I’ve been helping teams and their leaders do great things by working in a truly modern way since 2007. I work from home, I don’t email my team and I don’t work on Fridays!
My projects: ✅Nozbe to-do app for teams and 📖#NoOffice book
Side projects: 🖋Journal, 🎲Dice, ▶️YouTube watcher and 🇺🇦FCKPTN
Latest blog posts from me:
💼 ✅ 16 years of Nozbe
Today marks the “sweet sixteen” birthday 🎂 of Nozbe - a to-do app that I launched on my own way back on February 1, 2007 from my small rented apartment in Warsaw, Poland.
📲 😎 Replacing battery in iPhone SE - my daughter’s first phone!
Before we launched the brand new Nozbe I got myself an old 2016 iPhone SE to be able to test if our app is fast enough for this phone and designed well enough to fit this smallest screen on the iPhone. After a few years as I upgraded my iPhones, I put this old vintage one on the wall of my home office and kept it there. Now that my eldest daughter needed her first phone, I decided to give her this one for starters. However, this iPhone’s battery was really bad. So I did some research and decided to buy a new battery on Amazon for around $20 and change the battery myself. What could possibly go wrong?
📖 Hell yeah! Dedications I wrote to a friend on all 4 Derek Sivers books
I’m a big fan of Derek Sivers and his writing. I had a pleasure of interviewing him for the Productive! Magazine #30 and we’ve stayed in touch via email since then. I re-designed my blog inspired by him and just like him I maintain a “now” page. This December when I got an email from him about a sale of a bundle of all 4 of his books, I decided to take him up on his offer and bought two sets of his books - one for me and one for one of my best friends - Steve. Today I gave Steve the books and I wrote 4 separate dedications on each of them:
📱 🏠 Why I need a Mac when I’m working mostly on my iPad?
Recently I wrote about my new 2023 home office setup where the key part of it is the M1 MacBook Air. Some people reading that article got a wrong impression that I’m no longer #iPadOnly. They thought I ditched my beloved 13” iPad Pro. That’s not true. Quite the contrary, the iPad is still my main computer. In fact, I’m writing these words on my iPad. I’m doing most of my creative work on the iPad. But… the M1 MacBook Air is an important back-stage/secondary computer and that’s why I need it in my home office:
🏠 M1 MacBook Air changed my home office setup for 2023 completely!
Time for my annual home office update as it’s different from the one set up for 2022 when I configured a streaming kit. I thought that setup was going to stay for years to come. I even recorded a short video and a long video walkthrough about it. Well, this all changed when my iMac 5K became too old to get MacOS updates and I had to swap it for an M1 MacBook Air earlier this year. Going back to the laptop and external screen setup in my home office was something I haven’t done since 2012 with a MacBook Air connected to a Thunderbolt Display. Here’s my new 2023 setup, which I have been testing for the last few months and so far has been working pretty well for me:
💼 ✅ Nozbe is now a Limited Liability Company: Nozbe sp. z o.o.
As today is December 15, it would actually be 19th birthday of my entrepreneurship. Back in 2003 on this day I formally started my company called initially apivision.com as a web and Internet Marketing consultancy. Later as I launched Nozbe in 2007, I changed the company name to reflect that. However, there is no celebration today. My email, which I sent to all of Nozbe users earlier this week explains that my company has transitioned from sole proprietorship to a limited liability company. I also touched on our #NoOffice culture, why I believe it was this change was badly-needed as the company grew and why I procrastinated on it. I hope you’ll find it interesting:
🗯 💼 What’s a broken keycard moment in your business?
Recently I mentioned on this blog a cup holder effect, which is this situation that one small thing can ruin the whole experience for you. This one is similar, but from a business perspective. I call a keycard moment a glitch in your business, that causes a disproportionate harm to all of your other efforts. You might be doing everything well and your customers are happy, until they stumble upon a malfunctioning keycard which destroys that experience which you so carefully built. And the worst part is that you might not notice it, because it’s just a keycard. Let me explain:
😎 🤖 Another Porsche LEGO set - building the 911 RSR
After my success with Porsche GT3 RS I decided to add another, a little smaller and less complicated, yet still cool Porsche lego set - the Porsche 911 RSR which I got myself for Christmas 2020 - to basically cheer myself up in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Here’s how the build process went down:
💼 🎬 Trust is better than control and… performance!
On our Nozbe page about trust I write that control is better than trust should be inverted to: control is good, but trust to do the work is so much better. However, it’s also about performance. As Simon Sinek points out in the video below, we all want to have people on our team who are both great performers and trustworthy, but when push comes to shove… teams choose trust over performance:
🗯 📲 😎 How to enjoy photos of your family on your iOS16 iPhone Lock Screen
My brother, who recently converted back to iPhone from Android, just sent me over this tip and it’s fantastic - if you’re a parent, who has lots of family photos - follow the steps in this article and you’ll thank me later. Thanks to this tip, every hour I see a different photo of one of my three daughters and wife. I love my Lock Screen now! Here’s how to enable it:
💼 ✅ Aulery - how I won my first startup award
In a few days the Polish startup community will be awarding new startups Aulery - an annual award for innovation and global ambition. The funny thing is that the history of this award aligns with my history of starting and running Nozbe - because I was one of the first winners! Here’s how it went down:
📱 A decade later - 5 apps which are still on my iPad and rocking it!
More than 10 years ago I switched completely to using the iPad as my main computer and I posted a series of screenshots of apps I was using then. Heck, I dedicated an entire section of my #iPadOnly book to apps from that era. What strikes me now is that after a decade, there are still many apps that not only have stayed on my iPad but continue thriving on it. And most are authored by indie developers. Here’s my tribute to them:
🤩 🏝 Guest speaker at the Non-profit Productivity Summit 2022
Tomorrow my friend Mike St. Pierre is organizing a very cool virtual conference: Non-profit Productivity Summit where yours truly (that’s me!) will be speaking again about hybrid work, explaining the Pyramid of Communication and more. Below you’ll find some spoilers from my talk and an invitation to sign up for the summit! It’s free and there are many other cool speakers lined up!
🏝 Some companies still need an office because… they want an office!
Before the covid pandemic hit I was promoting Nozbe’s way of working - our #NoOffice lifestyle. However people were skeptical about it. They’d pull out the it’s good for you but it won’t work for me argument. Now that the pandemic is basically over, some companies are reluctant to keep working remotely and I believe that the ones that will insist on strictly going to the office will eventually lose, however they keep brining up the same arguments:
💌 5 things that might boost your productivity. Gratitude, No Office, getting things done… and more
Welcome back to my not-so-regular newsletter. I’m back with a short list of 5 ideas for you to help you get more done. Some obvious, some not so much, here goes:
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Hi, I'm Michael Sliwinski, the host of this site. Enjoying my writing? Make sure to give Nozbe a try - my app reflects what I stand for and what I write on this site - and it will make you more productive!
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