Show Notes:
Joel Gascoigne: Founder & CEO of Buffer
- Very into habits
- Meditation is important to his well-being — thinks CEOs should practice meditation
Buffer
- App that helps you schedule your tweets
- 850k users and counting
Traveling and Habits
- Team for Buffer is spread out around the world and travels a lot
- Habits are important for working while traveling and not in a traditional office space
Morning Routines
- Wakes up at 5am
- Meditation
- Protein shake
- Gym – close to home (1 block away), so it’s easy to get to and easy to create the habit of going to the gym when it’s easy to get there
- Tries not to check email in the morning
- To build the morning routine, creating the evening routine is equally as important. Joel goes for a 20 minute, slow evening walk to sort out his thoughts, get away from technology (leaves his phone at home) and wind down for the night.
- To get up early in the morning, goes to sleep early (around 9:30pm) in order to get 7 hours of sleep and wake up around 5am.
- Give yourself some slack on the weekend — an hour to an hour and a half difference of extra sleep on weekends from normal weekday wakeup times helps maintain sleeping patterns.
Tips on Habits
- “Don’t confuse your beginning with someone’s middle.” Know where you’re at with your habit and don’t expect yourself to be at the same level as someone else is with their own habit.
- Aim for small goals to begin with, then work your way up as you go.
- The power of compounding with habits: if you do something every day, then increase every time by 5%, eventually the results will be huge.
- Expect to fail.
- Set different environments for different things. (e.g. designate your work desk, then move over to a comfortable chair when you check Facebook, then go back to the work desk to work)
- Figure out a personal motivation for creating a habit — why do you want to do it?
Culture of Buffer
- Focus on self-improvement
- “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” –Jim Rohn
- Pair up workers together weekly to talk on Google Hangouts and encourage each other with their habits and improvements
- Offer perks — Amazon Kindles, Jawbone (fitness tracker),