Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Articles in the Productive Magazine #2

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

OK, it took us a little more time to compile the second issue of the Productive Magazine, but we’ve got the lineup ready and it’s going to be a great issue so here you go:

Interview with Guy Kawasaki
by Michael Sliwinski

How to Set Goals That Lead to Success
Dustin Wax  

The Single Secret to Making 2009 Your Best Year Ever
by Leo Babauta

How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week
by Michael Hyatt

Why You Shouldn’t Do New Year’s Resolutions
by James Mallinson

Say No to make Yes Sound better
by Kris Rowlands

What’s Wrong With New Years Resolutions?
by Andrew Mason  

Making it all work with Mindmanager
by Michael Deutch

Productivity For Groups – Because You’re Not Really In Control
by Andrew Yang

Simply Get Things Done Course – Introduction
by Michael Sliwinski

My volunteer editors (thanks guys!) are now checking the contents of the articles to make sure we don’t have any “bugs” inside :-)

I’ll post more details on the magazine later next week, but we’re getting ready to rock the productivity world again with the new issue!

And of course - thanks to all the contributors! You make the magazine great, we just do the compilation :-)

Productivity Bloggers - where’s your article for the issue #2?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

The downloads and great reviews keep on coming and I think it’s safe to say the issue #1 was a great success.

It’s time for the issue #2. While I already know who will be on the cover and I’ve got some great bloggers already in the pipeline… I’d like to know if you would like to participate, too?

Who can write for the Productive Magazine?

If you’re a blogger with an audience, write about life, productivity and/or motivation and would like to send your message to others, make sure to contact us

It can be a blog post your wrote, you’re writing or you’re planning to write. Exclusive articles for the Magazine are more than welcome :-)

What’s the theme for the Productive Magazine #2?

We’ll be talking about our plans for the New Year, motivation, Apple… and much more…

Make sure to join our Productive Magazine mailing list to be notified about the newest issue.

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.

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 :-)

Tribute to Marc Orchant

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

There are people who are just good. You meet them and you become instant friends. You know you can turn to them if you need anything and they will be there for you. You can chat with them for hours and feel like you’ve known them forever. They support you and motivate you to be a better person… and even if you’ve met them only once, you know you’ll never ever forget them.

Marc Orchant (1957-2007) was like this and I still miss him, so I decided to dedicate the Productive!Magazine to him. If he hadn’t died, he would have co-founded this project with me.

Productive!Magazine is dedicated to the memory of Marc Orchant.

I’d come to know Marc by reading one of his blogs. We shared the same passions: gadgetry and computers (both had Toshiba M200 TabletPCs) and Getting Things Done methodology.

When I launched Nozbe in February 2007 he wrote a great review of my new web app on his ZDnet blog “Office Evolution” and supported me as one of the first users (ID #101).

We kept in touch and when in Summer 2007 I was invited by Ismael Ghalmi to be a panelist/speaker at the Office2.0 Conference he encouraged me to go and we met there.

We had a great time and on the last day of the conference Marc and his wife Sue, along with their friend Oliver Starr invited me and my wife for a dinner at their favorite San Francisco restaurant: “House of Nanking”.

This is a photo I took of Marc and his wife Sue when we were all waiting in line for the restaurant:

We promised to stay in touch and see each other again but he suddenly died of heart attack on 9th December the same year. Read Oliver Starr’s “In Memorium”

Marc was a great blogger, he wrote for:

You can still check out his Twitter channel

He left his lovely wife Sue and his two children: Rebecca and Jason. If you knew Marc, please consider donating to help his family (Oliver Starr handles the donations)

Articles in the first Edition of the Productive Magazine

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

We’re now busy compiling the first edition of the Productive Magazine. We have received many great submissions and most of them have been accepted as I’ve personally invited the bloggers to this first issue.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the response - I initially planned on including up to 10 articles in the first edtion of the Productive Magazine but ended up with 15 quality articles. Here they are:

