Nozbe’s success and user base of more than 300,000 people grew mainly thanks to word of mouth. Happy and productive people referring their friends and family to Nozbe. Introducing Nozbe in their companies, demoing our app to their colleagues and explaining how they could also achieve higher productivity and reduced stress levels. To help people refer others to Nozbe, we’ve always had an affiliate referral program and in June of 2016 we’re making it even better.

Ever since I founded Nozbe back in 2007, the security and safety of customer data as well as the stability of our infrastructure were my biggest points of focus. To the point that I’d wake up in the middle of the night to check if our servers were still up… Over the years we’ve had our failures, outages and issues… but if you’ve been with us for the last few years you’ll have noticed that our infrastructure has been rock-solid for a while now.

In this blog post I’d like to explain why that is, what we’ve done so far and what we’ll be doing in the near future to actually make it even better and more secure for you to get things done and communicate effectively through tasks thanks to Nozbe.

I’d like to mention a few things:

• how our server infrastructure is built
• how we store your data (tasks, files, attachments, 3rd party files)
• how we do backups
• how we can keep Nozbe going even through a major catastrophe…
• who has access to your data
• and what’s still to improve here :-)

Do you know how to succeed in this time of change?

We believe that working remotely is the best thing for ourselves, our jobs and our families. But, of course, every team needs to meet from time to time. So do we.

Last time we met, three months ago in Sopot, we did a lot to make this time as productive as possible. Company members did internal keynotes, Michael held one-to-one talks, and we all had a lot of fun working and playing!

Watch and feel the spirit

We would like to share a video from Sopot, where we talk about NoOffice worker privileges and what we love about being together.

Continuing last week’s tradition of sending you fitness advice, here’s mine. A little over 2 years ago I decided to really get back in shape. I was already running 10-15km per week but after a knee injury I decided to lose weight and start doing other sports than just jogging. Thanks to the “Slow carb diet” I lost 8kg / 16lbs and thanks to a friend who convinced me to give it a shot, in 2014 I completed 2 sprint-distance triathlons and 1 Olympic-distance triathlon. The last one became my perfect distance: 1,5km swim, 40km (24.9 miles) bike ride and 10km (6.2 miles) run. A little under 3 hours of fun. Last year I did two of those and this year I already did one in April, I’ll do next one this coming Sunday and the third one in September. Now, the key to getting it right, besides being in shape, is a great packing list, because these are three different sports you have to do with only a minute to change between them, so you better have everything in place. That’s why while preparing to my last triathlon I decided to create this handy packing list for both me and you:

Get my complete triathlon packing list

Thanks to our cool Nozbe.how shared template system I created this checklist as a project template in Nozbe so you can either open it and use right away or import to your Nozbe account.

If you’re curious about some of the details about why I structured this template the way I did, here goes:

As a productivity tutor, Jeroen Sangers knows many GTD services, but Nozbe is his app of choice.

As you probably know we have some very active members on the Nozbe team. Some of us just run for fun or play football, while some train for triathlons… they’re very ambitious. That’s why we want to share our athletic knowledge with you. Today we’re starting with training plans for a 10k run. These aren’t random numbers and distances to train with. These plans were prepared based on the experience of a runner with a 10k PR (personal record) below 29 minutes and his marathon PR is below 2 hours and 12 minutes.

We just launched Nozbe 3.1 with lots of features and improvements, and today I’d like to focus on 3 changes that will help you move your 2016 goals forward and get them done!

One of the most successful entrepreneurs in Africa, Marek Zmyslowski, is also a loyal Nozbe user. Check his tips out!

If you follow the Nozbe blog or newsletter closely, you might have seen my article discussing how I use Nozbe to implement the FRESH approach (from the book, “The Accidental Creative” by Todd Henry). I’ll spare you and not completely rehash the entire approach, but one aspect of FRESH that is very important is the “F,” which stands for “Focus.” As we all know, a very important part of being productive and creative is lazer focus. Not only do you get a lot more done when you fully concentrate on the essential few, but you also use your energy and brainpower much more efficiently.

Since I wrote my previous post for Nozbe, I’ve been continuing to tweak and refine my FRESH Nozbe system, and I recently had a breakthrough after reading Brian Talty’s post on using “organizing headers” in Nozbe. At first, I played around with Brian’s method for a few days, but I continued to tweak it in a slightly different direction. Eventually, I came up with the idea of creating “time block” categories.