This is a portion of a team-wide discussion happening within Buffer right now. 

It feels that we have a bit of a “pendulum” of the communication and relationship between the teams.

On one end, there isn’t much freedom, and there’s a lot of structure. If an engineer wants to try something, or a customer development person wants to send a tweet out asking for feedback, s/he can’t do it without writing up a plan, getting advice, etc. At this end of the spectrum, everything is planned and intentional. And slow! This feels a bit like all being on the same team for tug of war; everyone has their hands on the rope at the same time and we all pull the same direction, but everyone has to work together completely to accomplish a goal. If one person lets go, it falls apart, so no one can let go to try something new.

At the other end of the spectrum, there isn’t much structure, and there’s a lot of freedom. Every team works independently. Engineers build, marketers market, and heroes support. There isn’t much advice or communication between the teams, and instead, each group just does their job when it’s their turn. This feels a bit like hot potato; the customer experience bounces between teams and each team can only influence it in while they have it in their hands, but when you’re in control of it, you can do whatever you want.

I would love to hear if you do or don’t relate to this, how your team handles this challenge, any solutions or new perspectives you’ve found, or anything else. :) Super keen to hear from you and learn about this one! :) 

Comments welcome or hit me up on Twitter. :) 

In 2014, I played with the idea of doing a few “30 day challenges.” Because my first one had felt pretty involved (I hit 10,000 steps on my Jawbone Up each day for a month), I chose a very easy next challenge, one that had nothing to do with physical activity! :)

In the month of March, I read a book a little bit every day. 

That’s it. Pretty darn simple. I didn’t make any rules at all other than that. No chapter, percentage, or time goals each day. No number of books I wanted to read in the month. Just, every day, I’d at least turn on my Kindle and read a few words. 

You know what happened? This tiny challenge turned out to have one of the biggest impacts on my life. I built a habit of reading that has continued for the next year. I certainly don’t read *every* day anymore, but since this challenge, I generally feel that reading books is something that I “do,” not something that I “should do.” That’s a pretty big change for me from a year ago! 

Here are a few tiny tidbits that helped me achieve this: 

1) The most obvious one is to carry your Kindle with you. The Paperwhite is quite small, light, and dare I say even durable. It lives in my backpack so it’s almost always with me if I find myself with 10 minutes and I’m all caught up on Instagram.

2) Read at the gym. I read on the elliptical or while walking on the treadmill. (Just turn the font size up so you don’t have to squint.) Shoutout to my pal Daniel who taught me this one. In fact, sometimes I don’t allow myself to read *except* when I’m at the gym, which makes it like an extra treat! 

3) Read interesting books. This one seems obvious, but it’s super important! I find myself abandoning my Kindle when I’m reading a book I’m “supposed” to read or like but just trudging through. I get super excited about reading again when I’m into my book. It’s really that simple! 

I just recently finished an “oh-em-gee-I-can’t-put-this-book-down” book called The Martian, in case you’re in need! (Kindle Link, $6.) And here’s everything the Buffer team is reading, in case you want to ping us for reviews! 

4) Enjoy it. I think this may have had such a lasting impact specifically because I didn’t set any stretch goals. As Leo Babauta recommends, sometimes it’s great to “leave yourself wanting more” instead of pushing yourself to the limit with every activity. 

So, overall, this was a super easy and fun 30 day challenge that I highly recommend! Sure, a few Fridays I only read a few pages while I dried my hair to go out, but other days I curled up and read for a while before bed instead of computing, or enjoyed a full hour while at the gym. 

I’d love to hear from you: your tips on how you fit more reading into your life, any challenges you’re facing, or your current book recommendations! :) Find me on Twitter at CaroKopp.

It started out innocently enough. A busy week of errands and a particularly fun weekend filled with dancing, and there it was. A 7 day “streak” of hitting my goal of taking 10,000 steps per day, according to my Jawbone Up.

(The Buffer team + family members all get a Jawbone Up as a gift, and we share our steps and sleep stats with each other. I love this because I think it is an amazing way to be super transparent and share our self-improvement efforts with each other. These are two of Buffer’s key values. It’s one of my favorite aspects of life at Buffer, to be completely honest!)

I have always tried to lead an active life, especially in the last few years of my life, when I’ve started sitting at a desk for many hours per day. There’s nothing like a good sweat session after sitting still! But, that being said, I usually take days off here and there, whenever I have a busy (or lazy!) day. I suddenly had the thought, “I wonder how long I can keep the streak up?”

I am *extremely* fortunate in that I live in a beautiful apartment complex with a gym in the building. So, with this incredible luxury, I knew it would be just a matter of will power, and not weather, or responsibility, or anything else. If I chose to achieve this, I would simply have to DO it!

It was then that I decided to do my first “30 day challenge.” I’ve long been inspired by these bite-sized goals, first brought to my attention by Matt Cuts. I love to quote my old gym’s manager on this concept. He used to say, “You can stand on your head for 30 days!” Meaning, you can withstand any challenge for that amount of time. I was so excited to try. I think it was important that I had the 30 day goal instead of simply, “I wonder how long I can keep this up?” Otherwise, I might have been tempted to say, “Ah, turns out I could keep it up for 20 days.” (It was around that time that my friend visited, and I realized on a night out that I wasn’t going to get back home in time to hit the gym before midnight. So, I jogged in place! Luckily, my friends, and San Francisco residents in general, are extremely tolerant of such strange behavior!! :)

Ultimately, I did. And on the last day, I timed it so that I could run up the stairs in my building, to the very top floor, and run out onto the roof to complete the challenge. There, I gazed upon the San Francisco skyline, and reflected on my many blessings. (Perhaps most obviously, the incredible gift of health. I hope I never take for granted the ability to walk on these two legs, as long as that privilege is mine.) 

