Archive for November, 2008

20 000 downloads in the first week. I’m psyched!

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

When we launched the magazine I was hoping for a great reception from the “productivity blogosphere” and I was dreaming of reaching a goal of 10K downloads total of the first issue of the magazine. When in the first 24 hours passed with exactly 1000 downloads, I was very optimistic about our goal… but I never expected this:

Productive Magazine downloading...

That’s right, in a little over a week (a week and a few hours) 20K busy professionals downloaded our first inaugural issue of the Productive! Magazine and the counter keeps on running!

Today is Thanksgiving so it’s a perfect time to THANK YOU MY READERS for contributing to this success!

Let me assure you we won’t fail you and deliver an even better issue #2 of the Magazine. You can expect it in January 2009. We’re already working on it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Make sure to recommend Productive! Magazine to your friends and family. After all, everyone wants to be more productive, right?

Why do we need the Productive! Magazine? Let’s rediscover the obvious.

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

It hasn’t been a week yet since we’ve launched the first issue of the Productive! Magazine and the results have surprised me so much that I actually don’t know how to express my excitement! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’ll be happy to thank everyone who participated in this project and downloaded the magazine.

I’ve received lots of great feedback and high praise on this first issue! Thanks!

Most of it was very, very positive. You - the readers have made me blush on numerous occasions and you’ve made me really happy this passing week. There was also some constructive critisism, especially regarding editing (some typos and grammar mistakes… and we’ve corrected a few already) - we’ll do better with the next issue (got some volunteer-proofreaders, the more eyeballs, the less mistakes!).

I was trying to track most of the blogs that wrote about the magazine and read the comments of the readers over there and several times some people (trolls?) wrote very harshly that our magazine is yet another “productivity p0rn” and that we should be productive and not read about productivity…

So why do we need the Productive! Magazine? (and the whole productivity blogroll?)

Because we need to rediscover the obvious every now and then.

We do. I’ve read the book by David Allen (see inteview in the magazine), “Getting Things Done” like 4 times already… and every time I’m learning something new, something I haven’t noticed before (or haven’t paid enough attention to).

The same applies to reading blogs by the productivity bloggers included in the Productive! Magazine. These are real-life examples of real-life people who are struggling to be better and more productive just like we are… and if we can relate to even a smallest part of their life… we can relate to our life and our problems and try to improve ourselves.

And very often we do need to rediscover the obvious…. and to learn again something we thought we knew, but lost it or forgot somewhere down our road.

When compiling the magazine and reading the submitted articles, I’ve had several “a-ha” moments and learned many “new” things that I actually knew about in the past! This is the power of rediscovering the obvious aspects of life that can help you in your path of personal development.

I remember the argument when I told a friend of mine that I developed Nozbe to help myself and others get things done, and he laughed in my face saying: “why do we need another to-do application?”… and I smiled and responded: “a to-do application (or pen and paper for that matter) doesn’t work for me. I tried. I need something more structured, I need to easily access my next actions and contexts… and my to-do list would be just too long without them… and totally useless”.

Every one of us is different. Our lives are different. Our goals are not the same… and our ways of getting things done can be totally diverse… and because of that the mission of the Productive! Magazine is to try to find the best productivity-related articles that approach our lives from different angles and that everyone can find something for themselves.

And learn something new. And rediscover the obvious.

And why do you think we need the Productive! Magazine? Please do let me know in the comments!

We’ve been Lifehacked… and it feels great!

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Why have we been Lifehacked? Well, because of the amount of people who came here from the Lifehacker blog… it’s an analogy in geek talk when a page has been slashdotted due to a short info on the Slashdot. This info can kill servers and make pages offline.

We survived. Our downloads are going strong and we’re more than happy and welcome everyone!

What exactly happened? Thanks to a chain reaction and a blog post on jkOnTheRun (thanks James!) and later Lifehacker (thanks Jason!) and Web Worker Daily (thanks Scott!), we’ve received thousands of new readers to our Productive! Magazine.

Thanks everyone who came and downloaded our first issue of the Productive! Magazine - please post your comments and send us your feedback. We’re already working on the second issue and we want to make it even better!

BTW, we’re approaching 15K downloads as of writing this blog post… in just a little over four days… isn’t that incredible?

Your excited and psyched,

- Michael Sliwinski (Editor)

P.S. The downloads are going strong, but our mailing list provider is experiencing some issues with email queuing so if you’ve signed up for our mailing list and haven’t received your confirmation message, you will in a couple of hours. Sorry for this delay. If you have downloaded the magazine, do sign up for our mailing list and you’ll receive updates on the new issue.

Did you print your Productive Magazine copy?

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

It’s Sunday and a weekly review day for me… but I’m still excited about our launch of the magazine… which is constantly pulling a nice healthy 1K downloads per day without any big promotion activities yet! (Thanks to everyone who downloaded!)

Did you think about PRINTING it out?

We’ve done our best to make sure the magazine is quite printer-friendly and so we’ve focused on not including too many background images (and not too few, so that the magazine still looks beautifully).

I’ve heard from some of the readers that they’ve had a great success printing out the magazine and they’ve included it in their “weekend readership” lists. Have a great read! A cup of tea, nice armchair and the first issue of the Productive Magazine - how about that?

