Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for modern teams. I write about productivity, #NoOffice, #iPadOnly and I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do.
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.
Sugared drinks are a big part of our pop culture. They have all the marketing money in the world and they try to sell us on the idea that drinking sugar-bubbly drinks 🥤 is good for us. Yes, they taste good. But essentially they are just empty calories, they elevate our glucose levels and basically make us fat. We should drink water 💦 instead. That’s why I was so happy to see the world-famous footballer Cristiano Ronaldo rejecting Coca-cola on a Eurocup press conference, indicating to drink water instead. What an example!
Finally both me and my wife managed to get our first shot 💉 of the Moderna type of the vaccine against the COVID-19 disease. In this short blog post I want to explain why we got it, why I’m excited about it and why I hope to encourage you to give it a shot (pun intended) as well. Here’s us after we got ours:
Apple discontinued the HomePod and was selling them “until supplies last”. Instead of getting rid of the HomePod I had in the kitchen, I did something completely different. I listened to Marco Arment praise HomePods on ATP here and then here, especially recommending a stereo pair. So I hunted down two white HomePods for my living room and hooked them up:
Derek Sivers in his book “Anything You Want” coined the term: Hell yes, or no!. This basically means that if a decision is not an instant, exciting yes for you, it should be a no. Turns out my 4-year old daughter, Liliana, already gets it. She applies a very similar rule: I don’t love it.
10 years ago today the big earthquake hit Japan and I was there to witness it first hand. It was my first ever trip to Japan to promote Nozbe and the Nozbe Handbook. What was supposed to be an exciting trip to Japan turned out a lot more exciting due to the earthquake and its aftermath. Today, a decade later, I want to get back to these moments:
I grew up as a Star Wars fan. I always admired Jedi knights and especially their Jedi Master Yoda. So when I got Disney+ for my kids and realized there was a new series from the Star Wars universe called The Mandalorian featuring a “Baby Yoda” character I had to watch it. I loved it. So this past Christmas I doubled-down on my childhood memories and got a LEGO set featuring this cute character.
Every now and then it’s good to get off the screens of iPads and iPhones and just play a board game. As a father of three girls, we like spending evenings playing Catan, Carcassonne or Monopoly. Or even just a simple “Snakes and Ladders” game. But to be able to play, you need dice. And in a household like ours, dice magically disappear… so in order to be able to have them always handy, I decided to quickly build virtual dice, so that we can use the phone to throw them in a truly random fashion! 🎲🎲 Get virtual dice here.
Yes, it’s a crappy year. 2020 is seriously bugged. Our life has changed dramatically. We can’t do the things we used to do. We need to wear masks everywhere and avoid other people. However, even today in 2020, on the American Thanksgiving day, I can think of several things I’m thankful for.
When I was a young teenager I visited the Warsaw old town with my parents and my uncle. It was a hot summer afternoon and I wanted an ice-cream so we sat down in a very fancy ice-cream shop and my uncle told me: “Michael, take a look at the menu and choose any ice-cream you want. I’m buying.” And I looked at the menu and couldn’t decide… and this is what happened:
Last year on the GTD Summit one of the speakers was Marshall Goldsmith, the author of the book What got you here, won’t get you there! (Amazon or Audible) which I really liked. I discussed this book with Radek on The Podcast - The Art Of Feedback because one of the most memorable things Marshall wrote in this book (and said to me on the GTD Summit) is that we’re taking in feedback wrong. We have a tendency of ruining feedback. Here’s why: