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:

🎧 The Podcast 217 - Immature business decisions in 18 years of Nozbe

AI co-hosts have a great discussion about my essay celebrating 18 years of Nozbe - immature business decisions. They manage to catch the essence of what I was trying to convey - enjoy!

🕹️ ✈️ 3 BIG problems of Peak Design’s Roller Pro - weight, size and price

I’m a big fan of Peak Design and I have ordered their Everyday Zip Backpack 15L (Amazon link) as my go-to backpack for travel. And before that I ordered their Outdoor Backpack 25L as my new default backpack (Amazon link). What I didn’t order is their latest invention - the carry-on luggage Roller Pro despite looking very cool:

💌 Remote Work Hacks: Fighting the ‘Dark Side’ of #NoOffice

Remote work offers many benefits BUT it comes with some challenges that can make it difficult to stay productive and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Problems like:

🏠 💻 Perfect Recording Studio in my Home Office 2025

Now that I’ve finished setting up My new Home Office for 2025 I’m starting to appreciate the tweaks and improvements that lead to making it my best “recording studio” ever. It’s an improvement to the Streaming setup from 2021 and most gear stayed the same, but with the new things that came in and much better light management this makes the overall result amazing:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #71: Remote Work Hacks

We discuss a series of hacks that you can use to make your #NoOffice experience better. How you can work from home and finally get the lifestyle you want while still benefiting from a focused and productive environment.

🔗 Photo Info - quickly manipulate photos on iOS and Mac

On my #iPadOnly journey I keep making lots of Shortcuts to improve my work on the iPad. Sometimes I need to manipulate images or photos. Here’s a handy Shortcut for it:

🕹️ ✈️ Is Peak Design Everyday Zip 15L an ideal small backpack for airplanes?

In Europe, most airlines, especially Ryanair, Easyjet and Wizzair, let you have a free small bag which you can put under a seat. The dimensions are more-less 40cm of height (16 inches), 25-30cm of width (10-12 inches) and 20cm of bulk (8 inches). Most of my backpacks are between 20-26L and they are just too big. Normally I’d get away with it, but recently the airlines started paying more attention to these bags’ sizes. So I checked if my favorite bag/pouches company Peak Design had anything that would work and I think I found it. It’s Everyday Backpack Zip 15L (Amazon link).

💻 How to put iCloud Photos and Dropbox on an external SSD

I’m in the middle of renovating my home office for 2025 and this time it’s not only about moving some furniture around but also upgrading some hardware. I’ve retired my trusty M1 MacBook Air and bought an almost-base M4 Mac Mini to which I connected an external 4TB SSD drive for storing both all the photos and all of my Dropbox files. Here’s how:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #70: Remote Work Banned – Because Workers Are Just Napping?

Why companies ditch hybrid work? Are there any data-based reasons to back up this decision? Are CEO’s too emotional and employees simply cheating when working from home? In today’s episode, we tackle one of the most controversial workplace topics: the return-to-office (RTO) mandate. Does this policy make objective sense or is it simply nostalgia of certain CEOs?

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #58: Immature Business Decisions

I’ve been running Nozbe for the last 18 years and very often I made business decisions that were against the “common business sense”, yet they’ve benefited me tremendously. Here are some examples where I just followed my gut and succeeded.

✅ 💼 ⭐️ How my immature decisions led me to celebrating 18 years of my productivity business?

Nozbe - the productivity app that I founded back in February of 2007 is celebrating 18 years in business. To commemorate the occasion, we bid and won the cover of iMagazine (see below) as all the proceeds from this auction went to charity. So… my Nozbe app is now mature. However, as I’ve been preparing today for this Wednesday’s celebratory recording of the NoOffice FM Podcast, I’ve realized that I’ve been making some very immature decisions on my way to getting here:

📝 On February 1 `25 I am…

…I’m celebrating 18 years of Nozbe on a weekend with my wife, as we plan our year. I’m so blessed!

🎙 🎬 No Office FM #57: Why I pay people for free Fridays? 4-day Workweek at Nozbe!

This time it’s me solo doing a comprehensive presentation of our Nozbe Mighty Friday policy. How is it that in my company people don’t really work on Fridays and I still pay them and we’ve been doing this for the last 8 years?

🤖 LEGO Ferrari Daytona SP3

I have a long-standing tradition of getting a cool LEGO set each Christmas and in 2023 I got an amazing car - Ferrari Daytona SP3 which is enormous! Almost 4K blocks (3778 to be exact) based on a $2.5M dollar hypercar and this time it took me almost a year to build it as I couldn’t find the time for it. In the end it’s here and it’s gorgeous.

🔗 LinkTitle - an easy way to get a title of any page

When you’re working online like I do (“I write random stuff on the Internet”, after all) very often you have to copy and paste links. Also their titles. To make it easy, I decided to create a simple Shortcut that will get the title automatically for me. Feel free to use it, too:

🐘 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: