Posts Tagged ‘Productive Magazine’

120,000 views of the Productive Magazine on Issuu

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

I’ve never payed attention to the number of views the Productive Magazine got on Issuu.com but when I checked them eariler today they blew my mind!

Productive Magazine issue #1 with David Allen just passed 100,000 views

and

Productive Magazine issue #2 with Guy Kawasaki is closing 20,000 views

Let’s see how much issue #3 will generate, we’re working on it already and I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile if you know anyone who could benefit from reading the Productive Magazine, make sure to let them know and forward them to this page! Thanks!

Update: Just checked and our second issue of the magazine is one of the most popular on issuu.com this month, just have a look at the screenshot:

Productive Magazine Issue 2 - Cover Preview

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

OK, we’re finally finishing the second issue of the Productive! magazine - the last corrections and we’re good to go, should be out next week, before the end of April. Here’s the cover design to get you excited:

To be notified about the new issue, make sure you sign up for our Announcement List Newsletter.

Highlights of the Second issue of the Productive! Magazine:

I know the #2 issue is long overdue, but I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait!

As always, the magazine is proudly being sponsored by Nozbe - Simply Get Things Done!

Spring cleaning at the Productive Magazine

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

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!

[Preview of PM #2] Cover and Interview with Guy Kawasaki

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

After a long New Year’s break the Productive Magazine will be coming back with the issue #2! Thanks to your great feedback we’re hoping to make it the best issue ever and we’ve got some great articles for you to enjoy in this first issue in 2009… and some of them will be exclusive pieces written by bloggers solely for the magazine!

The Cover and the featured Interview… with Guy Kawasaki!

Yes, that’s correct. After David Allen in #1, we’ve got Guy Kawasaki for #2 - an interview I did with Guy back in December about life, entrepreneurship, his new book… and getting things done. I think we both had a great time with the interview, here are some of the quotes to give you an idea what to expect:

…important point about productivity and hiring: sometimes one should look beyond the lack of a perfect background…

…I don’t know of a place on earth where failure is more tolerated than Silicon Valley…

…business is also deceptive because things are never as good or as bad as they seem….

…If you change the world, you’ll probably make money….

…If my advice is “too obvious,” why are many companies doing so many silly things? As your magazine shows, there’s knowing the obvious and doing the obvious. The two are different…

You’ll be able to read the entire interview in the next issue of the magazine…. coming soon as a free download here, so stay tuned!

One more thing, if you’re an entrepreneur and need some good, “never-too-obvious” advice, I highly recommend Guy’s new book: “Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

Would you recommend Productive Magazine to a friend?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

I’ve asked the readers who signed up for the Productive Magazine mailing list this simple question:

Would you recommend Productive Magazine to a friend?

Here’s just a handful of answers I got:

Not only did I download it, I made everyone I work with at the Magazines download it as well.

Super work you produced. Great job! I will recommend highly.

a resource that I simply have to pass on to all of my Productive Entrepreneurs

Many blogged about the magazine, no wonder we got 20.000 readers in just the first week and the downloads are still going strong… although a little slower every day…

And would you also recommend our magazine?

Please let me know in the comments and send this link to anyone you’d recommend it to. You can also digg this link on digg.com

P.S. Later this week I’ll be announcing what’s to be expected in the second issue so make sure you’ve subscribed our RSS feed or you’ve signed up to the mailing list.

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!

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.