Yes, now it’s real and Productive Magazine will be released in March (this year so the waiting is almost over. Here are some quotes from my “editor note” in the magazine. We’re now finishing the editing and compiling the magazine. Almost there, here you go:

Why the delay…

The delay has been caused mainly by lots of stuff going on in my private life, ie. my responsibilities as a father and our move to a new apartment. Because of these life-changing factors, the time I had left to work has been used to focus on my company, my web app - Nozbeand the new web app that we are going to release this year.

What’s the theme…

Since in my company we don’t have real physical office space (everyone works from home, including yours truly), there’s always a challenge of balance between work and private life. The two boundaries blend and very often it’s hard to draw the lines between the two.

Why home-office…

The main rationale behind working from home is not a way to save money. It is mostly a lifestyle choice and I love it. I have fallen in love with the concept when I was in college writing my final thesis on Teleworking (Telecommuting). This is why the theme of this issue of Productive! Magazine is working from home and we have great experts to help me tell more about the subject.

We’ve got some real experts on board…

First off, we’ve got the ueber-blogger Leo Babauta who writes his most popular blog on the Internet, Zen Habits directly from his home office on the beautiful island of Guam or from San Francisco (OK, not yet, but he is moving there this year!). We also have Stephanie Dickinson, one of the most famous home-office worker on the planet, author of “The 30-second commute”.

And regular contributors…

To cover the theme of productivity of self-employed home-worker, we’ve got Art Carden’s review of the 2-year-long New York Times bestseller “Four hour workweek”, Michael Hyatt, my personal role model, will tell you how to delegate even when you don’t have anyone working for you. Similarly, Mike Vardy, our laughter guru, will tell you how to outsource… in a very humorous way and Steven Aitchison will tell you how to make irrational thoughts go away.

I will also tune in with my contributions. You should sign up for our newsletter and subscribe to our blog here and watch out for Productive Magazine #4 in March!

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!

As promised, tomorrow we’ll be launching the third issue of the Productive Magazine and since the magazine has been already compiled (it’s undergoing the last revision though), I’ve decided to post a small video trailer on our sister site “Productive! Show”, click on the photo to jump and watch the video:

The newest issue of the magazine will be available tomorrow and as always it’ll be a completely free PDF download, so make sure to send this to your friends and colleagues!

We can notify you per email about newest issue, just subscribe to our Productive! Newsletter mailing list and we’ll email you when it’s available.

So far so good, we’re finishing up the Productive Magazine Issue #3 and it is going to be a great one.

For this issue I’ve been interviewing Michael Bungay-Stanier (@boxofcrayons), native Australian who lives in Canada and has been awarded there “coach of the year 2006″ and by David Allen is considered one of the best thinkers on productivity. Among the GTD crowd he’s very well known for the “creative questioning” podcast with David Allen.

Here’s the early scoop of the cover design for the issue #3:

Some excerpts from the interview:

You know how there’s some work you do that’s meaningful and important and makes a difference? And then there’s the rest of the stuff you do and that somehow fills up your days? Great Work is the first type. And I want you to do more of that.

Think of your goal not as saying No – but as “saying Yes more slowly.” Part of what trips us up is how our default is set to saying Yes and saying Yes quickly. If you can just slow things down a little - and the best way to do this is to get curious and ask questions about what’s being asked of you - then you’ll end up not committing yourself to so much.

I truly believe that you can’t do Great Work by yourself. If you’re smart, you build up a team - people who can provide technical, intellectual and emotional support.

Metrics are tricky - they can turn into an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. At least, that’s the excuse I make for me not measuring very much.

Mark your days in the calendar, please tweet about the magazine and follow me on Twitter…

Tuesday, August 4th, Productive Magazine is strikes back again!

After almost two months of not-posting let me tell you we’re not asleep over here but busy preparing the next issue of the Productive Magazine.

• Who will be featured on the cover?
• Whose articles will be published?
• How will the magazine look like?
• When will the magazine #3 be published?

You’ll get answers to all of these questions in the coming days, so make sure to Subscribe to our Newsletter or to our RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter or plain simply bookmark this web site…. or do all of this to be on the safe side and receive info about the Productive Magazine issue #3.

One thing is sure - the magazine will be published this month and will stay as always a free PDF download, so make sure to spread the word about it!

Stay tuned!

- Michael (Editor-in-Chief

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:

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?

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!

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
   
2. Black and White version with Full-color cover
   

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!

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:

• Guy Kawasaki tweeted about it
• Chris Pirillo sent a FriendFeed status
• Testeq announced it on the David Allen forums
• Leo Babauta blogged about it on ZenHabits
• Steve of Change your Thoughts blogged about it
• John Kendrick also blogged about it
• Ades also wrote about it
• as well as Flippingheck
• and yours truly on the Nozbe blog and my personal blog

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