How my life influences my business and the other way round. How I design my lifestyle and how I succeed or fail in the process.
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…
How my life influences my business and the other way round. How I design my lifestyle and how I succeed or fail in the process.
This tip has blown my mind 🤯. It turns out that with a basic super glue and Baking soda (or Sodium Bicarbonate) you can fix almost anything. It started with my daughter’s headphones - her Beats Solo 3 wireless broke and initially I wanted to buy the replacement parts, but then I stumbled across a video (embedded below) that convinced me to do it differently. Here’s the result of my fix:
Virtual isn’t real. Online meetings aren’t the same as being in the same physical space. Long distance relationships never work. Right? Maybe. If that’s what you want to believe. I think by running my #NoOffice company Nozbe for the last 16 years I’ve proven that you can run a viable, creative and a very profitable business completely remotely. And recently I’ve realized that over more than a decade I’ve developed a close friendship with Augusto Pinaud even though that until last month, we’ve never met in person and all this time we’ve been only communicating online while living a literal ocean apart.
Twitter used to be my favorite social network. My happy place. I know, there are trolls there and stuff, but the cool thing about Twitter was that I could choose to follow only a select number of people and using a brilliant Tweetbot app. I had a social network without an algorithmic timeline. Just good old chronological timeline. I could follow my favorite people (Below 100) and I could tweet to people who’d choose to follow me (16K+ as of the moment of this post). This all changed when Elon Musk bought Twitter, fired a bunch of people, brought back suspended trolls and later, without any warning cut off access to third-party apps like my beloved Tweetbot. Here’s what I’m going to do moving forward:
Before we launched the brand new Nozbe I got myself an old 2016 iPhone SE to be able to test if our app is fast enough for this phone and designed well enough to fit this smallest screen on the iPhone. After a few years as I upgraded my iPhones, I put this old vintage one on the wall of my home office and kept it there. Now that my eldest daughter needed her first phone, I decided to give her this one for starters. However, this iPhone’s battery was really bad. So I did some research and decided to buy a new battery on Amazon for around $20 and change the battery myself. What could possibly go wrong?
After my success with Porsche GT3 RS I decided to add another, a little smaller and less complicated, yet still cool Porsche lego set - the Porsche 911 RSR which I got myself for Christmas 2020 - to basically cheer myself up in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Here’s how the build process went down:
My brother, who recently converted back to iPhone from Android, just sent me over this tip and it’s fantastic - if you’re a parent, who has lots of family photos - follow the steps in this article and you’ll thank me later. Thanks to this tip, every hour I see a different photo of one of my three daughters and wife. I love my Lock Screen now! Here’s how to enable it:
Today is Thanksgiving in America and even though I’m located on the other side of the pond, I really like this day and I’m truly thankful for my American friends and for their influence on my life. However in this short post I’d like to convince you to practice thankfulness and gratitude every day, ideally as you fill up your daily journal:
You are planning a special experience. Your expectations are high up. It’s going to be awesome. And then one minor thing doesn’t go according to plan. It’s a small issue, yet it slowly but surely impacts your perception of the entire experience. You switch from glass-full to glass-empty thinking. Now everything is wrong. It’s all bad. Ruined. Even when objectively it really isn’t. Me and my wife call it a “missing cup holder bias”. In this article I’m going to explain to you why we call it this way, how its negativity spreads and how to snap out of it!
A few years ago I got myself a glorious Porsche 911 GT3 RS Lego set for Christmas and I posted about it on my Instagram but never here on my blog. I’m a huge Lego fan and building physical objects out of these bricks is my way of doing something creative without looking at an iPad screen and relaxes me after a whole day of working on Nozbe. And gives me a chance to reconnect with friends. Here’s how I built my dream Porsche 911 GT3 RS out of Lego bricks back during the 2016/2017 Christmas season:
Today are America’s Midterm elections which motivates me to write about the importance of going to vote. Of doing your civic, democratic duty. Make sure you’re registered to vote. And then go and vote. While voting, remember about one aspect of democracy that nobody talks about - democracy is not the rule of the majority. Not at all. It’s the rule of the vocal minority when the good people do nothing and don’t vote. Here’s why: