Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity
    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity
    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity

    By Michael Sliwinski

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Learn how to manage your goals, projects, commitments, and emails, and live a happy life where you can feel in control and leave stress behind! Let Michael Sliwinski, a productivity and time management expert, guide you through the core productivity techniques.

    Did you know that in an eight-hour workday we spend just four hours on actual work? And that we only work with complete focus for about two to three hours a day... which is actually not bad. That means you have about 10-15 hours per week for intense work. Do you devote that time to the most important tasks that push your projects forward?

    It’s very likely that you don’t. It’s time to find out why and what you can do about it!"
    The "10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity" book will help you create a work system that allows you to utilize your potential more effectively and avoid basic mistakes in the way you manage your time.

    Thanks to the book, you will learn:

    - How to manage your tasks more effectively using the GTD method
    - What is a trusted productivity system
    - How to distinguish priority tasks from other matters
    - How to act effectively anywhere and at any time
    - How to collaborate with others
    - How to deal with a flood of incoming emails and notifications

    Michael Sliwinski has been professionally engaged in productivity and time management since 2006. Today, he wants to pass everything he knows on this subject onto you with this practical guide. "10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity" is not a collection of theoretical principles – it’s a record of many years of experience that he has been drawing on to constantly optimize his own productivity system.

    It’s also a collection of practical tips – simple enough to start applying immediately. In certain parts, the author encourages you to put the book down and try out my advice right away – no excuses!

    Although Michael loves books (he reads several dozen a year), he believes that personal experience is more important than dry, bookish theory. That’s why each step of the book includes an instruction for immediate application in Nozbe – the app that the author uses on a daily basis and created over a decade ago. (Be sure, though, that with Michael's tips you’ll also be able to create your own trusted productivity system with the use of other tools. The principles remain the same!)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Sliwinski
    Release dateDec 4, 2018
    ISBN9788394508678
    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity
    Author

    Michael Sliwinski

    Michael is a productivity guy. He is the founder and CEO of Nozbe, a project management and collaboration tool used by over half a million busy professionals and teams from all over the world. He served as Editor-in-Chief of one of the top productivity magazines on the internet, Productive! Magazine. Michael is also an author, blogger, and speaker. He co-hosts The Podcast. He was born in Gdynia, northern Poland, and spent his childhood there. His mom started teaching him English when he was 6 and thus she fostered his interest in languages; his father, who was an "electronics technician," got him interested in computers. Now, apart from Polish and English he also speaks fluent Spanish and German. He has two university degrees, one in Business Economics and one in Marketing. Right after his graduation in 2003 he set up his own company, apivision.com, to pursue his interest in Internet commerce. He founded two startups (Wyslij.info and HitRSS.com) that eventually failed before he finally started something he was truly passionate about and managed to succeed with: Nozbe. In his free time he enjoys doing triathlons, running, swimming, playing basketball, skiing, writing, and reading (or listening to) books. He is a geek who likes technology gadgets (he's an Apple fanboy) and cars. Michael works from home and everyone on his team works remotely. He believes a "job is not a place to go but a thing you do." He lives in a very beautiful place in Europe with his wife, Ewelina, and their three amazing daughters: Milena, Emilia, and Liliana.

    Related to 10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity

    Related ebooks

    Self-Management For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Can a Diary Change Your Life?

      Oct 3, 2021

      Part planner, part diary and part reflection journal, this system – made famous by New York-based designer Ryder Carroll – has gone on to inspire an entire ‘bullet’ method. Fans rave about its mind-clearing and productivity-boosting powers via visual

      6 min read

    • Article

      Get Organized With Nirvana for GTD

      Oct 11, 2017

      REQUIRES Nirvana for GTD YOU WILL LEARN How to create and manage projects and tasks. IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes ? GENIUS TIP Use tags and timescales to make searching for tasks easy. You can create as many tags as you like. DO YOU EVER look at your to-d

      2 min read

    • Article

      Do less, ACHIEVE MORE

      Jul 29, 2021

      Do less, ACHIEVE MORE
      3 min read

    • Article

      Make Your To-do List Work For You

      Mar 31, 2020

      Highlight all of the tasks on your list that will take two minutes or less, and do them straight away. It will shrink down your list in a matter of minutes. Get honest and ask yourself: ‘What tasks can I let go of and remove from my list altogether?’

      1 min read

    • Article

      Get Organized Now!

      Dec 20, 2019

      Get Organized Now!
      6 min read

    • Article

      We’re Working Harder Than Ever—so Why Is Productivity Going Down?

      Aug 27, 2016

      MOST OF US FEEL MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN EVER. BETWEEN wi-fi and mobile data, smartphones and apps that let us do everything from hail a ride to order groceries, we can get more done, in more places, more of the time—whether we want to or not. So why doe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Stay Focused on Your Work

      Nov 28, 2017

      REQUIRES Be Focused, OS X 10.9 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to get into a better pattern of work and rest with the help of a neat little menu bar utility IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes BE FOCUSEDis a free app from the Mac App Store that helps you stay focuse

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Life Worth Living

      Jan 27, 2020

      A Life Worth Living
      2 min read

    • Article

      Tips To Bust That CLUTTER!

      Jan 20, 2021

      Tips To Bust That CLUTTER!
      1 min read

    • Article

      Microsoft To-Do

      Jun 18, 2020

      If you already use Microsoft’s To-Do app on the web, iOS, or Android, you’ll be pleased to know it’s been released as a Mac app. It doesn’t yet offer Planner integration, and we could do with a Dark Mode, but overall it’s a good combined GTD (Getting

      1 min read

    • Article

      88 For Inspiring Us To Clean House

      May 30, 2018

      Margareta Magnusson Author Death cleaning—known in Sweden, its country of origin, as döstädning—may sound morbid. But it’s really an act of love, says Margareta Magnusson, the 84-year-old first-time author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleanin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Not To Do List

      Jul 29, 2019

      Not To Do List
      1 min read

    • Article

      6 Disciplines to Regain Control of Productivity

      May 26, 2022

      Here are six disciplines Sales Managers can leverage to help their Reps build productive sales weeks: Urgent issues get our attention (and therefore time) – clients who require information, problems that require solving, requests by senior management

      1 min read

    • Article

      40 WAYS TO BE happy

      Mar 25, 2021

      40 WAYS TO BE happy
      6 min read

    • Article

      Not More Work Better Work

      Apr 12, 2022

      Not More Work Better Work
      3 min read

    • Article

      How To Be Indistractable

      May 1, 2020

      Being ‘indistractable’ has been called the essential skill for our time. Why is it so critical right now? In today’s world, technology and interruptions are everywhere. If you sit down to work on a project with a fast-approaching deadline, it won’t b

      5 min read

    • Article

      Got A Shiny New Idea?

      Nov 14, 2020

      Got A Shiny New Idea?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Writing Motivation

      Jun 24, 2023

      Where do writing motivation problems come from, and how can we overcome them? In recent years, there has been a movement in psychology to understand what happens in our brains when things are going well. Research in neurology, cognitive psychology, p

      5 min read

    • Article

      What Have You Learned From Business Mistakes?

      Oct 4, 2021

      Asif Ahmed Managing Director of Acclivity and author of The Finance Playbook for Entrepreneurs www.acclivity.co “When I first started out in business, I hadn’t fully appreciated the importance of having contracts in place to support every legal relat

      7 min read

    • Article

      Build It Into Your Day

      Jul 22, 2023

      Build It Into Your Day
      6 min read

    • Article

      Aim For The New Frontiers Of Work

      Sep 25, 2021

      Aim For The New Frontiers Of Work
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Power Of Flow

      Mar 1, 2023

      The Power Of Flow
      16 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for 10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Enthusiast and comprehensive guide on how to get things done using a productivity app.

    Book preview

    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity - Michael Sliwinski

    10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity

    Control the chaos of everyday life, including practical examples using the Nozbe app.

    Learn how to manage your goals, projects, commitments, and emails, and live a happy life where you can feel in control and leave stress behind! Let Michael Sliwinski, a productivity and time management expert, guide you through the core productivity techniques.

    Author

    Michael Sliwinski

    Illustrations:

    Hubert Tereszkiewicz

    DTP:

    Papercut

    Organizational support:

    Magdalena Błaszczyk

    Marcin Hinz

    Natalia Mialik

    Jakub Niżniowski

    Translation from Polish:

    Konrad Rozbicki

    Proofreading:

    Claire Kellems

    Joy Xiang

    EPUB/MOBI conversion:

    InkPad.pl

    ISBN:

    978-83-945086-7-8

    Copyright © 2018 by Michael Sliwinski

    Spis treści

    Dedication

    Foreword

    Step 1.

    Clear Your Mind

    Step 2.

    From Tasks to Projects

    Step 3.

    Focus on What’s Most Important

    Step 4.

    Be Productive Anytime and Anywhere

    Step 5.

    Delegate Tasks to Achieve More—Work as a Team

    Step 6.

    Group Your Tasks and Shift Gears!

    Step 7.

    Take Control of Your Documents

    Step 8.

    Check Your System Regularly

    Step 9.

    Master Your Emails

    Step 10.

    What Else Can You Improve?

    Final Productivity Problems & Solutions

    Final Thoughts

    Acknowledgments

    Dedication

    I would like to dedicate this book to the over half-a-million Nozbe users who work hard to meet their goals each and every day. We’ve been learning from each other about how to live a productive life and find fulfillment in what we do for over 11 years now. Thank you for your support and suggestions, and for constantly motivating me and the entire Nozbe team. Thank you for everything that you do.

    With this book, you will learn the basic rules for building your own time management system.

    Foreword

    In this book, you will learn the principles needed to build your very own system for organizing and taking charge of your time. In 10 easy-to-follow steps, I will share how you can quickly and easily realize your goals. Thanks to these rules, I am both happier and more productive.

    It wasn’t always this way...

    By nature, I am an incurable optimist and a generally disorganized person. That is exactly why I decided to look into the literature on self-management. I knew that I could no longer neglect my deadlines, postpone my meetings, and lose my way in the flood of information and projects that I was responsible for. I needed to finally get organized!

    My old way of using a physical planner was quickly becoming outdated and couldn’t keep up with the new, fast-paced environment the internet had created.

    Things could not continue like this for me. I was drowning in the sheer volume of things I needed to do. That’s when I decided to study the techniques of self-management. Seeking inspiration from books by authors like Stephen Covey and David Allen, I hoped even a disorganized individual like myself could tidy up their life. I never imagined I would find my life’s passion through this endeavor.

    It started out innocently enough

    After reading a few books on productivity, I was able to organize my most pressing issues. I already knew some programming, so I created a simple application for private use that enabled me to identify my goals and prioritize them. I gradually worked on my creation, and in February 2007, I decided to show it to the world. I figured that since it helped me, maybe someone else will benefit from it.

    That’s how the Nozbe app came to be. Its popularity, especially in the United States, exceeded all of my expectations. Motivated by its success, I left my job at the time and decided to shift my focus onto the tool that I continue to work on to this day. I no longer work alone but with an entire team. Today’s Nozbe works not only in browsers but on all mainstream platforms.

    Trivia: People often ask me where the name Nozbe came from. The name is actually a play on the phrase BE Naturally OrganiZed. We decided to abbreviate the name and, after a few attempts such as Be Oz and Oz Be, we finally came up with Nozbe.

    Popularization of the productive lifestyle

    Thanks to the development of Nozbe, I was able to meet many fantastic people with whom I continued to learn new ways of organizing one’s time. Together with a friend of mine, Maciek Budzich (author of the blog Mediafun in Poland), we came up with the idea of creating a magazine about productivity. I invited some of my personal gurus, as well as many experts in the fields of time management, business, and technology to work on it. That’s how Productive! Magazine was born, which with the help of my team, I was able to publish for more than eight years in multiple languages.

    Meanwhile...

    I am still studying and testing new ways of improving productivity. Seeing so many strategies that actually work, and hoping to inspire and help you organize your own goals and time, I decided to write this book.

    It’s time to get organized!

    The goal of this book is to help you build your own trusted productivity system. My rules of productivity are heavily embedded in Nozbe, so it will be featured in some of the examples. However, you don’t need to use Nozbe to take advantage of the advice and methods in this book. If there are programs or tools you feel more comfortable with, you should by all means use them instead. Of course, I would be very happy if you decide to use my app. What’s most important, though, is that you benefit from the tips mentioned in this book and are able to incorporate them into your own personalized system. Throughout the book, you will also learn about some of the other helpful tools that are available.

    How was this book conceived?

    The idea of writing this book came after recording my video course, "10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity." Together with the Nozbe team, I started by making small edits to the existing script for the video course. We invited Nozbe users to help out as well, and together we created a launch team made up of 200 true productivity aficionados. It soon became apparent that simply releasing the written script from the video wouldn’t be enough. Our ambitions were far greater. In order to properly explain all of the subjects, we decided to make even more edits to the script. Some topics that I had merely touched upon in the video course were expanded. A book allowed us to include related examples as well. Not all of them came from my own experiences. Some examples were sent in by other members of the publishing team, and the list of everyone involved can be found at the end of the book. I hope that the fruit of our joint labor results in a practical guide that will allow you to easily master all of the important techniques for increasing efficiency.

    Before we begin, let’s look at three common myths about productivity!

    Although productivity has become a popular topic—for articles, blogs, and applications—many people still seem to be skeptical about it. The main sources of this skepticism are most likely these three myths that we will put to rest right here.

    Myth 1: Productivity is for boring people

    Are well-organized people just plain unspontaneous? No, quite the opposite! As you will discover in the first part of the book, well-organized people don’t think of 10 different things at once. Because they have everything written down in their productivity system, they can focus on the present.

    The fact that they don’t have to constantly think about their responsibilities allows them to be more creative, more spontaneous, and enjoy life.

    Example: In 2016, I got away for a week-long vacation to Italy with my wife. We spent our time enjoying delicious breakfasts on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, taking long walks, and sightseeing. However, in order for this kind of a trip to happen in the first place, we needed to organize all of our professional activities before going away as well as get someone to babysit our children (many thanks to my parents!), buy plane tickets, reserve adequate accommodations, arrange car rental, etc. In order to truly live in the moment and fully absorb Italy’s beauty (rather than stress over being in a foreign country), we needed to get organized before the trip.

    Myth 2: Productivity is for rocket scientists

    I’ve heard many people complain that this whole productivity

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1