Self-Improvement
A collection of posts on Self Improvement
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
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.
Looking for some low-lift ways to make yourself happier? Here's some of the best research that we've found on personal happiness.
Personal brand experts walked this writer through exactly how to switch up her personal brand — and offered some more general advice, too.
Ariel Taranski shares her journey of building a thriving freelancing career while navigating chronic illness.
In this article, Matt Giaro shares systems and mental models for maintaining a sustainable content creation workflow.
In this article, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step framework for building your personal brand.
Before I worked in a remote team , I was a freelancer and never needed to collaborate with teams very much. The way I used my calendar back then was pretty basic; maybe a birthday here and there. But when I joined Buffer in 2015 that suddenly changed. The more I grew as an engineer and the more I leaned into leadership and ultimately transitioned into management , the more I noticed how essential cal
As 2019 comes to a close, there are a lot of fun, interesting, and important numbers for us to look back on at Buffer. One of my favorites is looking at the number of books we’ve read as a team – 1,541 books this year! One of the coolest perks we have at Buffer team is that all team members (and their family members!) get a free Kindle and all the Kindle books they want to read—any book, anytime, no questions asked. It’s always interesting to see which books are most popular on the team. We ha
Less than two years ago, I had almost zero published articles with no audience of readers. However, this never stopped me from considering myself an aspiring writer. I knew I liked writing a lot and always wanted to share my thoughts. My biggest challenge was not knowing where and how to start . I was lost because I thought I had nothing original to share with the world . This was a
I am the kind of person who really thrives on lists. On the blog, we’ve written about lists as both a key element of a daily success routine as well as a vehicle for accounting for your productivity each day . Personally, I make lists of tasks every day in Todoist, and I also keep an ongoing list of my goals. There’s one group of lists I make in particular that I classify as “career lists.” There are fi
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
“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others? If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength. It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Joseph Addison We’re a remote team that loves reading (and self-improvement ). In fact, through the first nine months of 2018, we’ve read over 1,000 books! So when International Literacy Day popped up on the calendar, we wanted to get involved. International Literacy Day, celebrated annually on September 8 ,
I love the little traditions that develop organically at Buffer. One of them is to welcome each new teammate with a long email chain of happiness that begins with that person’s introduction. More often than not, the introduction has a certain ratio: * 1 part what this person will do for Buffer and has done for work in the past * 2 parts who this person is in the world—a mom, a breakdancer, an ex-Marine I love this 1:2 ratio because it speaks to a simple truth we strive to recognize as a tea
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle is credited with saying these 15 famous words. And for most of my life…I didn’t believe him. I fought against cultivating good habits and routines because I didn’t want to feel like I had to live my life by other people’s rules. I wanted to be my own person and do my own thing. Besides, keeping a routine was hard work. Know what I discovered? Having no routine or structure is so much more draining mentall
No matter what we do or how well we do it, some criticism is eventually going to come our way. And those moments are often some of the toughest we all face in work and life. Hearing potentially negative things about yourself is probably not your favorite activity, and most of us would rather avoid the awkwardness that comes with telling someone else how they could improve. But what do we lose out on when we avoid these tough conversations? One of the fundamental skills of life is being able to
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 end of each day. I’ve found that making this a
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” ― Doris Lessing One of the most inspiring perks we’re lucky enough to have at Buffer is a free Kindle for each teammate (and her family!) and as many free Kindle books as you like, no questions asked. When we share what we’re reading at Buffer on our Pinterest page or in our Slack community, the selections often tend to skew more toward non-fiction—you can generally find teammates reading books that help us improve at our jobs, under
Making decisions is something we do every day, so I wanted to find out more about how this process works and what affects the choices we make. It turns out, there are some really interesting ways our decisions are affected that I never would have guessed. Luckily, we can take action to improve most of these. What happens in your brain when you make decisions Obviously lots of things take place inside your brain as you make a decision. What I found really interesting were the various t
Have you ever been in a meeting where you felt the electricity in the room change based on a single sentence? Words are incredibly powerful: even a solitary one can win you over, put you out, set your boundaries, and change how others perceive you. With this kind of power, it’s in our best interest to try to understand the science and psychology of words. I went hunting for some of the top words and phrases that motivate people to be creative, work together and build relationships. These are
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 oth
