After a longish break resulting from changing our publishing schedule from monthly to quarterly, here is the latest issue of Productive! Magazine :-)

Inside No.31: interview with Grace Marshall on work-life rhythm-not-balance and being really productive and articles on workflow optimization, making working as a team, work as well as transparency and exercises as a productivity booster.

This interview can’t be missed

No.31 comes with a great interview with Grace Marshall - a naturally disorganised productivity coach, chief encourager at grace-marshall.com and a productivity ninja with the team at Think Productive :-)

She speaks with Michael about the work-life rhythm that should replace the work-life balance. She also gives some tips on how to be really productive not just busy and how to deal with the guilt that distracts and holds you back.

Grace and Michael also talk about Grace’s new book called “How to Be Really Productive."

“Guilt has you thinking that every time you move forward, you’re moving backwards somewhere else. And so, when you’re dealing with guilt (…) one of the first things to do is to actually take a step back and go, “Okay, let’s start with… Let’s start with enough."

Nozbe is used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. For all of them efficiency and smart time-planning are the principles that let them enjoy their lives and stay on top of the things.

Who is Jeff Sanders?

Jeff Sanders, the host of “The 5 A.M. Miracle Podcast” is one of Nozbe power users and productivity gurus. He is also a public speaker, author, a 10-time marathon runner, passionate raw vegan and a big fan of taking bold action. And don’t worry - he doesn’t keep his knowledge and experiences to himself.

See how the 5 A.M. miracle works in real life

As Jeff’s new book: The 5 A.M. Miracle: Dominate Your Day Before Breakfast has just been published, he spoke to Michael about what he wrote about and how waking up early will actually help you use your time wisely and get a lot more done.

Jeff convinces that if you read his book you will get a list of think you could do to change your life!

Did you know that Nozbe can help you build a new habit? Let’s take learning a foreign language as an example. Who wouldn’t like to speak an extra one, huh? Say… French…

Before you start

Scientific researches have found certain mechanisms that rule the process of creating a habit. Based on that, we can formulate a couple of tips that will help you take off.

1. Set a big goal - have your vision of what you want to achieve and why. Talk to yourself for a while and make sure that learning a new language is something you really want and need.

2. Make it so easy you can’t say no. — Leo Babauta - start approaching your big goal with tiny steps. Try setting the tasks easy enough so that you can get it done without motivation (that is kind of moody and differs depending on a day, weather and other circumstances.)

3. Building sticky habits is a lot easier if you make use of the routines you already have rather than try to fight or modify them. It’s good to build your plan around triggers that will let you know that it’s time to work on your habit, e.g.: after I get up and have a glass of water I learn French.

4. When you fail, get back on track as quickly as possible. Don’t worry! Missing your habit once or twice, no matter at what stage it occurs, has no serious impact on your long-term progress. Instead of trying to be perfect, be good and compassionate to yourself. You’re doing a great job!

OK. Once you know the rules, let’s get to work :)

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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.