Michael Sliwinski

I’ve been helping small business owners and their teams maintain a work-life balance since 2007. I work from home, I don’t email my team, we have few meetings and I don’t work on Fridays!
My projects: ✅Nozbe to-do app and 📖#NoOffice book
Side projects: 🖋Journal, 🎲Dice, ▶️YouTube watcher and 🇺🇦FCKPTN

⭐️ Featured article:

Topics on my blog:

Latest articles and posts:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #51: Why me and Magda are crazy about Task-Based Communication?

Another podcast episode recorded with my right-hand-woman Magda and a fellow Nozbe team member. We dive deeper into task based communication with all our best tips and tricks to help them work out in your team.

🔗 🍎 Apple Shortcuts and problems with IFs and blanks

One of the reasons I can be so productive being #iPadOnly is the fact that I use Siri Shortcuts a lot. I have them for Action button, Clipboard management, Notes, Journaling and much more… The problem is that both the Shortcuts app is very poorly written by Apple (crashes, freezes, scrolling issues) and with many iOS updates Apple “upgrades” the way Shortcuts work and suddenly something that used to work, just stops working. Recently this happened to me with my Tinify Shortcut. In iOS18 there was even a bigger change…

⌨️ 🔗 Use Tinify (TinyJPG and TinyPNG) to compress your images

When I was doing the migration from my old blog at sliwinski.com to this one, I wanted to make sure this one loads fast also on mobile phones. So I painstakingly compressed all of the images using a free(ish) service called Tinify. I wanted to both have cookie and eat it, so have lower file sizes AND great quality. I automated it using Shortcuts and each image was reduced by between 70%-30% of the original one without visible loss of quality. Here’s how I did it (and no, they are not a sponsor, I just recommend them because I like them).

⌚️ Apple Watch face for the Summer and weekends

As I keep using the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and keep loving it I keep tweaking the watch faces. I’ve already blogged about World Clock Watch Face and now it’s time for my Summer/weekend watch face, again based on the Ultra Modular.

💌 ✔️ 7 reasons why good habits are important

Creating and maintaining good habits helps you simplify decision-making, conserve mental energy and leads to long-term success. Here are 7️⃣ reasons why it’s good for you:

🎙 📱 🎬 No Office FM #50: Small Habits - Big Wins

Last week was a special podcast episode as I was recording in the same room with Magda, as we met on Nozbe Reunion. We talk about habits and it’s a very juicy episode! Listen up:

💌 Why batching & grouping tasks is good for your productivity?

✅ Apart from the usual Nozbe structure of projects, tasks and comments - there is a feature that will give you superpowers to group your tasks better for execution using “contexts” or “tags” like this:

📱 🔗 How to download YouTube videos using YT-DLP and a-Shell on the iPad

A few years back I wrote a tutorial how to download videos to the iPad using youtube-dl and a-Shell app but it stopped working because of a court order. Luckily there’s a fork of this called YT-DLP which you can use again. Here’s how it works:

✅ 🔗 New To Do - official Nozbe Siri Shortcut for iOS and Mac

I’ve created a version 2.0 of Nozbe Shortcut to add tasks recently and it’s much more powerful. Here’s what it can do:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #49: Contexts or Tags - How to Work Smarter By Batching Tasks

This episode is about taking your productivity to a whole new level by learning how to use contexts, or tags as they are named in Nozbe - learn how to batch tasks, follow status and much more!

💌 How to use emails productively?… and have less of it?

☀️ Summer holidays are gone and many of us just got back after a longer holiday… only to find a pile of emails 📧 so overwhelming! Is there a way out of it? Here’s how we do it at Nozbe:

📝 On September 11 `24 I am…

…back in my home office after summer holidays and getting ready for our annual Nozbe reunion

✔️ ⭐️ How I plan my week? Cal Newport’s Weekly Template my way

I started Nozbe because I’m a disorganized person so I needed to keep studying productivity and implementing techniques to stay on track. One of these is a weekly template. I originally took this idea from Michael Hyatt and his ideal week but just recently Cal Newport explained it even better on his podcast. Below are my thoughts and additional notes from Cal’s episode:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #48: How to Use Email Productively

The #NoOffice podcast is back and it’s my first episode after the summer and it’s all about email and all the ways to use it productively. Now that you’ve come back to work after your summer holidays, you will want to listen to it as you’re un-piling yourself from email:

🍿 😎 ⭐️ My thoughts have been replaced by “Hamilton” lyrics…

I love musicals and I’m a huge fan of the Hamilton musical since I saw it first in London on West-end in 2019. Later it came to Disney+ with the original cast and the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda (see trailer below) and we’ve been having regular screenings with friends and family in our home. Later we took our entire family (including our three daughters) to see the show again on West-end in London in 2022. But that’s not all, as both my wife and me speak German, we even travelled to Hamburg in Germany, to attend a German-version of Hamilton last year. Our entire family is crazy about this show. We listen to the entire soundtrack in the car. And my eldest daughter got herself a shirt that says: “My thoughts have been replaced by Hamilton lyrics” which inspired me to write this post:

🐘 Follow me on Mastodon or see what I’m up to now

Hi, I’m Michael Sliwinski, the host of this site. Are you a fellow small business owner? Make sure to give Nozbe a try - my app will help you and your team get your professional and private life organized in a simple way. It’s FREE and you’ll get a bonus of $15 for Premium version by signing up below: