Hi, here’s Michael, Nozbe founder. I hired Magda two years ago for a position of an editor in the Productive! Magazine. As this wasn’t a full time job really, I also asked her if she could temporarily become my assistant. I’ve never had an assistant before and I wanted to learn to work with one. She said yes, and two years later she’s still helping me get things done. In this post I want to share how we work together. I hope this might be helpful to anyone thinking about working with an assistant or searching for ways to improve their collaboration. We’re actually thinking about recording a short video about it, soon. Here’s how we work together with Magda:

Magda manages my email

Although we said farewell to email in Nozbe long time ago, we can’t prevent the whole world from using it :-) I receive hundreds of emails every week and it is Magda who takes care of them.

How?

At the beginning of our cooperation, I set up all my Gmail accounts so that every single new message is being forwarded to one email address that we call “CEO”. I’ve also given Magda an access to the “CEO” account - in Gmail, it is called “delegated account”. This way we both have access to my emails and we both can receive and send emails from the “CEO” address.

There are various emails coming to that shared Gmail inbox:

• personal
• business - individual
• personalized business emails sent by companies to multiple receivers
• automated invoices, billings, account statements and other finance-related notifications
• etc.

Magda archives the emails that don’t require any reply or are just advertising; she sends regular finance-related messages to a dedicated notebook in my Evernote. If an email is not too personal and Magda’s competence is enough to reply to it accurately, she does it.

Now, the most important: messages that require my reaction, reply, confirmation or simply advice. Here’s how we deal with them through Nozbe:

Although the contrary situation is way more frequent, once in a while it is time to leave some shared project. When that time comes, questions arise.

1. Who can leave?
2. How can you leave a project?
3. What information will be retained on the leaving account?

This post will answer those for you.

Who can leave a project?

Essentially, anyone can. However, if your are the one who created the project the only way you can do so is by first requesting the ownership thereof to be transfered to someone else. You can of course simply complete it or delete… but that’s not the answer in some cases, such as leaving one company for another.

So, the owner can’t simply leave.

Anyone else can leave a project they have been invited to without any problem. To do so, go to given project, use the “i” icon at the top bar, click on the list of people in the project, pick yourself and use the “…” icon next to your name. Then “leave the project”.

As we’re ramping up our Affiliate program and we want to give you an even better product, I’m conducting interviews with our top affiliates, users and fans. One of them is Jeff Sanders, host of The 5 AM Miracle Podcast - and with Jeff we talked about a few things: how he discovered Nozbe how he uses Nozbe for his content creation how he tricks Siri into adding tasks to Nozbe via email he asks me what’s in the future for Nozbe what does “Nozbe” actually mean (hint - it’s not a Polish word) how I use Pomodoro and Unschedule with Nozbe and many more behind-the-scenes details about Nozbe It’s a longer chat (~ 20 minutes) but I’m sure you’ll find it useful.

One of most popular blog posts on my personal blog is the one I did on “Pomodoro Technique and Unschedule Calendar”, where I explain how both: Pomodoro Technique and “Unschedule Calendar” from Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” can work together. But since I’ve done that I’ve improved the concept and moved from a paper-based calendar to a template in Nozbe which serves me even better. This technique is really powerful. I’ve used it for many days now and you practically can’t have a bad, non-productive day if you implement this, so be warned - this will make you more productive :-)

What is “Pomodoro” and “Unschedule”?

But before we start, let’s explain briefly the concepts of “Pomodoro” and “Unschedule”:

Pomodoro is a productivity technique that asks of you to set a timer for 25 minutes and work on something until the timer is done. Then take a 5 minute break. Then repeat. The premise is that knowing the timer is ticking and having the time-constraint of 25 minutes, you’ll work better, faster and with more focus.

Unschedule is a type of calendar where you don’t plan your work, you only put meetings on calendar and “fun things” somewhere in between. You plan only for those. Then you’re left with blank chunks of time that you can now fill with work. The premise is similar - time constraint of knowing you have only X more hours of work, and later a meeting, makes you more focused… and knowing that in a few hours you have your “jogging time”, motivates you to work harder and “deserve” your reward.

