Self-Improvement - Page 6
A collection of posts on Self Improvement
Our second weekly #Bufferchat focused on personal improvement . Thank you to everyone who was able to participate! Here’s a brief overview of the amazing discussion: Some personal development goals of attendees * Leverage natural talents and strengthen discipline to work smarter * Improve video production skills [https://t
Reading is a part of the lifeblood here at Buffer — it’s engrained in our focus on self-improvement and a huge part of the employee perks . From Day One as a Buffer team member, you’re given access to a free Kindle Paperwhite and all the free Kindle books you like. Amongst the team, we love seeing what everyone is reading as new books are posted into our Hipchat room and Facebook Group. Many t
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie Once in Hong Kong I took a trip to the barber, since my hair was getting a little long. It ended up being one of the most fascinating times I’ve had my hair cut. The last few times I’ve been to this barber, they’ve always washed my hair in the sink before I’ve had my hair cut. The way they did it was to turn the chair arou
Live smarter, not harder. This principle is one of the 10 Buffer values that form the backbone of our company culture. We love experimenting with new ways to live out this value, and we’ve found productivity tips to be instrumental in this equation. What are some of our best productivity discoveries so far? We’ve written about a few before on the Buffer blog. • Ultradian rhythm and the 90-minute work cycle [http://blog.bufferapp.com/opti
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. A
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 isa 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
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson Around two years ago I stopped watching and reading mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook , and it created a lot of discussion, so I wanted to expand on m
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. An
Recently, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7-day work week routine. The idea was quite simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day. The biggest thing I wanted to do
When you have a goal — whether it’s starting a business or eating healthier or traveling the world — it’s easy to look at someone who is already doing it and then try to reverse engineer their strategy. In some cases, this is really useful. Learning from the experiences of successful people is a great way to accelerate your own learning curve. But it’s equally important to remember that the systems, habits, and strategies that successful people are using today are probably not the same ones th
We’ve looked at a few different strategies to help remember the names of people you meet on the Buffer blog before, but there’s lots to say about memory. It turns out that science is continually finding new connections between simple things we can do every day and an improvement [htt
Psychological theories often feel a bit too complicated for me (I’m sure there’s a theory that explains why that is) but I’ve come across a few that are simple enough to understand and that I think of often, particularly when dealing with other people. I thought it might be fun to take a brief look at a few psychological theories that are especially relevant for business, marketing, leadership and overall communication skills. Keep in mind I’m no professional psychologist, so if you’re keen to
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold over 15 million copies, originally started: “I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.” After giving this talk for some time, Carnegie found that the attendees started discussing their e
Although there are some people who advocate for dropping all your goals or focusing on systems instead of goals , I’ve never managed to fully give up on setting goals for myself. In fact, I just finished my monthly review today, where I looked at how well I did on the goals [https://buffer.gho
“We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.” – Seth Godin It’s easy to be vague, broad, and to never commit to a particular direction. It’s frightening to be specific. One of the key things I’ve learned in the last two years of doing startups is that to make real prog
“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
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
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
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
How long does it take to become elite at your craft? And what do the people who master their goals do differently than the rest of us? That’s what John Hayes, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to know. For decades, Hayes has been investigating the role of effort, practice, and knowledge in top performers. He has studied the most talented creators in history — people like Mozart and Picasso — to determine how long it took them to become world class at their
I’ve written about positivity before, in terms of cultivating a positive outlook for yourself. What I want to write about today is cultivating positivity in your workplace, particularly if you’re a leader. By focusing on positive interactions with your employees and encouraging an upbeat emotional state as often as possible, you’ll be more likely to have a happy, productive and efficient team. How positivity affects our brains To start with, let’s look at how positive and negative emotions wo
This is the fifth 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. I’ve written in the past about the evolution of our culture at Buffer. One of the things we started to do at around 6-7 people as part of the culture is that everyone has a 1:1 session with either myself or their team lead at least every 2 weeks. On top of that, I personally have a 1:1 session with Leo, Carolyn and Sunil (th
This is the fourth 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 . Something I’ve found difficult to completely embrace, but which understanding has been super important, is the idea that there is a ratio for everything. I’ve started to call this Ratio Thinking, and I’ve found
I’ve been reading some advice from successful writers lately and exploring what their routines are like to see what I can learn about Here are six of the most common pieces of advice I came across that have helped me a lot improving my writing here at Buffer . It also features actionable t