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 week is all about the new iOS17 - operating system for our iPhones and iPads! Finally it’s coming to our devices and at last I’ll be able to split my main iCloud ID from my wife. An e-divorce of sorts. Nope, I’m not really breaking up with my wife, I love her too much… but we’ll finally be able to have separate iCloud accounts because since 2012 we’ve been using the same main Apple ID/iCloud account on both of our iPhones. Yes, that wasn’t ideal but it worked for us very well. However, as you can imagine it was also frustrating at times, so here’s what iOS17 offers that finally will help us out:
I’ve written a daily journal for more than seven years now and I’ve incorporated daily gratitude practice into it every morning. While many people tried my journaling shortcuts, some commented that while they weren’t committed to keeping a journal, they’d like an incentive to practice gratitude and have just a gratitude journal of sorts. That’s why I decided to extract the gratitude part from my journaling Shortcut to make such practice more accessible to many more people. Read on to get this free Siri Shortcut (compatible with iPhones, iPads and Macs) and start benefiting from an effortless daily gratitude practice today!
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?
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!
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:
