When we launched the magazine less than a week ago I wasn’t sure how the reception would be - after all most of the productive people are on vacations right now re-charging batteries before September and Christmas season… apparently not - our magazine has been already downloaded 6 thousand times and the counter is ticking….

If you haven’t grabbed your issue of this great free PDF packed with fantastic articles by top productivity bloggers on the net, get your copy now and let others know by twitter and email!

Did you like the magazine? What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments below!

Our “Productive!” family keeps on growing. As we’re preparing the launch of the all-new issue of the Productive Magazine (I’ll announce the launch date this week!) I decided to compile my series of “2-minute productivity” shows into a separate blog called “Productive Show”.

My goal is to publish a new 2-minute video about productivity every week. At this moment I just put all the archive videos I had on the topic and we’ll go from there.

We’ll see how it goes, but I’ll definitely give it a try. In the meantime I encourage you to check out our sister-site and let me know how you like the 2-minute videos with some really cool Productivity Tips and Tricks.

How to manage flood of email messages? How to quickly read magazines? How to process inbox? It’s all in there, have a look and let me know in the comments:

My very good friend Frank Meeuwsen of “What’s the Next Action Blog” fame and now one of the chief editors of Lifehacking.nl blog (the biggest community of “Lifehackers” in the Netherlands, aka Holland) did a great interview with David Allen before the GTD Summit in San Francisco. Enjoy:

The intro by Frank is in Dutch, but the rest is in English, so no worries.

I came back from the GTD Summit in San Francisco and the Productive Magazine #2 is not ready yet due to some technical problems we’ve been experiencing… and I’m really sorry for that.

As I hate being late or overdue with things and we’re long overdue with #2, I decided to do some cleaning and design the Productive Magazine Editorial Processes over again and make sure we can deliver each issue of the magazine on a regular basis.

Shorter but regular (monthly as the ultimate goal)

I’ve heard voices over at the Summit that they’d rather read a shorter magazine but on a regular basis than a longer one every few months. I definitely share this opinion and let me tell you, I think we’ll be on the right track with PM #3. The next issue will be due sometime in May and hopefully #4 and next ones will be as regular as ever and issued every month.

Productive Magazine Team is growing!

One the side note - our Productive Magazine Team is growing - apart from Me and my assistant Delfina, Lori Anderson and Dustin Wax (of Lifehack.org fame) have volunteered to participate and let me prepare each issue for you. If you also would like to volunteer and help me out, make sure to contact me.

How did I design the processes for the Productive Magazine #3 and beyond?

While I can’t reveal all the details yet (I’ll have to test them and really see what works and what doesn’t) I’ll be happy to let you know in the future posts about the process, for now just have a look at the Mind Map I did in the Freemind app on my Mac:

Please let me know in the comments, what you liked, didn’t like and would love to see in the future issues of the Productive Magazine and which format would be the best for you?

P.S. The issue #2 is almost finished and should be out any day now. Again, sorry for the delay!

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

You have read “Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“, right?

If you have, you’d want to get the newest book by David Allen… and if you haven’t grab both from Amazon now:

The new book is called: “Making it All Work - Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life“:

About the book (from the book’s web site):

David Allen’s Getting Things Done hit a nerve and ignited a movement with businesses, students, soccer moms, and techies all the way from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia. Now, David Allen leads the world on a new path to achieve focus, control, and perspective. Throw out everything you know about productivity– Making It All Work will make life and work a game you can win. For those who have already experienced the clarity of mind from reading Getting Things Done, Making It All Work will take the process to the next level.

David Allen shows us how to excel in dealing with our daily commitments, the unexpected, and the information overload that threatens to drown us. Making It All Work provides an instantly usable, success-building tool kit for staying ahead of the game.

Making It All Work addresses: how to figure out where you are in life and what you need; how to be your own consultant and a CEO of your life; moving from hope to trust in decision-making; when not to set goals; harnessing intuition, spontaneity, and serendipity; and why life is like business and business is like life.

This eagerly awaited follow-up to Getting Things Done is guaranteed to find an audience in today’s competitive business environment and among David Allen’s many fans.

The book will be available on sale today - I’m getting my copy today!

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:

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.

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.

We’ve finished the first version of the Productive Magazine cover. Due to some issues we had to re-schedule the first edition of the magazine for September, but we’re right now finishing it and it should be out very soon.

As promised, we have an exclusive 4-page interview with David Allen and lot’s of great articles:

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:

• Platform Agnostic (his personal blog)
• Office Zealot - Marc’s Outlook on Productivity
• On the Run with TabletPC podcast with James Kendrick
• The TabletPC Web blog
• Office Evolution at ZDnet
• Blognation USA

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)