Today I wrote my last post for the Buffer blog. That blog, as much as the company itself, has been my home for the past nine months. I’m moving on to exciting things, as is the great team I’m leaving behind, but Buffer’s not the kind of company you can leave without a goodbye letter.

People often ask me how I came to be Buffer’s first Content Crafter. The funny thing is, there’s no amazing story to tell about that. Buffer posted a job ad for a Content Crafter, and I noticed it because I’d been following the company’s progress for a while. I applied, went through the interview process and got the job. All very straight forward.

The key to why I was offered a job at Buffer (I think), is in this diagram, which our COO Leo shared recently. It shows the four attributes that all new hires need to have:

When I applied to work at Buffer, I fit squarely (or circley) in the crossover between...

March 2014

I’ve been sharing some of the insights from my own Exist account with people on our mailing list and new users recently. I’ve found this is a good way to provide real examples of what Exist can do and share how useful it is to me already.

I thought it might be fun to share some of these publicly so more people can see some real-world examples of what I’m getting out of Exist already, and how it helps me to understand my life.

What my best days look like

Ultimately, we’d like Exist to be able to show you what your best days look like, and find simple adjustments you can make to have more great days. We’re working on this process now, and I’m starting to see some clues in my data already.

For me, my so-called “best days” are the days when I rate my mood 4 or 5 out of 5. Everyone’s different—you might say your best days are when you’re more active, but I care most about...

March 2014

Another five apps I like that you should try. If you haven’t read my past entries, you can find them here and here.

Reporter

Reporter is a random sampling app to give you an idea of how often things occur in your life. It’s right up my alley, being that I’m into all things self-tracking and Quantified Self.

The app sends push notifications to your phone (iPhone only) at random points during the day, each time asking you to fill out the same survey of questions. Reporter comes with some built-in questions such as Where are you?, Who are you with? and What are you doing? but it become truly useful once you start adding your own questions. Some of my favourites that I’m using now include:

• What are you thinking about?
• What are you looking forward to today?
• What are you doing?
• What did you dream about?

The app has three different kinds of surveys: a daytime one that gets...

March 2014

I’ve noticed that my reading habits have changed a lot lately. In particular, what I choose to read and where I find it.

Thinking about this got me thinking about sharing content online generally, and how link-sharing has evolved. I’m sure there’s a lot more involved in this evolution than I know about, but here are a few thoughts about what I’ve noticed in my own reading workflow.

Where am I going?

I find most of my online reading material from Twitter. Occasionally I’ll take a peek at my Kippt feed, or drop into a content discovery app like Prismatic if I’m really desperate for something new to read, but Twitter fills my needs most of the time.

I use Tweetbot, so I can easily long-press or right-click to save a link to read later. When I long-press on a link in Tweetbot for iPhone, I see the URL I’m going to before I choose to open it.

This is the biggest behavioural...

March 2014

I was chatting to someone recently about ways to meet other startup founders, when I realised I had accidentally found a great way to do so. I never meant for this to be a method of networking, but that happened to be a side effect of something I was doing anyway.

Here’s what I did:

I gave them feedback on their products.

Now that I’m on the other side of a product for the first time as a founder, I know how important feedback is (and how hard it can be to get). This new point of view led me to send a lot of emails recently—sometimes as many as one per day—with feedback about the products I was using. I had always thought about ways products could be improved, or features I wished they would add, but I’d never bothered to share my feedback with the people creating those products. I’m sure most users do the same thing.

The funny thing is, because a lot of these startups...

March 2014

Something I noticed around the start of this year was that quite a few people I came across had set goals for big, exciting changes they want to achieve in 2014 that are beyond their control.

A good example is getting a new job. I noticed a couple of people who’d set goals to “get a job at x” or “work for x” this year.

This reminded me of something I learned as an actor. Actors are, for a large part of the time, at the mercy of others. Most of us are vying for roles that are overwhelmed with applicants, chasing down directors and producers who have too many actor friends already, and sending card after card to agents, hoping to get signed. And that’s if we’re being proactive about our careers (of course, there are other ways to go about getting work as an actor, like writing and producing something yourself, but those seem to be the exception, rather than the rule).

...

Feb 2014

Here are some apps I use often, and like so much I want to share them. If you missed it, you can read my first post on apps I like here.

Day One

A beautiful, robust journal app for those who are willing to put in the effort of actually journalling.

Day One is available for Mac, iPhone and iPad, and every update seems to make it more powerful. It lets you add photos, tags and weather data to your entries, write in Markdown and even pulls in activity data from the M7 if you have an iPhone 5S.

I use Day One on my Mac to write up monthly reviews of the goals and daily habits I’m working on. On my phone I use it to save quotes from books or articles I read and ideas I have.

One of my absolute favourite uses of Day One, however, is Brett Terpstra’s Slogger. I have Slogger set up to run every day and create new Day One entries from my Instagram photos, tweets, music I listened...

Jan 2014

Last week marked the end of December 2013. For the month of December I ran an experiment to see if I could change the way I share links online. I wanted to try something new to see how it affected me and my followers.

I used to share a lot of links on Twitter. I used Buffer a lot of the time to space these out, since I tend to read online articles in blocks of time and then I have a whole bunch to share at once (incidentally, this is exactly the problem Buffer was created to solve).

Switching to Kippt

The experiment involved setting up a new, public list on Kippt to save links to. I shared only a few important links on Twitter, and saved everything I found somewhat interesting to my Kippt list. I tweeted the list two or three times over the month, but otherwise left it up to people to find or follow it themselves.

For the most part I was using Google Chrome as my desktop...

Dec 2013

One thing I’ve changed a whole lot (and probably will change again) is how I manage my reading workflow of articles online. I’ve stuck to the setup I have now for the past few months, so I think it’s working well enough to share it with you.

Finding content

For the most part, I find content on Twitter (via Tweetbot, which lets me long press/right click on a link to add it to my read-later service of choice).

The other main place I find content lately is in my Kippt feed. I use Kippster on my iPhone and iPad, and generally read these on-the-spot.

I’ve tried a few content discovery services like Zite, Flipboard and Prismatic but didn’t find any of them useful enough to stick with. Prismatic probably came the closest to unearthing interesting content, but the app’s design didn’t work for me.

Luckily my Twitter feed is interesting enough to keep my reading list full.

Reading