If you haven’t had a chance to check out the latest episodes of Michael’s and Radek’s “The Podcast”, read on and pick those you find the most interesting or timely.

86: Perfect week

Michael Sliwinski shares a pro tip he learned from Michael Hyatt: how to design a template for your ideal week. A good routine is helpful for productivity!

Listen to the episode no.86:

Here comes Productive! Magazine no.34 - the latest and the last issue of our periodical.

The reason we stop working on our magazine (that have been on-line for more than 8 years) is… essentialism :-) Michael, our Editor in Chief, explains his decision in details in his article that you will find inside this edition.

Interview with Greg McKeown

The special guest of issue no.34 is none other than Greg McKeown, the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less”.

10 years in business – and just as many years listening to customers. We get feature requests every single day. And that’s what the latest “Ask Michael” episode is about! You might be curious what we do with your requests. Are they stored somewhere? Does anyone read them? First, we carefully review your requests. Then we save them in a special Nozbe project. And use them while planning future releases. But our experience tells us that (usually) simply adding new features isn’t actually what you really want.

Nozbe isn’t the only app we use to get things done. We also use Slack. The natural question is: is integration between these apps on the way? Although we strongly prefer asynchronous communication because it doesn’t disrupt deep work, we need more “live” and less action-focused field too – to keep a healthy balance. Slack handles this very well. Check out what Michael has to say about Slack, its role on our team and the future of integration between Nozbe and Slack:

After celebrating the 10th anniversary of Nozbe, Michael comes back with extra insight from our team! Watch to find out how he manages the whole company within the Nozbe app. It’s actually an extremely common question: how do we use Nozbe on a daily basis? The truth is, we’re just one of our own customers, using exactly the same product that we offer to you. Check out how a structure of shared projects and good habits can keep your team action oriented:

We were blown away by how many people signed up and attended our live webinar. It went so well that we decided to share the recording with you. We hope it will help you “refresh” your productivity powers and the tips and tricks will give you what it takes to achieve all of your goals this year and beyond! Watch the recording of our LIVE webinar: “Your Productivity Evolution: from Personal to Business in the last 10 years of Nozbe”:

A new episode of the Ask Michael series is chock-full of facts and conclusions from 10 years of Nozbe. Michael speaks for himself about how he got started and what has changed since 2007. Recently we’ve shared the history of the Nozbe app. Today Michael presents his own point of view. How did he meet David Allen? What was the first book about Nozbe? What’s next? This video is a bit longer than usual, as the history of Nozbe can’t be told in a few minutes.

Last week we launched Nozbe 1.9 and I wrote about it in my previous post… but this time around I want to remind you about something really important. It’s about new and improved Project Sharing. Here’s my video all about it: Why Nozbe 1.9 revolutionizes collaboration Before Nozbe 1.9, when you wanted to share a project with someone, you’d have to ask them if they used Nozbe, convince them to give Nozbe a try, tell them why Nozbe is so great for your productivity… and only if they signed up could you invite them to share a project with you.

Today, it’s time to take you back to the beginning, and show you what got us to today. This is a long post, but it’s worth reading if you’re curious how we got to this point. Let’s turn back the time machine and head back to 2007!

It’s still astonishing to us that Michael’s little side project has evolved into a productivity platform with an enormous community and a great team. So many factors got Nozbe on its current path. Both coincidences and hard work.

Beginnings

You might not be surprised (if you have already read Michael’s “It’s all about Passion” book, among others) to learn that Nozbe wasn’t intended to be a global business. It was just a quick and dirty solution for organization issues.

It was 2005. Michael, known today as The Productivity Guy and the author of #iPadOnly, was a PC user. Hard to believe, huh? There’s more than that: before he read “Getting Things Done,” he kept organized with MS Outlook – just like many other folks in those days.

Michael was a marketing consultant. He worked from home, helping other businesses get better results online. Because he worked with their websites, he learned HTML, PHP and MySQL (technologies needed to build modern websites). And he had a lot of fun coding.

But managing projects for many clients at the same time became a struggle. Then he got David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. Convinced by the method, but not by its reliance on paper, he searched for a digital solution.

Inspired by David’s method I built a tool that’d help me achieve my goals and implement the GTD system in real life. I spent a whole day researching the web to find a tool I needed for this […] and finally when I found nothing, I dedicated one weekend to building a very simple, bare-bones web-based tool. (from “It’s all about Passion”)

In the next few months, he spent some time fixing bugs and making new features. And he still thought about Nozbe as a simple project only for himself. Initially, there was no plan to make money.

Michael had already tried running his own business. Michael and Victor created a simply email reminder service called… Nozbe. They offered a subscription but only a few users decided to pay. This project, like a later one, failed quickly, because they focused on making money. Michael gave up, but he learned a lesson. It was a chance to take entrepreneurial baby-steps. And now he already had a fancy name for the next project.

You may know Michael as a #NoOffice evangelist, for proving that a remote company is a reliable and effective model. In fact, the idea isn’t new. Nozbe reminder was developed using tools like ICQ and FTP. Now it would be Slack or iMessage and Dropbox. Is that really so different?

Tools have changed, but not the methods.

Now let’s focus on 2007 - the launch:

Nozbe is a living and evolving organism. It changes with our fresh ideas and your generous feedback. As we’ve said, we keep listening to your opinions. Watch the latest episode of “Ask Michael!” We can’t count all the changes and fixes that have been possible thanks to your messages. Actually, we love them, whether they are expressly positive or have some criticism. We’re open to your suggestions, so today Michael talks about start/completion date, one of the features you’ve requested (and asks you for something too):