This is a fantastic guest post by Fokke Kooistra – a Nozbe user, a Dutch productivity guru and a coach. See what functions projects play in his personal way of using our app.
This article is for you if you miss the sub-projects feature in Nozbe or you just want to see how project labels can make your life easier.
I need sub-projects!!!
When promoting Nozbe at conferences we end up talking to many interesting people. Once, a professional event manager came up to Nozbe’s stand and confessed that she tried Nozbe once but gave it up pretty quickly. She was disappointed not to find a sub-projects feature.
She explained that she deals with dozens of various aspects of event management and she runs many events at the same time. Each event requires at least several linked projects. “I really need sub-projects!!!” she claimed!
But maybe not.
We think it’s possible to modify the workflow so that sub- and sub-sub-projects aren’t that necessary. We recommend using project labels!
Too big to fit into just one project
We totally understand how complicated your job can be and that it consists of many aspects and stages. We also deal with such complex processes at Nozbe. Have you tried to think outside of a vertical hierarchy though and link related projects differently?
I’m not that creative… and worse yet - I’m blonde. I still happen to have ideas, though. Sometimes :-) When I need to, I force myself to reflect and come up with a nice solution or plan. More often, interesting thoughts just pop into my head in the most unexpected situations… Because I don’t want to lose these little treasures, I always capture them. I encourage you to do the same.
The purpose of all this commotion?
Idea dumping is a really handy procedure - whether you do it routinely or spontaneously.
Thoughts in your mind, although precious, can be a hindrance to productivity. When they float around in your head, they will surface again and again at inappropriate times, stress you out and, worse still, be lost when they are actually needed.
You might want to run idea-dumping sessions for two reasons:
I stumbled upon Nozbe several years ago while searching – yet again – for the ideal multi-platform task management system. Even then, Nozbe had a clean, crisp, and powerful interface. Today, Nozbe stands alone as the ultimate expression of a well-designed task management system.
Each new version of Nozbe allows me to update and refine my personal productivity workflow. Nozbe, the company, works very closely with their user community to keep the flow of ideas moving and growing.
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?
One of the frequently asked questions we’ve heard a lot in the last few weeks is how best to make use of the Business version features of Nozbe. To answer this question, we created a short video tutorial about team & project roles and the Nozbe Ratio. In fact, Nozbe PRO users can learn something too! Check it out!
Nozbe and Google Calendar are like best friends: they share information, work together for the greater good and don’t bother each other. And, by the way, they both work for you! Learn how to make use of integration with Google Calendar. And a calendar in general.
This time it’s all about iOS. Almost 50% of our users are already using iOS 10 and Nozbe 3.3 is dedicated to them. So take a look at what the Nozbe team has prepared for you :)
Android and Windows fans don’t worry! Features for your platforms are being developed and we will ship them in future Nozbe releases.
Better “Add to Nozbe” on iOS Two years ago, when iOS 8 came out, we added a new way to add stuff to Nozbe: the Share Extension.
