Hey there. Kind of a wild time in the news right now. That's an intentional understatement.

There is almost too much to feel defeated or enraged by. I ended up writing 1900 words on how I use Buffer – the product I work on for a living – as a distraction from it, and realized it may be helpful to readers of my newsletter, so here is that.

Before that though: for the foreseeable future, I'll be donating all proceeds from any sales of my music to the Immigrant Law Center, the ACLU, and the various organizations supporting the people of Minnesota. I don't expect this 🧊 situation to end quietly, and I suppose it could get worse before it gets better, so I'll be donating to other places and people who need the help. You can help by either:

• Buying my music, directly or on Bandcamp

• Donating yourself at standwithminnesota.com/

Since I started working for Buffer, the various aspects of my life have come into more of a harmonious state. I have flexibility in my workdays, which allows me to handle taking my daughter to/from preschool, spend almost every Friday afternoon with my family instead of working, work when I’m most focused, and ramp up a few little side projects in my spare time – including this writing habit.

During that same time, we’ve improved the Buffer product significantly, to a point where it’s become my primary way of interacting with the social platforms. As a solo creator/artist, it’s my favorite way to “be online” with a sense of calm & purpose, and avoid succumbing to the feeds unless I am deliberately looking for inspiration, discussion, or information¹. At Buffer we call this “creator mode” – the idea that, as an online creator, you sometimes need to be on social without being distracted by social to do or grow your business. We aim to offer the best toolkit for most creators looking to achieve this (while also – and this is important – sticking to our values).

Since the holidays, I’ve been starting to experiment with a workflow that takes this “creator mode” thing to a sort of extreme: in which I have effectively zero² social apps on my phone except for Buffer, so I’m effectively always in my calm Creator Mode. This feels possible very soon, with the upcoming plans we have for Buffer’s web and mobile apps³.

I thought I’d write this post to share a bit more detail how I use Buffer, not as a social media marketer (our primary audience historically), but as an artist/creator trying to share my ideas, perspective and work.

It’s worth noting that everything I mention here is available on Buffer’s free tier. We do have paid plans, with added functionality meant for more active creators, businesses & pro marketers – and, full disclosure, as an employee I use Buffer with more social channels than the 3 available on our free tier. That said, if you have 1-3 social channels you’re looking to manage or grow, and want to do so in a calm fashion focused on creating, this flow can work for you completely for free. (But also please consider paying for Buffer if you need more!!!)

Capture & inspiration

Most of my social posts come from random ideas that I have about my odd intersection of music, sociology & consumer tech, things I’ve already written, or chatter that I see on the social channels I tend to be on. (That last one is shifting a bit away from algorithmic social feeds and more toward other places: Discord servers, email/DM exchanges or conversations in real life.)

Most of my social content starts and ends as text posts. If I have a quick idea for a post, I’ll start writing in Buffer’s iOS app directly with the goal of getting it out the door quickly (more on the scheduling part later). The iOS app has some brilliant little buttons for the Lock screen and control center, which I use to start writing a short post in 1 tap.

I don’t make a lot of video content these days because I personally find it draining to both create and consume. But when I do have a video to share, I’m often capturing it with my iPhone camera, editing very lightly in the Photos app itself, and uploading it straight to Buffer to distribute to YouTube Shorts and Instagram. Usually I will publish the video directly with no further edits or markup; other times I’ll want to layer text on top. In the latter case, I’ll use Buffer’s “notify me” feature, which nudges you via Push notification at the time you want to post the video, and gives you a quick way to take the video & caption into Instagram to use the native markup features.

If I have a bigger idea I want to flesh out in prose, I instead start in IA Writer, my writing app of choice. Writing here allows me to deeply focus and explore an idea for as long as I feel like writing (like I did with the post you’re reading!). A finished written piece ends up here on my personal blog, and then I shift to Buffer to reshape that piece into shareable social content (more on that works in a second).

The Create area in Buffer, for me, is a dumping ground & asset library which starts that process. There is a Board view for planning out your content prior to posting, but I don’t really use it for that – instead I have columns for different categories of stuff I’ll use in posts later:

• random ideas needing fleshing out but aren’t big enough for long-form prose,

• album artwork & similar assets,

• important links (eg. to popular blog posts or my albums),

• calls to action or other important messages

For the aforementioned long-form written content, I created a Zapier automation which pulls the full content of longer posts from my website (via its RSS feed) into a specific column in the Create area.

I love Create because it’s channel- and topic-agnostic – I don’t need to worry about specific character limits or formatting requirements for the stuff in here. When I want to post something, I pick an item here and simply hit “Create Post.”

From rough to posted

I rarely pre-plan shorter content. Even the long-form writing, once ready, usually just goes right out to whatever platforms I want to share it on. I most often share in the moment and to multiple platforms, but rarely all platforms at once, because not everything makes sense on every social platform. My surprisingly large LinkedIn audience finds my music posts a weird curiosity; Bluesky will not engage much with anything about product management.

Rather than a proper schedule, I think of my content as more of a proper backlog (or queue) and rely heavily on the “Next Available” posting option. This simply queues up that post at the next recommended time in my posting schedule for a given channel. Combined with my habit of posting impulsively, this creates a light optimization of when I post (since my schedule is based on our own recommended posting time data), and gives me a small buffer time (no pun intended) in case I regret my impulse posting decision and want to scrap it.

I will often (but not always) preschedule release announcements a bit more in advance, but I admittedly sometimes forget and do those in the moment as well. It can get hectic on release day! I should work on that.

The Sent tab in Buffer is really helpful for occasionally checking on my posts and whether they’re being seen. The post metrics refresh every few hours, so I can check in later, but I’m not checking it constantly because I know there’s a small delay - which does wonders for my focus. This tab is also useful for quickly duplicating posts – either repurposing an old idea worth posting about again, or to quickly cross-post something to another network if I think it might do well there.

Maintaining a semblance of community

The new Community area of Buffer has been particularly exciting for me, because I can use it to reply to folks interacting with me instead of using the native social apps. This was truly the straw that broke the camel’s back (the camel being all the social apps on my phone).

Before this, I would react to notifications from any of 5 different apps informing me of random people liking or replying to what I post, and I’d bounce across those apps in an attempt to stay on top of all of it. I would mostly keep up, but it would always feel chaotic. Now I just check the Community tab a couple times a day, either on my laptop or phone – and I don’t need any social apps available locally to do it. Plus, you can bulk dismiss comments you don’t want to deal with 😉

This is relatively new to Buffer and something several of my teammates are actively developing. We just rolled out the ability to Like comments directly in the tab, and we’re working on some more features: support for Mentions, quickly categorize & triage comments, plus covering more social channels (YouTube, TikTok and Mastodon are all on the list).

Knowing what’s working

I’ll fully admit that I don’t think much about my social media metrics themselves. I don’t look for robust charts that demonstrate my follower growth or fluctuations in post reach over time. (We do have some of this in the paid Analyze area of Buffer, which we’re planning to overhaul very soon!)

Instead, I look for general trends & learnings (What posts did well? What posts are getting the most replies/discussion?) and other downstream metrics, like site traffic, song plays and purchases. The Sent tab I mentioned earlier is where I can get a quick glance at posts to inform those learnings, but I admit we can offer more here to actually distill those metrics into useful trends and such. This will be a focus for our team over the first half of 2026.

My personal wishlist for Buffer

This is what I am wanting out of our own apps. It’s a lot – hopefully clear here that we have a lot still to do. Fortunately, we’re working or planning to work on many of these things this year!

• Automatically break up long-form writing into a multi-post thread

• Surfacing trends or top/surprise performers, and similar insights

• Be able to compare posts shared to multiple platforms against each other

• Support for Mastodon and YouTube comments in Community

• Better comment notifications

• A better way of managing links or text snippets I frequently use in posts

• Notify me when someone mentions me on a social platform

• Be able to publish directly to my newsletter or RSS feed, or at least more tightly integrate these with Buffer

• Some kind of curated feed of posts in my topics of interest, to serve as inspiration

• Auto-update the posting schedule if posting time recommendations change (note: currently this requires a manual update, but also the recommendations don’t change much or often)

• An inbox for DMs, not just public comments

I hope this was a helpful, or at least interesting, read!