  1. Exclusive interview with David Allen by Oliver Starr of GTDtimes
  2. Zen To Done (ZTD): The Ultimate Simple Productivity System
  3. Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster
  4. Happiness and the End of the Working Week
  5. Seven tips for making yourself happier IN THE NEXT HOUR.
  6. Having One Of Those Days? Here’s How To Deal With It
  7. The GOYA method for Personal Development
  8. 17 Things you Should Stop Doing
  9. How To Work Less and Still Impress
  10. 3 Essential Tools for Productivity
  11. 7 Idea Dumping Tips (How To Manage Diarrhea of the Brain)
  12. 10 tips for keeping your desk clean and tidy
  13. 14 Numbers Your Cell Phone Can’t Live Without
  14. Seven Questions That Will Change Your Life
  15. Getting Things Done® Primer: Chapter 1

These are really great blog posts. Great articles. I’m privilidged to have been given a permission by the authors to include these in the first edition of the Productive Magazine. It’s going to be a great first issue!

The articles keep on coming… still waiting for your submission!

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

The Productive Magazine is beginning to get some shape with the submissions we’ve received from the productivity bloggers. Just have a look at the “Blogroll” part of this page to see the growing lists of blogs that will participate in the first edition of the Productive Magazine.

I’m still waiting for some of the responses and a couple of good articles can still make it to the first edition, so if you’ve received an invitaiton from me, don’t be shy and reply with 1-3 links of the articles you’re particularly proud of and I’ll be happy to choose one that will make it to the first issue of the magazine.

To all the others who did send me their articles already - thanks everyone - I’m really proud and happy we can compile the first edition with so much good stuff.

Why Productive Magazine? Why downloadable free PDF?

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

The initial response from first bloggers who decided to participate has been great and it seems we’d really be able to pull our project off and have the first edition of the Productive Magazine ready by the end of this month.

Why Productive Magazine? Aren’t blogs enough? Why PDF format?

Some have issued these questions so let’s address them here. First of all, we both love blogs. I’m a blog reader myself (my Google Reader account is full with RSS-ed blogs) and I’m also a blogger.

I’m not only writing for the official Nozbe blog, but I’m also a regular contributor to the official Getting Things Done Blog by David Allen - GTD Times.

My technical editor, Maciej is one of the mostly-recognized bloggers in the blogosphere in my country with his “Mediafun” blog and he is also distributing his blog content in a form of a “Mediafun” Magazine.

Some people don’t appreciate blogs yet… but they do read magazines.

With the Productive Magazine our goal is to reach people who haven’t discovered blogs just yet (or they think blogs are just diaries of people who want to talk about their life with others)… and by giving them blog content in a form of a downloadable (and printable) magazine, they can get to know how much useful information there is to be found in the blogs… and if they like a particular article, they can always click on the author’s blog link and subscribe to the blog to discover even more.

We also believe a FREE downloadable PDF format is the best “bang for the buck” and people will be happy to share the magazine with their friends and families. Since the blogs are free to read, the Productive Magazine should be just the same.

This is going to be a great ride!

I’m sure the Productive Magazine will be a success for all of us, so don’t hesitate and contact me to support the cause… and to offer the best productivity articles to the readers. We are already busy working with the first articles that came in to prepare them for publishing.

First Blogs and Bloggers contacted!

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Since the Productive Magazine is all about bringing the blog-content to the masses via a PDF-compiled magazie format, I decided that the Productive Magazine should be published in a form of a blog as well.

As we don’t have all that much time until the Productive Magazine premiere on August 1st, liveblogging about the experience should be lots of fun!

Now, just today I started contacting the first bloggers I know and respect from the “Productive blogosphere” as I call it. Let’s see how they respond to my initial invitation to participate in the project.

Once I get first responses, I’ll add the blogs who replied positively in the “Blogroll” on the right side of this site.

Guys, keep the responses coming - we can’t wait to start compiling the first edition of the Productive Magazine with your great articles!

- Michael