29th edition of Productive! Magazine is here. This issue is a powerful one, so make sure you read it as soon as you’ve got a minute or two :) You will learn how to deal with difficult people, gain up to 40% of your workday and claim back your life. We also welcome you to read the interview with Simon Grabowski from GetResponse (leading email marketing tool) about the journey from a one-man shop to managing a great international company and running a marathon… at the North Pole.

Inside No.29

Interview with Simon Grabowski, the founder and the CEO of GetResponse.

“Optimization would probably be my second name :) Because I love doing that, and, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit frustrating for those around me…"

Preston Ni, a professor, coach, and trainer shares 6 key ways of dealing with difficult people.

This summer, our long-time customer care officer and creator of that department - Delfina - is going to be visiting Denver, Colorado, USA. This has sprung a thought in our minds that maybe we should arrange for some US Nozbe mini-tour. The origin of idea We have been for quite a while pondering on how to more personally assist our users in the USA. Her trip provides a perfect opportunity for it, in our opinion.

Today our Nozbe designer Radek noticed we were placed on Apple’s App Store front page on iOS (both iPhone and iPad) as one of the “best new apps”. Wow. We’ve been on the App Store for the last five years and I never remember Apple singling us out like this. It’s only on the App Store in Poland as far as I know but it’s great anyway! While I’m very happy about it and my team is ecstatic as they deserved such recognition, I’d like to share my “bigger picture” about it here:

Being recognized by Apple is nice. But by customers it’s better!

Yes, it’s nice to see your work being recognized by a big player like Apple. Especially after seeing that they usually recognize our competitors who are not really better than us…

Do you want to get new versions of Nozbe earlier? Do you want to contribute and help us develop your favorite time and project management app? If you’re up for the task (pun intended), we need your feedback! Consider joining our beta testing program.

Beta Nozbe 2.0

Back in July 2014 we introduced beta testing program for Nozbe 2.0 It helped us a lot to develop the final product that was introduced 3 months later. Our fantastic Nozbe users provided us with a lot of feedback (bug reports and feature requests). It would be impossible to release Nozbe 2.0 without all your help. We are very lucky to have such great customers who care about Nozbe and want to help make it even better.

Nozbe Team growth

Thanks to Nozbe 2.0 success, this year we started hiring more people to our team. It is indispensable if we want to implement new features faster and with better quality. So our team is growing, we are hiring developers, testers and customer support people. Our processes are getting more mature. The future looks very bright for Nozbe and we all are very excited about this.

Test blog

Beside team growth, our community of Nozbe users is also growing. More people all over the world are getting their stuff done with Nozbe. And we are sure that a lot of them would like to contribute and help us getting our stuff done - increasing quality of your favourite productivity app. ;)

I’ve been traveling a lot this past month and as I kept meeting with people asking me about business, success… and Nozbe’s features, one question clearly stood out in all this: who is your target customer for Nozbe? Consumer? Prosumer? Small business? Enterprise? Who??? … And my answer was pretty surprising to most of the people I met: ideal customer for Nozbe is a person (or a group of people) who value their time. Let me explain:

Time is money

There are countless tools that will help you get things done. Some are free, some are cheap, some are more expensive than others… But the point is that time is indeed money and you should find a solution that works for you. That makes you more productive. That saves you time. And here’s how to do it:

written by Michael Sliwinski, Nozbe CEO and founder Only last week, I told you we celebrated 8th anniversary of Nozbe and today I’m celebrating one of my own. I was born on May 20, 1979, so today is my birthday. I can’t be happier: as the CEO of Nozbe I have a job which I love and which is more of a calling to me. And I have to thank you for that!

Today is a special day for Nozbe. It’s May 14, and exactly 8 years ago today we officially launched Nozbe. We were out of “beta” test phase. We introduced paid plans. We started our productivity business. And we’ve been serving you ever since. Let’s celebrate Nozbe’s 8th anniversary together! I’ve got 2 great news for you today: 1 - New Nozbe 2.1.6 will help you get more done thanks to lots of fixes based on your suggestions and major improvements to gestures.

Recurring tasks seem to be a constant source of confusion to many. Let me walk you through this option in Nozbe and provide a couple of extra hints. Definition Recurring task in Nozbe is an action that you do repeatedly at regular intervals. Full description thereof can be found at our Help Page. How to create one? Create a task either using the “+” icon or the “a” short-cut. You can then set the recurrence by using the hash parameter.

Today, April 24 2015, a very exciting new product hit the market — the Apple Watch. We’ve already announced that we were working on a version of Nozbe for the Watch, but we’ve never really said when we were going to release it. The answer is: we already have. That’s right. If you have your Apple Watch tethered with your iPhone, all you have to do is update the Nozbe app to 2.

I believe everyone knows there are comments to tasks in Nozbe. Yet, it seems not all see a point in that. Therefore a question - to comment or not to comment - arises.

All about comments

Most of us are aware of the definition and the basic use as per instructions found on Nozbe Help Page. Their principal function is to facilitate communication on issues relevant to a given task within a team.

And that’s just great. Once your team gets disciplined about it, the function can replace emailing almost entirely and thus save much time.

Attachments that can be added to comments are a great way of speeding up your work and storing relevant reference materials in order to make everything clear.

You can also email tasks already with comments to Nozbe or add comments via email at later time.

That’s all great, you may say, but what is the point then of this post? Well… here it is:

Alternative uses of comments - notes

One of the most obvious secondary uses are simply notes. If you do not share the project with anyone, or even when you do, you might wish to add things to your own tasks.. in that case they become your notes.