Over the past decade, Nozbe has become known as one of the best task managers on the market inspired by the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. (We've done a GTD podcast series, and we've recently interviewed David Allen, creator of GTD.) They have now come out with a completely independent product called Nozbe Teams, and as you can imagine it’s focused on small organization productivity inspired by all the lessons learned from their work with Nozbe Personal.

We sat down with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski to talk about getting things done in Nozbe Teams--how it’s different from Nozbe Personal, what they learned from users, and what’s on the horizon for Nozbe Teams (now out in beta).

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/072 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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In this Cast | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Michael Sliwinski

Michael Sliwinski is the founder of Nozbe – a tool that helps busy professionals manage time, tasks and projects – available as a web app as well as native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPad and iPhone. He's been running Nozbe as a remote-first company for more than 11 years running Nozbe. Now, he's launching Nozbe Teams to help busy managers of small teams get things done together.

Show Notes | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

#iPadOnly by Augusto Pinaud and Michael Sliwinski

Productive Magazine

Work From Home: Augusto Pinaud (Facebook Live video)

Nozbe Personal

Nozbe Teams

Raw Text Transcript | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25And welcome to our listeners to this episode, we've got a little bit of a surprise for you all. We don't do this very often. But on occasion here on ProductivityCast we invite a guest to talk about a topic or a thing that we think is really useful. And we're actually really delighted to have Michael Sliwinski here from Nozbe. And and so welcome Michael to the show.

Michael Sliwinski 0:47Hi, thanks for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:49Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so do you want to tell us a little bit about you, you have a long standing relationship with Michael, and you want to tell us a little bit about Michael and then Michael can fill in the gaps.

Augusto Pinaud 0:59That sounds like Good plan. Yeah, I have the good fortune to call Michael a friend. I met Michael many years ago on a publication called Productive Magazine. And he's been talking about being No Office and Office Free seems at least the last 20 years, maybe more. Michael is the founder and CEO of Nozbe. And now, Nozbe has been growing and evolving and has a new product coming out called Nozbe Teams. And Nozbe Teams is one of the things that we want to focus this conversation on about this new thing. And I'm sure we will talk about #iPadOnly the book that we Michael and I wrote together and we still strongly believe in and still continue using iPads. And I'm sure also we will talk about No Office as it is really relevant to the dates that we are living right now. So we start welcome, Michael.

Michael Sliwinski 2:02Hi. Yes. Thank you. I'm good. I'm good. I. So anyway, before I start, like I love the podcast, I'm a big fan. And I'm a regular listener, actually, a few weeks ago, I was listening to one of the one of your shows, and then I was like, Hmm, I don't want to listen to listen to Augusto recorded, I will I want to talk to him. So that was really an impetus to send him a message and say, Hey, I haven't talked for a while. And then this is how we reconnected after a few months. So that was great. So anyway, I'm a big fan of the of the show. And I'm a productivity freak. So productivity geek, productivity freak, productivity aficionado, like, however you want to call it. And that's why I think I belong to the show in this sense. And, yeah, I've been building Nozbe and it's a personal productivity tool that helps people be awesome, by you know, getting their stuff together. And yeah, we've been All remote company 25 people right now I think I always lose count. But anyway, we don't have an office. We don't go to any office, we've always been remote. And that's why also right now we are trying to help people to, you know, to advise them how to how to deal with this current situation of the Coronavirus and how to stay at home and work effectively.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20Michael I wanted to start us off with giving people an understanding of maybe the differentiation what specifically differentiates Nozbe from say other time and task and project management software that are out there. And then if you can give us a little bit of compare and contrast between Nozbe Personal and Nozbe Teams?

Yeah, so um, the first thing was that must be was built for me. I needed to solve my own problems, question my own itch and build something that I would that will help me get stuff done better. And second thing is a very powerful yet simple tool that I tried. I tried to simplify getting things done. I wasn't Taking inspiration from getting things done, but not direct implementation like you, for example, you compare it to OmniFocus, which has like lots of lots of great features. And it's very complex, you have to study OmniFocus, to be able to use it, for example, but not only is it simplified, because I tried to simplify origins where like I wanted to get next actions, projects and contexts. And that's it like nothing else. And this is what I did in the very beginning, when I was building Nozbe, right now mostly is grown after 13 years, to a very cool productivity tool with more than half a million users all over the world. Nozbe is also syncs across all the devices. So you can have it even on there wasn't even an Apple Watch app so you can have your next actions on the go with just your watch. So in this sense, we we have we tried to be actually multi-platform really easy to use. And what happened was like when we were building Nozbe as a personal productivity tool, again, to make Getting Things Done simple to make productivity as simple as, as possible to really be able to quickly put stuff into your projects into your tasks. And, and also comment on the tasks. So this way you have a larger context of what what you really want to do. When you when you think about Nozbe other tools like this, you know, they're all a different version, you know, different interpretation of productivity. And in my case, I wanted it to be as simple to use as possible, and also as portable as possible so that I could use it, you know, on my iPad, you know, I was done, I wrote the #iPadOnly book. And we just recently published it for free on the internet. So if you go to #iPadonly.com, you can just read it for free for me, the multiplatform the simplicity, and also collaboration. So again, something that you don't get when you for example, you have things or OmniFocus is collaboration with other people. So it must be it's very simple to share a project with anyone. So even if somebody who doesn't have Nozbe account can share a project with you. This way. You don't have to let go of your system you can share a project with somebody. And when they create a task, they create tasks in your project that you share with them. So we don't have to just you know, copy and paste things. This will be like a briefly a summary of Nozbe. So a very, very powerful simply simple tool, but you know, multi platform and you know, multi person if he wants to. Now we have two tools we have we just launched Nozbe Teams. And lots of people are asking, why would you build a completely new tool under the same brand name? Why not a newer version of Nozbe. But Nozbe Teams is is an opposite approach. It's approached from you create a team. So it's it's for a team to get stuff done together, instead of you getting stuff together with some people. So so let's like the simplest, the simplest version to explain the difference between these two products is that there needs to be the original Nozbe and we call Nozbe Personal is a tool to help you get stuff done. Also with some other people on all of your devices, but not be teams is to help teams get stuff done. So it's just basically just for teams. And there are like many things that we'll we'll talk today about the differences that come from that, but it's a, like a kind of completely different design decision, like from the get go. And, and because and we had to build a separate tool for that,...