2022 review - wind of change
🗓Yearly Reviews,⭐️Featured
This is my ninth yearly review and yesterday was the Valentine’s Day which means I’ve never posted a review so late in a year. It’s because this January has been particularly busy for me as you’ll see. The year of 2022 in a nutshell was a big change for me - the business was going slower than in 2021 and in the end I had to make quite a few drastic changes that should bring hope for 2023. Here goes:
- War in Ukraine changed it all!
- Nozbe, my productivity business of 16 years
- More changes to my Home Office setup
- Health and Sports - OK but could be better!
- Personal stuff in 2022
- 2022 was a year of many changes that will hopefully make 2023 much better overall!
War in Ukraine changed it all!
It’s impossible to write about 2022 without mentioning the awful war in Ukraine. Because of it, we stopped selling Nozbe to Russians and Belarusians. I’ve started a FCKPTN project. In a few days we’ll be already a year into this war and there is no end in sight. I hate it that the world seems to have gotten used to the fact that there’s a war in Ukraine. This mustn’t be the new normal.
Nozbe, my productivity business of 16 years
The biggest change for Nozbe as a business, was finally switching to a Limited Liability company. I should have done it sooner, but as they say, better late than never. Now I’m no longer Nozbe and Nozbe is no longer me. But I am still the owner of the company (together with my wife) and I’m the CEO.
Business-wise it was another tough year. Despite clear message that the artist formerly known as “Nozbe Teams” is the new Nozbe - Nozbe Personal sales dropped significantly and the new Nozbe sales didn’t pick up as quickly as I’d hoped.
One of the reasons was my lack of leadership of the company. I delegated too much of the responsibilities and the whole vision of what we’re building was lost in the translation and the product wasn’t as good as we hoped it would be.
Luckily, at the end of the year thanks to talking to Nozbe’s awesome customers, one-on-one meetings with Nozbe directors and listening to my trusted group of mentors and a business coach, I think I got the hang of it back! The last few months have been much better for our business and I’ve taken a much more hands on approach as a leader.
These past months, especially December of 2022 and January of 2023 I was working on a new positioning of Nozbe:
Nozbe is an app for small business owners that lets them get both their business and life organized in a simple way.
It’s like I finally realized what I was doing all along - I was helping small business owners like myself (duh!) maintain a work-life balance thanks to Nozbe - an app where they can manage it all - their business tasks and projects, as well as their private ones!
Nozbe is a work-life balance app!
That’s why this year we’ll be focusing on two things:
- Simplicity and joy of use - how to make Nozbe even simpler to use and get started, as well as making sure using our app brings you daily joy!
- Reaching out to small business owners - even though Nozbe is an app for everyone, we will not market it like this - but we’ll focus on small business owners exclusively for 2023 and beyond.
My goal for Nozbe is to serve 100K business owners by the end of this decade.
If you’re a business owner yourself and you’re struggling to maintain a work-life balance - check out Nozbe today.
Nozbe - simplify your life!
As I mentioned above, I hired a business coach - Marta Raga - she is specializing in helping power women overcome their anxiety problems - but she uses me to train her skills and… she helped me a lot process my issues and limiting beliefs to help me grow as a CEO. I’m having regular monthly sessions with her and I’m planning to continue next year, too!
More changes to my Home Office setup
I finally ditched my good-old iMac5K after 7 great years of service and replaced it with the M1 MacBook Air which is a great office computer for me. My main machine remains the M1 iPad Pro 13 for which I built a dedicated iPad Corner and my main iPhone remains the iPhone 13 Mini which apparently is as powerful as the latest smartphones.
Health and Sports - OK but could be better!
My weight is not where it should be. My average for the year was 74.2 (compared to 73.2 in 2021) and now I’m back at 75kg yet again. I’m working my way down since the beginning of the year to finally get to 70kg by my birthday in May. I’m very mindful about my diet now.
In 2022 I spent 260 hours doing sports, slightly more than 252 hours of the previous year, which is good. I completed one olympic-distance triathlon (my 15th!) and this year I’m also planning on doing just one race.
- Swimming - I started going more regularly to the pool and did 20km (close to my 24km goal).
- Cycling - I did even fewer km than the previous year and clocked only 1179km (below 1500km goal). Milestones: RV8, B4, SV4, M1, R1.
- Running - again, fewer km than in previous years, only 372km (below my 420 goal). I had trouble finding motivation to run! Milestones: P2P6, SG1.
- Walking - more than last year, 283km and this year I’m already off to a good start. More power walks with my wife and for the first time I tried Nordic walking (and I did it twice and it’s lots of fun!)
- Tennis - a little more than a half of what I did in 2022, which means only 39 hours of tennis play. Couldn’t find as many partners to play as in previous years. The cool thing is that I also started practicing Padel and won my first match!
- Weight training - nothing to see here. Only 5 hours total. Shameful. This is also one of the reasons my weight is where it is now. Time to get back in shape!
Fitness Goals for 2023
After reviewing of all my goals and making a plan for this year, I’m aiming for more realistic goals that fit my lifestyle:
- Swimming 🏊♂️ of 24 km or 2 km/month
- Cycling 🚴♂️ of 1200 km or 100 km/month
- Running 🏃♂️ of 400 km or 33 km/month
- Walking 🚶♂️ of 240 km or 20 km/month
- Tennis 🎾 of 48 h or 4 hours/month
- Weight training 💪 of 24 h or 2 h/month
How to improve my fitness in 2023?
One cannot achieve different results doing the same things so I’ve decided to make some changes in my schedule so that I make my fitness training more effortless:
- Every Monday and Wednesday, when two of my daughters go to Tennis and Padel, I bring them there and immediately go for a run. It’s usually a 5-6km run, so with 2 runs like this I can get to 10 km a week easily.
- Every Tuesday I have a Tennis training session with my coach before my marketing meeting.
- On Thursdays I go on the bike in the afternoon with a buddy of mine.
- On Fridays I usually try to do a power walk with my wife or have a tennis match with a friend.
- On weekends I sometimes go on longer bike rides with friends or do a weight training session at home.
Personal stuff in 2022
I’ve finally closed down “sliwinski.com” and redirected my blog to here which I’m very proud of. In a week I’ll be announcing another milestone in the history of this blog.
This blog brings me joy and is a constant reminder how much I like publishing content and writing these posts for myself and for anyone who’d read them.
Also, I started being much more frequent with my Newsletter both here and on LinkedIn. I hope you’ll subscribe and recommend my writing to others!
In other social media news, Elon Musk bought Twitter and completely destroyed the platform so I’m no longer as active there as I used to be. My colleague Tom helped me set up our very own Nozbe Mastodon Server where you can find me at @michael@nozbe.com
In 2022 I also updated my Journaling app for everyone to use. I created both a Basic version and an Advanced with Planning version. I hope many more people will appreciate the habit of daily regular journaling. It helps me stay grounded, focused and productive!
Trips in 2022
We’ve had 2 Nozbe Reunions last year and we’re planning one for this year. The first one was also the very first in-person after COVID pandemic. It was great to see my team together reunited. We visited two Polish cities: Lublin in Spring and Szczecin in Autumn.
In Summer, for my family I rented an RV aka “camper” and we traveled across Sweden 🇸🇪 and Denmark 🇩🇰. Living in a “moving home” or “house on wheels” for two weeks with my wife and 3 daughters is challenging but really fun. We’re thinking of repeating this kind of holiday this year. My youngest daughter got to celebrate her 6th birthday in Legoland! Yeah, I’m a big fan of Lego.
We also had a two-week holiday in Iceland 🇮🇸 - a country I always dreamt of visiting. It was so much fun, especially that we have Icelandic friends who live there and could show us around.
Last year I also visited Belgium 🇧🇪 (Brussels, Antwerp), UK 🇬🇧 (London where I got to see the Hamilton Musical yet again!) and Barcelona 🇪🇸 (Sagrada Familia is almost finished!).
Family events in 2022
Now that COVID is over, we visited our home town in Easter. We could take part in many family events, like celebrating my cousin’s 40th birthday, my brother-in-law’s son’s baptism or my middle daughter’s first communion. In December we got to spend Christmas with family and celebrate New Year’s Eve with friends partying like the pandemic never happened. So cool!
Weekend dates with my wife
More or less once per quarter me and my wife are trying to have a weekend together just to ourselves, where we go off to a nice place and spend time without our three (lovely) kids. We used to go on Honeymoons but now that our daughters want to travel with us on longer trips, we plan these with them and just get away for weekends. We did three weekends last year:
- In February we did our planning weekend in Seville in Spain. The hotels were amazing and the Andalusian climate was fantastic. It’s warm even in February!
- October weekend we spent in a city 150km away from home - we just drove off and hung out in small towns around there - visiting places we otherwise never have time to visit.
- December was a getaway to Warsaw - both me and my wife had professional commitments in the capital of Poland so we used it as an excuse to do business stuff and in the afternoon enjoy each other’s company. Mixing business with pleasure when you’re with your partner is great!
2022 was a year of many changes that will hopefully make 2023 much better overall!
The year of 2022 was great personally but not so much business wise.
I think I needed to be shaken out the same-old-same-old thinking and finally forced to face the music and take charge of my company, push for changes and double down on growing as a leader and CEO.
In 2023 I will keep on growing while learning how to convey the message of the kind of powerful change my Nozbe app can bring to small business owners in maintaining their work-life balance.
Here’s to a great 2023 🥂