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:

💌 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:

✅ 💼 🎬 Set up Nozbe in 5 minutes or less! You can change your company’s habits so quickly!

My app Nozbe is kind-of in productivity space, but now as we serve SMART business owners we are more in habit-changing space. Especially as entrepreneurs realize their companies are becoming successful and need to get organized, they need Nozbe but they tell me they have no time to set it up. That’s why I recorded this short video explaining that you CAN set up yourself and 2 of your closest co-workers in 5 minutes or less, from start to finish:

📝 On August 4 ‘24 I am…

…starting my summer August which means deep work, reading and a family camper RV trip. Need a break after quite a stressful first half of the year.

📱 ⭐️ 5G - 5 reasons for getting a cellular iPad

As an iPad fan, the person who uses iPad as the main computer and who loves working on an iPad and who just happily upgraded to the M4 iPad Pro, I get asked a lot about choosing the best configured iPad for people’s needs. Recently I’ve been asked whether it’s worth it to upgrade to the “cellular” model. My answer in most cases is YES and here’s why:

💌 ✅ 💬 Messages in a productivity app?

At Nozbe we are fans of #asynchronous communication, meaning, it’s not in real-time: you do something - you get feedback later. So why did we include chatting/messaging in our app now? Because #productivity… let me explain:

🎙 🎬 No Office FM is back with #47: Messages in Nozbe

After a long hiatus the NoOffice Podcast is back and it will become a regular podcast starting from September. In this new in-between episode I’m sharing the details behind our latest Nozbe feature: Messages - how they came to be, why we did it, and how we’ve made them productive!

📱 ⭐️ A happy month with 13” M4 iPad Pro - thinness changes the device!

As a devout #iPadOnly user, I’ve posted my first and second impressions of the new iPads but now that I’ve lived with one for almost a month, I can offer a better verdict… and it’s very positive! The new 13” M4 iPad Pro is something else! Here’s why:

🐘 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: