It's 6:46am. I was supposed to be starting this just after 6am but I couldn't drag myself out of bed until now.

This week I'm on a holiday from client work. I'm working on Exist, but all of my normal client work time is going into resting and hobbies like reading and learning iOS development. This week is supposed to be the break I've been needing to stop myself from feeling rundown; to avoid burnout.

The more I write, the more I favor a "lean" writing approach. In the spirit of lean startups, I've developed a writing process that's focused on creating a solution to the problem as quickly as possible, and iterating on it.

If you're getting stuck when trying to write, or if you need to stick to a tough schedule of writing new content (I'm writing up to 5 pieces a week at the moment), this process can help you get past the blank page and create something valuable every time.

The term "gated content" most often applies to a content product, such as an eBook or PDF available to download, that a customer must "pay for" with their email address.

Here are some examples:

I'm feeling tired and rundown this week. But I'm not too surprised about it. I've just come through a period of huge growth and productivity. I launched The List, set a weekly publishing schedule for this blog and stuck to it (I even got ahead, so I have a backlog of posts waiting to be published now), and started getting up at 6am to write four days a week.

I've shared some of my favourite apps in the past, and recently I shared the tools I use for writing. Today I want to focus on the physical products I use all the time and would recommend.

My computer is a MacBook Air and my phone is an iPhone 5S. Apart from those, it's easy to forget about the products that make my life easier and more fun every day. Here are some of them.

When you write something, what name do you give it? A blog post? An article, and essay?

Paul Graham is well-known for publishing essays on his site, and he's even written one about what essays are.

I find it fascinating to look through my archive of published work and remember how each post came to be. Some of them in particular have interesting stories behind the topics and titles. I've collected a few of my previous posts to share with you how each idea was born and what lesson we can take away from each example.

You'll notice almost all of these are from the Buffer blog. For the most part, posts I write for my own blog, the Exist blog, or for sites like Crew and Zapier, generally come from a very simple place—a personal experience, some new research, or simply a topic I'm curious about. Working in a team at Buffer, and taking cues from such a large audience, led to more interesting stories behind some of the content.

I used to think short blog posts weren't worth reading. I thought a post of 500 words or less would necessarily be low quality, because the author probably didn't put much time into it.

Recently I visited the blog of someone I respect and noticed many of his posts are shorter than 500 words. In fact, some were just 2-300 words. Seeing such short-form content from someone I respect made me rethink my avoidance of short blog posts. I see now that there are benefits to writing high-quality short-form content.

Having "the right" tools will not make you any better at writing, but they can make the process more enjoyable. Of course, the "right" tools are really what's right for you. I've found my favourite tools through a mixture of coming across them by chance (most physical products) and trying them out after reading recommendations by other people (most of the apps I use).

I'm working on an experiment at the moment to refocus my personal brand and make my output of content more valuable and consistent. I've been reading a lot and listening to some helpful podcasts, and came up with a plan for attempting this refocusing. I wanted to share it with you in case it helps you to think about your own brand and how you can adjust the way it comes across to others.

There's a term in the startup world, dogfooding, which comes from the phrase "eat your own dog food". Eating your own dog food means using your own product. Being your own customer. Understanding what you've built from your users' point of view.

Shortly before I left Buffer I read a story about a startup founder whose company died—according to him, mainly due to building something nobody on his team was dogfooding. He since moved on to building a company that sells socks—such great socks that he happily wore them every day. His new company was doing really well.

Periodically I like to write about some of the apps I'm using a lot (previous app posts: Feb, March). As a personal project, I also take a screenshot of my iPhone's homescreen once a week, so I thought I'd include my most recent homescreen this time around:

I was asked once about why so many links to the Buffer blog end up in my work. It's not just the Buffer blog; I link to all sorts of blogs and websites when I'm writing. And there's a good reason why.

When I write content, it's full of me: my thoughts and opinions, my research, my experiences. Things I've read often end up being referenced in my work. So do things I come across in my research. And blog posts I've written in the past, especially when I write about similar or related topics, as I often do.

I've read a couple of posts by startup founders recently that mentioned how it's expected of a founder to always be positive when asked how your startup's going. Nikki's post about how it feels to be shutting down her startup mentioned this. Nikki also said she wished she had been able to read about the emotional turmoil of shutting down a startup, so she would have felt less alone.

From my experience, there seem to be three main ways to use c ontent marketing for your business. I offer the same piece of advice to pretty much everyone I talk to about content marketing, which is: work out why you're using content marketing and what your goals are. Then you can choose the method that suits you best.

If you don't know why you're doing something, you can't measure whether it's working or not.

Next Tuesday Josh and I are flying to London. We're going on holiday for two weeks: a fortnight of gallivanting around Europe, minimising our stress and maximising our fun.

Aside from scouting each place we go as a potential new home for our company, we're purely taking a holiday. We're only taking one laptop between us. There'll be no work time unless something important comes up—all non-urgent work is being pushed back while we travel.

Something that's been bothering me lately is the measurement of "high quality" in the content marketing world. My issue is, I think the bar is too low.

I'm not exempt from this, either. The more I learn and improve, the more I realise how low my content quality was in the past.

I've been struggling to get to inbox zero lately. I've never really had this problem before, but between my work at Buffer and Ooomf and things heating up at Exist, I've really been drowning in emails.

I also tend to work with my inbox closed and notifications turned off. After all, emails aren't "real work" so I don't want them distracting me.

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.

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.