Open Tabs is a series under The Weekly Scroll where we peek into what a creator or social media pro has open on their browser, saved in their bookmarks, and stuck in their head right now. Each issue, someone new shows us what they're paying attention to.
Sabreen Haziq is a brand marketer at Buffer and an avid LinkedIn creator on the side. You'll find her on LinkedIn. She gives us a refreshed look at her tabs: check out her previous Open Tabs issue here.
Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.
Ruben Hassid (Substack): I’ve been really enjoying all of Ruben Hassid’s AI education content on Substack
Life of Riza (YouTube): I am completely mesmerized by the YouTube channel Life Of Riza, specifically underscoring creative ways of filming
This is how you’ll become a content creator in 2026 (YouTube): I was blown away by Modern Millie’s 3-hour video on how to become a content creator in 2026
Brain.fm: I’ve been really enjoying my Brain.fm subscription. It helps me get into a deeper creative flow, and I love their functional music, especially on ADHD mode.
Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?
I’ve been really enjoying Jade Sheng’s content on Instagram, where she goes by @jade.got.curious. She’s a creative director by trade, based in Chicago, and she uses content creation as a form of self-discovery. She started the account only a couple of months ago and is already at 112,000 followers, which completely blew my mind.
The first thing I noticed is that she only puts out about one video a week, and each one is a banger. There’s enormous pressure on creators in this attention economy to post constantly, so watching someone choose continuity and quality over frequency has been refreshing. Her storytelling is super layered, and she brings a lot of nuance to her scripts. She takes something intricate and explains it simply, often through metaphor, using the everyday objects lying around her like a craft mat or Lego. She’s also very good at finding an unexpected angle into a familiar topic, and she builds hook loops that carry you through the whole video. Parts of her videos are shot in her living room, and parts are shot outdoors, so my sense is that she isn’t filming in one sitting. She collects these breadcrumbs across the week and then edits them into one really strong video.
Her approach and her pacing took a lot of pressure off me. I move fast by default, because in my mind more output means more data on myself, and that data is how I pin down my own patterns and improve on them. Jade is proof that volume isn’t the only path to that, and that a small number of well-made pieces can teach you just as much. She’s also the reason I’m starting a new Instagram account. My current handle skews heavily South Asian in audience, and I want to build something for a US audience from scratch. Wish me luck!
What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?
I’ve been listening to “Vienna” by Billy Joel a lot lately, and one line in particular keeps resounding in my head: “Slow down, you’re doing fine, you can’t be everything you want to be before your time.”
I’m someone who constantly needs to expend creative calories, and I’m fortunate that my role gives me plenty of avenues for it. The cost of that wiring is that I often end up in a whirlpool of wanting to work on several pieces at once, and I’ve started to notice that the urge to make more things and the urge to make better things are not the same urge. Speed had been standing in for judgment. So I’ve been putting an intentional delay into my creative process, and what surprised me is that the delay is where I spend the most time thinking. The ideas that survive the week are not the same ideas I had on day one. This isn’t an instinct that comes naturally to me, so I’m practicing it deliberately, and I’ve been seeking out other creators in my industry who already work this way.
This also connects to the feedback I’ve been getting in my role at Buffer. We do monthly reflections with our managers, and pace keeps coming up as an area of growth for me. Pace is my superpower, but I’ve had to sit with the fact that moving fast and finding alignment pull against each other, and that when I lead with speed I’m usually solving for my own output rather than for the team’s clarity. What I didn’t expect is that slowing down would make the work more enjoyable too. When everything feels urgent, you never really get to sit with the thing you’re making. So, I’m taking more breaks without the guilt, and I come back with more energy and a clearer sense of what’s next.
What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?
Oof! The biggest thing I’m working through in my creator journey is scale, which I recognize is a fortunate problem to have. I’ve worked with more than 25 brands over the last year and a half, and a lot of those relationships have turned into long-term partnerships. It’s continuous, and that brings a predictability I didn’t have at the start. The hard part is that predictability takes up the same room that new opportunities used to fill! Hah!
When you’re early, saying yes to most things is the right strategy, because every yes teaches you something about what you’re building and what you’re worth. But at some point this flips, and the same instinct that got you here becomes the bottleneck. I’m learning to make tough calls about which projects to take, and to weigh a new brand against the long-term relationships I’ve already built.
On the practical side, I’ve been reworking my pricing and repackaging my offerings, and that has turned out to be a decision-making tool as much as a revenue one. It filters out a lot of brands automatically unless they come back with a scope that reflects what the (hard) work involves. The honest part is that I’m sitting on the cusp of joy and overwhelm! I don’t do creator work during the week, so most of my production happens over weekends, which is the same time that’s meant to be rest. I’m trying to build myself something close to a rubric, so that “is this worth it” becomes a question I answer with criteria rather than with instinct at 11 p.m. on a Thursday. Protecting rest is the real constraint I’m facing, and I’m learning that a decision about one brand deal is also a decision about how present I get to be for everything else.
Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?
The LinkedIn AI slop button caught my attention immediately! It started out as a joke, and then a lot of us noticed the option was really there. That’s a power move on LinkedIn’s part, and it’s also the part that worries me.
The premise is that AI slop is recognizable. If you write for a living, or if you’re AI-native, you can usually suss it out within a couple of lines. The complication is that AI writing and human writing are converging. Models keep getting better at natural language, and in the meantime a handful of ordinary words have been reclassified as tells. If you write “momentum” or “genuinely,” or leave in one extra dash, someone can read a sentence you wrote yourself as AI output. The judgment is intuitive, which is what makes it unreliable at scale.
What LinkedIn has built is a crowdsourced taste judgment wired into a moderation signal, and taste is one of the least stable inputs you can hand a distribution system. I hope people use it responsibly instead of flagging each other rampantly. A lot of creators are already exhausted from constantly workshopping hooks and trying to stay inventive, and one of those attempts will occasionally read as synthetic even when it isn’t. Give people grace and be selective about it, because none of us know what sits on the other side of the flag.
That’s what I’d want clarity on. How many reports does it take before LinkedIn treats a creator as a repeat offender? Does reach get suppressed, and for how long? I don’t take this lightly, because a flag I place on someone’s post could carry consequences for the revenue they make that month.
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO TALK ABOUT BREADCRUMBS
Sabreen’s line about Jade collecting breadcrumbs across the week and editing them into one video reminded me of one of the ways I use the Ideas space in Buffer. And you can use it too: to create, store, and refine your half-formed thoughts into fleshed-out content.
Tami popping in here 👋🏾
I’m inspired by a lot of things outside of social media, particularly other forms of media (TV, music, movies).
And I’ve watched a LOT of good stuff recently, but nothing has gotten my wheels turning more than Charli XCX’s latest album, Music, Fashion, Film.
This might be a bit of a random pull, but I consider Charli to be one of the most considered creatives alive today and the interviews she’s been doing on the press circuit for the album have been an illuminating insight into her mind and creative process.
I’m also reading On Photography by Susan Sontag in a bid to use an old hobby to get more insight into my new hobby. But really, nothing beats getting in practice reps with a camera, so I’m making time for that most days. It’s also a hack for cutting down on my screen time haha.
Alright, that’s it from me.
If you’d like to contribute to an issue of Open Tabs, fill out this form. I look forward to featuring more readers!
Until next week,
Tami
Sr. Content Creator
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