
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to design a totally new landing page for Buffer . I had the green light to get creative and to try something new, even if that meant throwing everything away and starting from scratch. So that’s exactly what I did. The Experiment This experiment, for me, was all about learning. Learning what people care about, learning what imagery tells a story, learning about how visitors examine a landing page, and learning how they decide whethe
