Productivity
A collection of posts on Productivity
Here's how I prepared for a month's worth of social media content in one day.
We’ve always had teammates who have side projects in addition to working at Buffer. Working on new projects, building, experimenting, and self-improvement are built into our DNA as a company. So it's quite common to be speaking with someone only to find out they own a small business outside of Buffer that started as a side project. We also have several published authors and many apps built by Buffer teammates. We believe this entrepreneurial spirit and creative drive not only enhances our indiv
Our list of 2025 time-saving, productivity-boosting tools every creator needs in 2025
We put together this social media checklist to give you a headstart on your content creation in 2025.
Have you ever noticed that your best ideas come when you're talking things out with someone? Or maybe you're that person who needs to call a friend to think through a decision out loud? That's called verbal processing. Verbal processors feel they do their best thinking while speaking. For content creators, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are bursting with ideas during conversations but struggling to translate that energy into written content, there's good news: verbal processing isn't an o
I went from occasional AI user to power user in months. How? My mindset for how to approach AI evolved. Now, I reach for AI every day. I once read that professionals aren’t going to be replaced by AI, rather, they will be replaced by other professionals who use AI. This idea that someone who leverages AI will perform better at their work is now supported by research. Harvard Business School published a paper where they compared a group of consultants using AI to another group that wasn’t using
A step-by-step guide to scheduling your posts to Bluesky, cross-posting to other platforms like X or Mastodon, and even creating threads.
Create your own social media calendar with a step-by-step guide, or use this free calendar template to get planning right away.
As a self-proclaimed tools nerd, I’ve tested out many of the ever-growing list of AI productivity tools on the market. These are the ones I keep coming back to.
Swipe files can be an evergreen source of inspiration for your social media – if you do them right. Here's how.
Like many others, I read and reply to hundreds of emails every week and I have for years. And as with anything — some emails are so much better than others. Some emails truly stand out because the person took time to research, or they shared their request quickly. There are a lot of things that can take an email from good to great, and in this post, we’re going to get into them. What’s in this post: * The best tools for email * What to say instead of “Let me know if you have any questions” a
In this article, Matt Giaro shares systems and mental models for maintaining a sustainable content creation workflow.
In this article, Anna Burgess Yang details how the automation process she uses for content repurposing.
We’re in an era where if you are trying to create a personal brand online or share your work, you do that by creating content — and creating content is a fantastic way to build your brand, make new connections, and level up your knowledge. When you add it all up, though, it can be a lot of content to create, even with the right tools in place. If you don’t have the right systems, it can be easy to fall off the content creation tracks. I’ve dealt with this myself at Buffer — I work at a company
In this article, we dive into some of our (and other creators’) top recommendations for boosting productivity so you can effectively grow your social media accounts.
Do you ever wish there was a shortcut to better understanding everyone you worked with? I definite have. At Buffer, we've had assorted documents to communicate work preferences over the years. Some folks have kicked off specific documents called operating manuals or leadership blueprints. Still, we've never had anything centralized or standardized, which can be a superpower for this type of internal communication and collaboration, especially as a fully remote team. Earlier this year, we decid
There’s no denying that content creation is time-consuming. In this post, we're sharing a sustainable strategy for saving time planning and creating social media content to help you better support your overall business goals.
Photo by Nik MacMillan from Unsplash . At Buffer we’ve always been interested in how to communicate in concise and clear ways. In fact, it’s been part of our company values from the beginning. Every organization values communication, and I’d submit to you that it’s doubly important for remote companies such as ourselves. It occurred to me recently how critical, and equally difficult, it can be to talk about technical topics as an engineer. It’s hard enough to s
At Buffer we strive to have at least all new code tested, and to add tests for legacy code when we can. This helps us catch bugs before they’re released, and watch out for regressions. This also leads to a notable amount of time spent writing tests. And let’s face it, that can get repetitive.There are some things that can help, like helper functions, factories, and test robots. Still, there’s a number of things you find yourself repeating. Is there a way to improve this? I’ve saved some time by
Deploying mobile applications tends to be a fairly different process than when it comes to web applications. On the web we can push updates and fixes regularly without the concern of versioning, and at the same time our users can access these changes almost instantly from within their browser. When it comes to mobile applications, things work a little bit differently. First of all, we don’t have the luxury of instant changes — for example, if we need to push a change to our android application
Over the last year my role at Buffer has changed from an individual contributor to a technical leadership role. While the amount of time I spend coding and doing architecture hasn’t changed much, the way I go about the tasks has changed significantly. Instead of being focused on a project from start to finish, I move around projects as needed. Sometimes a team will get blocked on a tricky problem or need to make a decision that could impact other teams or request technical mentor-ship to level u
I wrote previously about why programming is a part-time job, where I extolled the virtues of having breaks to allow time for my brain to think about problems I am working on. It seemed to resonate pretty well with people, and it is definitely relevant to fields other than programming. In fact, it’s probably valuable for all knowledge workers to have quality thinking time. But how do you make the time to step away from the computer? How can you force yourself to think about things without commit
The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent as much time away f
At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here is a recent example . One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of making things slightly more complicated than they really should be. This is the story of the last