Ultimately, I walked away (heh) with a renewed confidence for my dedication to my goals, as well as a few lessons learned. The first was that “rest days” really do serve a purpose, but not as I once thought. After about two weeks of the challenge, also known as half-way, I was pretty wiped out! My heels, knees, muscles, and will power craved a day off. But, I was able to switch from more involved exercises, like the elliptical, to simply walking. This provided a great ‘rest day’ without breaking the chain. Now I realize that, with my low-intensity workouts, I don’t really need complete rest days. I can simply change things up. The need for a  "rest day" had been mostly in my head, leftover from my younger years of much more intense and exhausting workouts on the soccer and lacrosse fields. Secondly, I can’t believe how well I slept that month! Now that I have observed such a strong correlation between my exercise and sleep, I always know how to combat it when I’m having some trouble sleeping in any given week! 

And, aside from the occasional 11:30pm treadmill sprint, and the time I jogged in place while my friends played darts, I managed to schedule in my workouts pretty well, as long as I prioritized it. I’m lucky to have super supportive coworkers, who cheered me on in our daily pair calls and on the improvements hackpad. :) 

And, partly due to Buffer’s transparency, I even got the most incredible gift from a customer: a plaque celebrating my achievement! Proving yet again that people are just awesome, especially Buffer customers. :) 

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear if you’ve been similarly inspired by Matt Cutts, and/or your activity tracker! :) This is the first in a series of blog posts about six 30-day challenges that I took on in 2014! Stay tuned for reading, intermittent fasting, not buying “things” and a few others! :)

At Buffer and many other customer-centric startups, the product, marketing, and engineering teams all listen to customer questions and answer them directly. This has changed through the years as the needs and team have grown. In its current form, just about everyone in the company ends up hanging out with the Happiness Heroes for about a half day each month. It’s rad. 

I wanted to share a quick story about something that happened this month during Senior Engineer (and world traveler, language learner, bitcoin expert, and sweetheart) Niel de la Rouviere’s day to deliver happiness. This sort of thing happens all the time at Buffer, so I’ve picked just one example to share.

A customer had written in, giving us a suggestion on how to improve the product.

(As a small aside, I’ve often been floored by how much of their personal time our customers will take to help us think through challenges, suggest improvements, and share ideas. Our Uservoice page is regularly updated with votes and comments. It’s incredibly fun to watch.)

In this case, the suggestion came in over email, and Niel grabbed it as part of his day of answering emails and tweets. It read: 

He was referencing the process for uploading a photo into the compose box in Buffer. The steps were:
1. Open the composer
2. Click the camera icon to get the instructions to drag a photo in or click to upload one directly.
3. Click to open the box to choose a photo to upload.
4. Choose a photo.
5. Press enter.

Here’s the screenshot he shared of the (now old) photo upload process, step 3:  

I bet you can see where this story is going. Niel, being the proactive, customer-focused and all-around-great-guy-developer that he is, went ahead and made the change. Now, you can drag right onto the camera icon without clicking first. A click now brings you straight to choose a photo to upload.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I learned to tie my shoes.

It came up because of a tweet from my friend Jeff.

I thought of a study that I remembered from college; kids who were told that it’s hard to learn to tie shoes persisted longer than the ones who were told it was easy. Jeff’s point, of course, directly relates to customer service, which is where I spend a lot of energy. So it got me thinking. 

Over time, this example has grown into something bigger for me.

As a bit of background, I should share that I value self-improvement (and I share this value with my coworkers). At Buffer, we are encouraged to build time into our day to focus on our improvements, even scheduling daily meetings where we cheer each other on and discuss challenges and progress. This is a huge blessing, and helps me make my own development a central theme of my life.

We focus on a variety of things, from small things (drinking a glass of water before bed) to big things (changing how I treat people or see the world). Some of these big things feel really, really hard. :)

I am sometimes reminded of the time I struggled to tie my shoes. At the time, I didn’t want to learn. I negotiated with my parents to let me keep my velcro shoes instead. I won’t ever need this skill, I reasoned. Why should I spend my time practicing something that’s so hard when there’s a perfectly good alternative?

But I learned. And in the 20+ years that I’ve been tying my shoes, I’ve probably tied my shoes over 15,000 times. How glad I am now that I practiced, and persisted. Looking back now, of course, it seems easy.

Nowadays, the things I practice are a bit different. I want to learn to always give the benefit of the doubt. I want to learn to forgive easily and completely. I want to learn to assign positive traits in others to personality, and negative ones to circumstance. I want to learn to listen more, listen better, with more focus, and to remember more. I want to practice complimenting my friends and loved ones more on the quality of their hearts, and less on the trendiness of their outfits. I want to choose to always see the good.

Sometimes, I feel like that little girl, negotiating with myself. This is so hard. Why should I practice? There’s a perfectly good alternative.

But I look down at my sneakers and think, “when I look back at this moment, will I wish I had worked at this? Or will I be comfortable with the velcro alternative I allowed my heart to settle for?”

I hope I look back and feel thankful that I did not give up.