It’s been just over two months since we’ve released Nozbe for Apple Watch. (I’ve written more about it in a previous blog post.) At the time, Apple Watch hasn’t yet hit the market, so we couldn’t test it directly on the device. Since then, we got a few watches for ourselves. We learned a lot about this device, its strengths and weaknesses. And after using our own app extensively, we saw a huge area for improvement. Today, I’m happy to announce that the latest version of Nozbe includes a lot of improvements for the Watch.

If you have an Apple Watch, just update Nozbe on your iPhone to 2.1.8, and the watch app will automatically update as well.

And if you’re curious about what’s new, keep reading!

(at the end of this post there’s a cool video we recorded that showcases everything in this post, make sure not to miss it!)

Supercharged notifications

As I explained in the previous post, we started our development with notifications, because they’re the most common and most immediate interaction with the Apple Watch. You don’t really have to do anything, they simply show up when appropriate, and they allow you to respond instantly.

In that spirit, and with what we’ve learned, we redesigned notifications to make them look beautiful and much more useful. Take a look:

Before, when you were mentioned in a comment, the notification would only tell you who mentioned you, and in what task. But to actually see the comment, you would have to tap “Show task” and wait for the app to load. Now, we simply show you the comment right in the notification. And if you want to reply immediately, we added a new action under the notification: Comment.

Today we are happy to announce new Nozbe release - Nozbe 2.1.8. It brings productivity boost especially for our Android and Apple Watch users. We created a special video to show it to you, featuring me and our CEO, Michael Sliwinski: Supercharged Android We heard you loud and clear - Android users need to have Nozbe widget which looks and works great. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been working very hard on exactly that - Android widget which saves time and thus helps you be more productive.

Grouping projects is one of the most vital and tricky aspects of day-to-day project and time management. Properly arranged groups can boost your productivity while a mess in the list can defeat the purpose of use of any system at all.

Labels

I guess everyone can imagine the most basic use thereof… simply create some, add them to projects and later on, filter by them. Yet, a second use that not so many are familiar with is… sub-projects.

Yes, you read it right… sub-projects. True, Nozbe does not have sub-projects. However, none said that you can’t turn your goal into a label; a complex task into a project and sub-tasks you had in mind - into actual tasks.

Two things to remember:

1. You can filter by a label narrowing your list of projects only to those with that given one.

2. You can have more than one label attached to a project (so it can indeed be grouped by a goal + something else)

   I for instance, have some fixed and unchangeable labels such as work, home, study, private. All my projects are grouped initially into those areas. Then, I have other sort of labels. Those are actual goals such as: affiliate, support and other - all for work; home related tend to be shopping, improvements; private - craft, travel.

As you know, we’ve just rolled out Nozbe 2.1.8 with major speed improvements, Android widget and lots of great new features (if you have a smartphone where Nozbe felt slow, then… not anymore! You should totally get 2.1.8 for Android and read all about it.) The latest Nozbe is already out for Android, Linux, Windows and Mac. We’re still waiting for Apple’s approval of the iOS version with much-improved Apple Watch support.

Nozbe has always grown via word-of-mouth spread among friends and colleagues. Our affiliate program has been running almost as long as Nozbe itself. Many users have taken advantage of it and earned additional income.

When you become an affiliate and how it works?

As described at our help page and also in your account Settings, you become an affiliate automatically once you create your Nozbe account. After you set up your nickname, your individual link gets personalized. Starting at this point, you are able to recommend Nozbe by providing your link to invitees.

Their account will get then automatically added to your statistics and once they pay their subscription, you start earning extra money. It is that easy! But there’s more!

Hello Android users! We need to talk. Some of you might feel a bit left out due to our latest Nozbe for Apple Watch release and other tight Nozbe iOS integrations which we recently launched. I get that. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t love our Android users! We do! To prove it to you we decided to get back to work and deliver some exciting new features which will change the way you use Nozbe on you Android device.

Android widget

We heard you loud and clear - Android users need to have Nozbe widget that looks and works great. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working very hard on exactly that - Android widget that saves time and thus helps you be more productive. Just take a look: