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Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do. More…

About Michael Sliwinski

Your host - founder and CEO of Nozbe

Hi, I’m Michael Sliwinski and I’m the founder and CEO of Nozbe and Nozbe Teams - to-do apps for busy professionals and teams. I’m leading a team of 20+ people who work completely remotely from their “home offices” and we’ve been doing this for the last 13+ years now. Nozbe and Nozbe Teams have more than 700K users from all over the world.

I’m on a mission to help small teams do great things!

I’m all about “team productivity” and what it means for me is helping teams work better, in a calmer way, leveraging trust, flexible hours and work from anywhere (remote for life!) and all that with the modern tools and technology of 2020.

Short bio

Here’s my short bio:

Michael Sliwinski is a productivity enthusiast and entrepreneur. He’s the founder of Nozbe, app that since 2007 helps small business owners (and their teams) manage their business and private life. Nozbe is available on any platform (web-based with native apps for the Mac, Windows, Android, iPad and the iPhone + Apple Watch). Michael is passionate about working from anywhere in the world (#NoOffice) and in a mobile way (#iPadOnly). Privately he is a husband and a father of 3 girls.

Here’s my full story

Selfies

If you need my photos for an interview, just right click and “save as” to download them in full res:

Michael Blue Michael Black Michael ATP Michael UK Michael UK Michael Team

This site is open source

View the source of this site on GitHub. You can copy and share any part of this site, but just give back credits to me. It’s published using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Everything - the content, the code, anything - feel free to share it, use it, re-use it. Just remember to give me credit.

What I’m doing now?

Check out my “Now” page

My additional projects:

Things I used to do:

Speaking

You can hire me to speak at your event!

I’m Passionate about Productivity, Entrepreneurship and Technology that help us get things done.

These are the three topics I’m being asked to speak at events all over the world. I’ve been a keynote speaker at various conferences and events (including TEDx) in the USA, Germany and Poland. As a productivity expert I’ve been featured on BBC and other media channels. These days I’m extremely busy running Nozbe, so I only accept a limited number of offers to speak per year. One of my recent ones was the one at InfoShare 2018:

Watch my entire keynote on InfoShare 2018

Here’s what people say about me speaking:

“Michael spoke to my team about productivity, time management and the tools that help him achieve his goals. His presentation left us motivated and excited to get more organized and achieve more in less time and with less stress. Michael speaks with authenticity and humor and delivers his productivity message with authority born of experience and passion. We could not have been more satisfied with what Michael provided us at Polidea’s Non-Tech Talk.” - CEO at Polidea

Contact me if you want me to speak at your event

My story

To learn more about my Nozbe story, please read this interview with me.

Born Polish, I’m European and I think globally

I was born in Gdynia, northern Poland (in Europe) and spent my childhood there. My mom started teaching me English when I was 6 and thus she fostered my interest in languages… and my father, who was an “electronics technician” got me interested in computers. My parents are really amazing. Together as a family (along with my younger brother Przemek) we traveled every year somewhere for holidays… and that’s why I still love traveling so much. Now, apart from Polish and English I also speak fluently two other European languages: Spanish and German… and I’m currently learning Japanese and French.

I studied in 3 Universities

I have two university degrees. One from the University of Gdansk (Poland) in Business Economics and one from the Fachhochschule Stralsund (Germany) in Marketing. I also spent a year studying on the Technical University in Valencia (Spain) through the Erasmus exchange program.

I started independent as apivision.com

Right after my graduation in 2003 I set up my own company “apivision.com” to pursue my interest in the Internet commerce. I founded several startups that eventually failed before I finally started something I was truly passionate about and managed to succeed with: Nozbe.

I launched Nozbe in 2007

Initially I started Nozbe because I wanted to better manage my time and I was inspired by David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. Back in 2005 I couldn’t find a tool that’d work for me so I built my own. I basically rewrote it twice before I launched it in 2007. Nozbe was my side project for an entire year before I decided to focus on running it full time in 2008. Now we’re a 20+ fully-remote people in the Nozbe team. Here’s a short history of Nozbe written for our 10th anniversary

I love my work, sports and books

I love what I do so it doesn’t feel like work. But apart from that I try to remain fit, especially as I lost weight thanks to “slow carb diet” and started running triathlons (I do 3-4 olympic distance a year: 1500m swim, 40km bike and 10km run). And recently I picked up tennis.

I also read about 30 books per year (actually I’m listening to them). I am a geek who likes technology gadgets (I’m an Apple fanboy) and cars. I am a Christian (Roman Catholic) and believe Jesus Christ to be my savior but I’m a very liberal catholic.

I work in “No Office”

I work from home and everyone on my team works remotely. I believe that “work is not a place to go but a thing you do”. I live in a very beautiful place in Europe with my wife Ewelina (who is a lawyer and you can see her on the photo above) and my three amazing daughters: Milena, Emilia and Liliana.

Here’s a video that I recorded a while back that illustrates what I’m about:

My name in Polish is: Michał Śliwiński.

Contact me or check what I’m doing now