How about ordering a PRINTED version from lulu?

Since our magazine is one big (and successful so far) experiment, I decided to also play around at lulu.com and see how it turns out printed. I’ve prepared two versions:

  1. Full-color Productive Magazine with Full-color cover
    PM in Full Color
  2. Black and White version with Full-color cover
    PM in Black White

We’ve tried to set the price bar low and we’re just getting a few bucks on these printouts to dedicate towards the second edition of the magazine. I just want to know if any of you would be interested in this kind of non-digital distribution. Please let me know!

It’s $19.95 for the full color version and $12.95 for the Black and White version (with full color cover).

Remember, you can always download the PDF version for free and print it out yourself.

Which will you do? Read on the screen? Print out? Order printed version? Please let me know in the comments below!

24 hours and 1000 downloads later…

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Exactly 24 hours ago we’ve officially launched the first, inaugural issue of the Productive Magazine.

This has been a great launch day. I never thought being an editor of an e-magazine would be so much work… but then again this is great fun and a rewarding experience. I’ve approached many people about the magazine and I’ve been approached by many great people… and we’re already starting to build a lineup of articles for the next issue… and I already know who will be featured on the cover of next Productive Magazine :-)

(but I won’t reveal this jus yet…)

More than 1000 people (and counting) have downloaded Productive Magazine in the first 24 hours.

I think it’s a great achievement… provided that almost nobody knew Productive Magazine existed several days prior to the launch date!

Here’s just a bunch of people who kindly helped spread the word about the magazine, some of them include:

Hope you can help us spread the word even more, I’ve received lot’s of emails from people thanking me for the magazine and that’s why I’d like to thank everyone who helped and blogged about it and who contributed (thanks guys!), as well as Maciek “Mediafun” for putting it together so nicely.

Some of the feedback I’ve received:

it looks really well done - it certainly wouldn”t be out of place on the shelves in my local newsagent

You won’t find another magazine as chock full of productivity tips as this one.  And these articles were written by top bloggers and productivity experts from around the world.

The magazine is in PDF format but looks like a professional magazine and it’s obvious that Michael and his team has put in a lot of time and effort into producing this.  It’s not your normal PDF download.

Congratulations! You’ve done a terrific job on the mag.

This looks really fantastic. Very nice callout to Marc there, he was a real inspiration to me

Anyway, keep the feedback coming and I’ll keep the counter running. Share the magazine with the world and I’m sure your colleagues, friends and family will find some great info in there.

Again, I’d like to highlight that the Productive Magazine is a tribute to the loving memory of Marc Orchant - a great blogger and productivity role model. The magazine is sponsored by Nozbe - your tool for getting things done.

Hope the Productive Magazine will make a great weekend-read :-)

1st Productive Magazine launched!

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

I’m happy to announce that we’ve just released the first issue of the Productive Magazine!

33 Pages, 17 articles, 3 MB FREE PDF download that looks like this:

Productive Magazine #1

Before you download…. watch the video of me introducing you to the magazine (only 6 minutes):

To download, just click here!

What’s in the magazine:

  • Interview with the David Allen himself - the best-selling author of the Getting Things Done book
  • 17 great articles by the most active productivity bloggers in the blogoshpere, make sure to check these out!

Thanks to all the contributors and to everyone who helped me make this happen!

After you’ve downloaded the magazine, please do come back to this web site and post your comments to let me know what you think! Thanks!

- Michael Sliwinski (Editor)

P.S. Productive Magazine is sponsored by Nozbe - Simply Get Things Done tool that keeps you productive when you’re by the computer or with the mobile phone or the iPhone.

Productive Magazine launching this Thursday!

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

We’re finishing the editing phase of the Productive Magazine and we’ll have it ready by tomorrow.

Launching the day after tomorrow!

To give ourselves one day of margin, we decided to launch this Thursday officially, so mark your this day in your calendars!

Want to promote Productive Magazine on your blog?

The Productive Magazine will be a free download in a nicely formatted PDF file (3 MB) with great 17 articles about productivity hacks for your life… and an exclusive interview with David Allen.

And I hope you’ll spread the word by blogging about it!

Feel free to use the below graphics (click for the larger versions):

 

 

 

     

(click “save as” to use the small graphic or click on the picture to load the high-res version).

Watch out for our launch this Thursday!

17th Article for the first issue of the PM

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

We’ve compiled the first issue of the magazine and now I’m going through the review phase.

Weekly Review

Speaking of reviews, anyone familiar to GTD (Getting Things Done) knows that the key to success in personal productivity is the weekly review.

It’s Sunday today and I’m at the moment conducting my weekly review. I need to be ready for this week, as this week we’re launching the first edition of the Productive Magazine (more on this tomorrow).

To emphasize the importance of a good and thorough weekly review, I’ve asked Maciek, our technical director to add one last (17th) article to the Productive Magazine, a great article by John Kendrick:

The Five W’s of a Weekly GTD Review

Since our magazine is in digital print, we can add an article at last minute and it won’t influence all that much our scheduling… so we did just that.

Good luck with your weekly reviews and wait for this week’s announcement of the Productive Magazine.