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:
😎 🙁 ⭐️ Unlike you and me, billionaires are not free despite their fortunes
How is it possible, that two wealthiest people on the planet, with all the billions that they have, are not free to do whatever they want? Elon Musk not only destroyed the value of my beloved social media platform, Twitter (now X), but was jumping at a Trump rally. Jeff Bezos who owns Washington Post, blocked their endorsement for Kamala Harris. Billionaires, unlike us, are not free, because they have too much to lose.
Topics on my blog:
Latest articles and posts:
😎 New York Times warns against Trump while Harrison Ford makes a stand for Kamala Harris and democracy
Yesterday I wrote about billionaires and their newspapers like Washington Post or LA Times not having the freedom (or guts) to endorse Kamala Harris. Shame on them. Today New York Times posted a great paragraph showing why we have to get rid of Trump and aspiring autocrats like him once and for all:
💌 Why Task-Based Communication rocks? 🎸✅
…or simply follow my 5 tips on how to delegate work better & discover yourself why at Nozbe we don’t use emails internally but simply… create tasks:
🎥 Team Productivity Podcast re-started with NotebookLM!
I’ve officially joined the AI craze and finally started testing many AI tools consistently. One of them is NotebookLM which lets you create “notebooks” where you feed it with documents, sources, data and it summarizes things for you or answers your questions… or creates a podcast! Now, that last bit is really interesting and I’m using it now to publish a podcast based off of my writing:
✔️ ✅ ✏️ ⭐️ Time is Money. Or how Nozbe is basically printing cash!
Last week, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow entrepreneur whose app is focused on marketing services. We talked about pricing, value and ultimately why people buy (or not) subscriptions to our apps. He pointed out that benefits of using Nozbe are not monetary unlike what he’s offering (bringing businesses leads that convert to revenue). After our conversation I was feeling confused. What about the old saying that time is money? Exactly!
🎙 🎬 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:
📲 ⌚️ ⭐️ Year later - iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Watch Ultra 2
Last Friday people were picking up their new iPhones and Watches and I wasn’t one of them (yet?) so I decided to write my thoughts on my (still) current iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Watch Ultra 2 which I got last year. How have they served me? What’s great? Good? Bad? Ugly?
🎙 🎬 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!
🐘 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:
