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Hello and welcome to NoOffice, a podcast about work technology in life from a remote company
perspective.
My name is Rafal Sobolewski and as always,
I'm joined by CEO of our new office company Nozbe
and my good friend, Michael Sliwinski.
Hello, Michael.
Well, I usually ask you, how are you?
But since-
- Anxious.
- Yeah, anxious, anxious, me too.
Yeah, we are recording this episode
like one week after the last one
because in the following week, I will be away
and we will mention some important topics today.
So we decided to publish it right away in this week.
So after that, there will be three weeks break.
- Yes.
- So yeah, and we feel anxious.
So please forgive us if the quality of this episode
will be slightly worse because yeah.
Yeah, talking English right now is, yeah.
But as you can hear.
All right.
Michael, we feel like we need to talk about Ukraine. I mean it's been exactly a
week. Today is Thursday, so it's been exactly one week when Russians,
Putin's Russia invaded and attacked a sovereign country of Ukraine. So yes, and
started a war. So yes, it's been exactly a week and because we are Polish and if
look at the map of Europe. Poland is right next to Ukraine and right next to
Russia as well. And Belarus, which Belarus is basically Russia. And you will see
that we are very close. These are our next door neighbors and our
next door neighbors are at war. Ukraine was invaded, was attacked ruthlessly by
Russia and now as we speak civilians are dying in Ukraine. So yes, we are very
anxious. We are very scared because we are afraid this might escalate to a
bigger war and we're also afraid because you know we fear for our
Ukrainian brothers and sisters because they're dying and defending their
country. This is completely pointless. Like war is completely pointless and
Mr. Putin is a son of a you know what.
Yeah, we want to talk about this because we are both from Poland and this is an international
podcast so we might bring some more light to this for our foreign listeners. And maybe even,
I hope, that we have like one or two downloads per episode in Russia. So maybe we will get there
with some proper information, not Putin's propaganda.
We will be talking also about what we can do as Nozbe.
And one of the things that I did was record a video, which is on Nozbe blog.
And the thing is that what I said there is that Russians are also close to us.
They are very good friends.
I have many friends in Russia and they are very good people, but they're not free.
They are ruled by a ruthless dictator named Putin and he is brainwashing them.
and many good Russians, good people in Russia, intelligent people in Russia still believe that
Russia is right now saving Ukraine. It's going there to save them instead of attacking them and
just starting a war. So that's why we want to make it clear there is no new ones. Ukraine is
a free country that wanted also to be a part of EU just like Poland and NATO just like Poland. So
It's not like Ukraine had some big demands on from the world. It wanted to be free and to just live and prosper.
That's it. And Putin didn't like it and because he's son of a... You know what? He just decided to attack.
And that's why it's really important for Russians to believe that, to understand that. Some of them do. Like they are on the streets
opposing war in Saint Petersburg, in Moscow, in many cities and they are being detained by police. Also ruthlessly.
Yeah, but the number of them is too low.
Yeah, but I mean, just look...
It's easy for police to arrest them, but if there were like 100,000s of people on the street,
that would be impossible to arrest all of them.
Exactly. But the thing is...
Yeah, they need to act.
Yes, Russians need to act. So our Russian brothers and sisters,
you need to get your act together. Putin should not be your leader anymore.
And that's why... But think about it. It's been 20 years of Putin's rule.
like after 20 years of brainwashing you believe anything man like it's propaganda is you know like
it's this thing that when you repeat a certain lie several times it just stops being a lie it just
becomes you know the status quo i feel for it i have one of my best russian friends he lives in
belgium and i talked to him recently and he said that for him it's so painful to go to russia to
visit his family and friends because they just chit chat about you know meaningless topics because
Because the moment they step on something meaningful, he just cannot believe that they're brainwashed so much.
You know? Like we, from the West, we don't realize that.
The problem with the Western countries was that we were tolerating Putin for just 20 years.
And because we're tolerating him, he thinks he can do anything now.
Yeah, that's many different factors of this Western world.
Yes, there is this currency in Ukraine, there is classical war right now, but there is also
happening information war in the internet.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's very important.
If you are interested in this topic and you want to learn more, please try to find on
Twitter or only verified journalist with the political background who knows the reasons
of the war, et cetera, et cetera, and can explain you more about that.
because it's very important to not to retweet, to forward random videos on the internet from
Ukraine that are not yet verified by Reuters or other press agencies because there are many,
many Putin trolls in the internet that produce this information. And they tried already in
Poland they tried with giving us a panic about that gas, the petrol
station will be out of petrol. And it was for two days because of
this panic that people started to... - Self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Later there was problem with the cash machines. - Yes, everybody was lined up for
ATMs. Yeah, but it's lasted for a day. There's no real danger. The danger is that we start
panicking. Putin wants us, as we are Poland and we are helping Ukrainians a lot, Putin
and Russian throughout the internet will try to give us a conflict, internal conflicts,
and spread disinformation. We really need to stay calm and do our thing.
Because, you know, he, like, dictators, they lead with fear.
That's the only weapon they have,
and that's the strongest weapon they have, fear.
They want us to be afraid.
They want us Polish people to be afraid to help Ukraine.
They want the West to be afraid of Ukraine.
I don't want to continue with politics anymore,
but just like yesterday evening,
when I was going to sleep, I was thinking,
like, why is NATO not, you know, getting involved?
And some, and then many people,
and I asked it on Twitter and many people replied to me,
they cannot because Ukraine is not in NATO.
And I'm like, yes.
So who says what we can or cannot do?
Because Putin doesn't know cannot.
He doesn't understand the phrase cannot.
Like he understands whatever the F I want.
So that's why it's like the West cannot do this.
Why?
So anyway, we have to remember,
Chinese governments, Russian governments, North Korean governments, like all these
governments they don't play by the book, by the rules. They don't care about the
rules. They do whatever they want and we need to remember that. Like
that's why I'm kind of annoyed that the Western society is so... it's
like playing nice with Russia and China so much because they depend on them so
much. That's why for example you know from the gadget perspective and from
Apple perspective. I'm so annoyed that Tim Cook puts all his eggs in the basket, in the Chinese basket,
because this puts Apple at a disadvantage.
Yeah, this is the point because political class in Western Europe acted very well, I must say,
not perfect, but very well to the situation within this week. But now, because of this information
war, like it's time for big tech's company to act now because actually the platforms are the reason
why Putin was able to put himself in the position to attack Ukraine because of all the targeted ads
and all the anti-vaccine accounts now became disinformation accounts about Ukraine situation
and situation in Poland also.
Exactly. So now let's go to good stuff. Let's talk about good things.
Yeah, we had this meeting on Monday, a director's meeting, and we are thinking
what we as Nozbe could do to help our brothers and sisters in Ukraine.
Okay, so we've already talked about how we do meetings in Nozbe, but I want us to
like quickly explain how it went down. So it went down that we were like sending
each other messages over the weekend thinking what we can do like just random messages actually
and then on Sunday evening I wrote up a proposal like an idea what we can do. I created a task for
it, made a comment, mentioned everyone in the team, everyone just you know this is my proposal
what we can do for Ukraine, let me know what you think. So by morning, by Monday morning,
where we have our director's meeting at 1030am, our director's coffee, we already had some thoughts,
and we already had this proposal, and we already had comments, you know, related to this proposal.
So it was, I think that that and that's why this meeting was kind of, you know, it was hard still
emotionally for us, but we was more, I think, effective, because we already had some ideas what
what we could do. I remember we wanted to... one idea was to put all the money we
have from Russian users to help Ukraine. So all the income from Russia
will be transferred to foundations for helping Ukraine, but we are no longer
able to charge Russian people. So that's... Yeah, I mean Stripe, which we
have as a backup a solution for still lets people pay with rubles which is
weird. So if we have any revenue coming from Russia we will
directly, 100% of it, transfer to Ukraine causes. So don't worry, we'll
deal with this money, we'll make it clean and we won't be profiting from
from Russia and we are not doing any, you know, like we, you know, and the
people who are from Russia who will not be able to pay, well they will not be
able to pay, this is kind of our small sanction that we can do. You know,
sanctions are, people say, are tricky, you know, it's like with sports people are
like, you know, are these sportsmen to blame for the war? And on
On one hand, you would say no because they are just sports people.
Like, what do they have to do with Russian politics?
But on the other hand, very often their sponsors are companies related to Putin, Gazprom, like all these other companies.
Like FIFA announced that Gazprom was one of the major sponsors.
And that's why FIFA had to make a tough decision.
and the same goes with Formula One. F1 has team sponsored by a major Russian company and having
a son of an oligarch who's Putin's buddy on the team. So it's like everything is connected to
Putin. I mean again it's Russian, it default lies both, I mean everywhere. First the West
tolerating Putin's Russia, but also within Russia, aligning yourself with the government,
aligning yourself with Putin. And that's why these sanctions are important. That's why these
sanctions should be imposed. And that's why I'm so proud of how social networks work. When FIFA said,
"No, we will just tell them to change their color," everybody was like, "No, we are not..."
And I loved it.
Polish national team was like, we are not playing Russia.
However they are named, we are not playing them.
We were supposed to play Russia by the end of the March
for the qualification to the World Cup.
And yeah, our team said we are not playing.
And I'm so proud of them.
Yeah, so FIFA had two choices.
For example, announce Russia as the victor of the World
Championships because nobody will play them.
So they will be the victor or kick them out.
And I'm happy that they did it.
Still, like FIA, for example,
the management body of Formula One
is not banning Russian drivers
and Belarusian drivers,
because both Russia and Belarus, they're the same.
Like, so you have to, because Belarus is helping Russia.
Like, Belarus is basically a state in Russia right now.
It's not a country anymore.
So anyway, the FIA, the automotive, you know,
the big agency that rules all the races
said they didn't want to be brave enough
to announce that Belarusian and Russian drivers
should not drive anymore.
But then each country is saying,
we're not taking them in.
So for example, in the UK,
if they want to go to Silverstone, no dice,
because UK said, no,
we will not have any Russian or Belarusian drivers here.
So it's like, is this smaller, you know, the smaller countries, you know, branches of
FIA are just saying nope.
So it's, I love this, the social pressure, the pressure from Twitter, from Facebook,
all this pressure, it's working, it's working.
So also, find this information is the first thing and second, keep putting on the pressure.
If FIA is doing something stupid, you know, keep tweeting about it.
telling them guys you're not brave enough. So I love it. The change that has happened within this
you know short week was just amazing. Like from "ah we'll see" to "let's go". Yeah I'm proud of it too
and yeah let's go back what we can do as Nozbe. So we will be, I think we are working right now,
Ola is working on this Russian blog post about the situation. So we will push this blog post into
the app. So there is the way we can get to some Russian people to try to provide them with
real information of Propaganda One so we can use our platform. It's of course, it's very small
number but still everyone comes. We are offering Nozbe premium for one year for free for
all the Ukrainians. Yes and it doesn't matter if it's a personal account, if it's a corporate
company, it's an organization. If you're from Ukraine you get Nozbe for free for at least a year.
Yes and the same goes to all the organizations that are helping Ukraine and that
fight against this information war in the internet. Yes, because right now I'm really proud of Polish
people. We are getting organized very quickly and you yourself are very involved as well. I am
involved too here because I'm from afar coordinating this with our friends from
the Gdansk and with my mom, you know, with many people. So people in Poland are getting
organized. So if you're a Polish team getting Ukrainian relief
organized, you can get Nozbe for free, Nozbe Premium. So just drop us an email.
If you check all these boxes, just drop us an email at support@nozbe.com
and we will provide you with premium accounts, premium teams, to
be able to get organized, to be more organized, and to put everything there
and just make sure that everything goes to appropriate families, people, and all.
We actually should do this earlier, but translating up to Ukrainian.
Yes, we are working on this right now.
And we provided to our team additional days of vacation, like two days per month,
that can be spent on volunteer work for helping in all those foundations that
collect stuff for Ukraine.
this is a marathon not a sprint like we know that this war
might um it might be long it might be short we don't know
but whatever happens our ukrainian brothers and sisters will need help
that's why we are giving this two additional extra days free
every month for the you know entire entirety of this year at least
uh for our entire nosby team so that people can just you know
if there is there are things to do in your local branch of people
helping ukraine you can just take the day off and just work there
and just help out without sacrificing your personal vacation time.
Yeah, and with nature of our work, you can take two hours each day, for example.
Exactly.
Which is... Yeah, because I got involved because we have this new building in our district,
like a center of local activity and...
Community center.
Community center. I'm the part of the local NGO who won a contract to operate this center.
And together with Foundation, we started working on collection stuff for you, Karen,
from local people. It's very, very tricky. It started on Sunday.
the first two days was a total hack house. People were bringing everything and not all of the stuff
was okay for giving to Ukrainian or sending to Ukraine. So we needed to sort it, to figure out
some systems, etc. What is good that my fiancé also got involved and she has
experience, like eight years experience in working in the small warehouse because she works in this
big fashion shop. Yeah, and she managed to organize some order, etc. And now we are, well,
It's not perfect, of course, but there is more order, we can fit more stuff,
and we know what we need, what we don't accept anymore, etc. And we update every day on social
media what people can bring to help, etc. Because like now, the top priority is to
send as many stuff to Ukraine as we can, as long as it's possible to drive to Kyiv or
other big cities. And that's very hard because we were witnesses of the people driving with big
trucks to Ukraine and taking Ukrainians who lived in Poland for three, four years. They want to go
there and fight. And I cannot imagine how hard this decision is for them because they are leaving
I think the guy was leaving his wife here.
He never, he has never been in the army,
but he still wants to go there.
It's tough, man.
- Yeah.
- Oh.
(sighs)
- I am anti-military, anti, I'm a pacifist, actually.
- Yeah, I think.
- I am anti everything.
- Me too, like I think weapons shouldn't exist, but.
- Yes, but when you're being attacked,
you have to defend yourself, and that's the thing.
And I do believe in self-defense.
I was a karate champion.
So I know that self-defense is important.
You mustn't attack, but you must defend yourself
if you're being attacked.
And I still, it's hard for me to process
that now in 21st century, we have to deal with this stuff.
Here, the free Europe, free world has this
at their doorstep.
and with the threat of escalation.
So, you know, it's really hard.
So I'm really proud of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters.
Like they are fighting like crazy.
- They are so brave and I just,
I'm so pissed off for myself because I have like,
not close, but I have some family in Ukraine
and I've never been there.
And-
- Now they're a bit too kind as well.
I want to go there as soon as war is over.
I am going there.
I want to learn Ukraine.
And yeah, because now I've met many people from Ukraine
within this week.
But still, as I said, as you can hear,
that there are many emotions there,
but still there are many positive emotions there
because people are so grateful for our help.
and working together to helping people, it's so satisfying.
And even talking to people how...
Because if you want to help, if you want to bring some stuff to those collection centers,
it's always better to bring one big boxes of one type of product than one big box of
20, 30 products, because it's so much easier to sort it, to prepare everything ready to
sent to Ukraine or to give to Ukrainian people who are refugees from the war and they will
start living here in Poland, in many cities.
Yes, we want to help them as well.
And yeah, we actually have one woman there who is Polish and Russian.
She has two passports.
Also, she has family in Ukraine.
And she cannot speak to family in Russia because her family in Russia is brainwashed.
And they hate her because she is helping Ukrainians.
Actually, she cannot go to Russia right now because she can go to jail for 10 or 12 years
because of helping Ukrainians.
Yeah.
and truly again because we we know uh we are so close we are in Poland trust me on this
Polish people, Ukrainian people, Russian people, we are very similar we speak very similar language
basically you know I speak some Russian and what I don't speak in Russian I basically you know get
away with speaking Polish with Russian accent so um so it's it's and the same with Ukrainian
So it's really we are very close, very close
people and because of the wars from the 20th century and before that,
our nations are mixed, very mixed. Like Lviv,
which is a Ukrainian city right now, it used to be a very vibrant Polish city.
So there is a very big Polish community in Lviv
and we are not claiming it, we are not going to take it over and attack
Ukraine to take our city. What happens is that it's a very
multicultural city right now, like Polish and Ukrainian,
but also the whole Ukraine. Because of history,
many people went to Russia, many people went to Ukraine who were
Russians, and so they're very mixed.
In my family, there is an Ukrainian woman,
and like a very distant aunt and her husband is a Russian officer.
So just think about it like this is crazy stuff.
So really like this word from a personal perspective from us makes no
sense at all. The only sense it's political sense of
a crazy person, Mr. Putin. I shouldn't even call him Mr.
Just Putin. He doesn't
deserve any kind of anything. And two more things I wanted to mention.
I feel exhausted emotionally because of those mixed emotions, but when I'm going there to help,
I feel very energized. So now in the last week, it was very hard for me to focus on work. So it
was impossible to do deep work. I was focusing in the time I have for work only to do feedback work.
So yeah, to help others who are able to deliver stuff
in DeepWork, to not block them,
give them feedback, et cetera.
So it's nice that the way we work allow it.
So I still can bring some value
and not taking the whole week off.
- Yes.
- Yeah, and one thing, one positive thing I wanted
to mention because yesterday, actually like two weeks
ago, I bought finally new 4K display and my old full HD display.
I took it to this community center and together with a friend, with my neighbor, he got some
old Raspberry Pi and we connected it in the center to put it some kind of info kiosk with
useful information for Ukrainians both in Polish and Ukraine and we are just
showing the slides there. Nice. So it's better used than anything else
like of our mind like it's very very good idea. And also on my end it's been
tough this whole week especially like last week when I woke up I was still
enjoying my holidays I was in a hotel and when I was in a hotel room I remember
waking up on Friday morning and seeing the images of children sleeping in the
underground stations because they are afraid of bombings and then seeing my
children sleeping in their beds and I was like wow this freedom thing it's it's
it cannot be underappreciated like we we completely take it for granted but like
my children are still sleeping in their beds not there in the underground but
they can be next so it's it was you know very hard anyway um work keeps me sane
So very often I try to turn off all these notifications and information.
Later I catch up, of course. But like yesterday, for example, I was making sure that the whole day long I wasn't reading anything.
I was just working, trying to work, you know, recording the video for our recranial relief, writing about it, like preparing all that stuff without actually, you know, looking at news.
And then I caught up later in the evening, but it was kind of my asylum.
It was kind of my way of compartmentalizing, you know, to make sure that I have some sanity, you know,
because otherwise, you know, because we cannot fight now, like I cannot, you know, go there and fight at this moment.
So you can feel completely pointless.
Like, when you look at war, every kind of work seems meaningless.
Because like, why?
You know, like there are people fighting for their lives.
But on the other hand, we need to make sure that we still keep saying,
because again, this is what Putin wants.
He wants us to be afraid, he wants us to be restless,
He wants us to be angry, but let's keep the anger, but let's make it sure that we use it wisely.
And let's make sure that we do have the way to switch off, do some work, do something for ourselves,
and then get back to helping, as you said, to getting energy from helping.
Funny thing is that on Mighty Fly Day two weeks ago, I make some sorting on my Twitter account.
I used to follow still political stuff, but I muted all of this and provided myself weekly
newsletters from those tweets with a Mabro service. But that was two weeks ago. Now it's
impossible to not to follow this. So I now even follow more. And yeah, on Tuesday I started
to feel anxious when reading social media. So I was like, "Okay, I will do it like two
times per day only." And actually I managed to do it like, I haven't seen any news since
yesterday afternoon. So yeah, but because at the beginning it was a very positive feeling
reading how brave Ukrainians are fighting against Russians, but after this, this information
was started to be bigger and bigger in Poland.
Well, yeah, you need to take breaks from this because staying sane is very important because,
as you said, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint.
Yes, it's a marathon.
our help will be needed for many months. Hopefully not years.
The worst part is of course the fact that we have one big tragic thing after another.
We just thought we survived the pandemic and we thought we're going back to normal life
and then this happened. So it's like, why?
Yeah. All right, so maybe I'll take a break and thank our sponsor, Nozbe, because this is our
self-asylum, working on Nozbe, and we are working on new features, working on new things,
you know, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but trying to work on this, and this brings us joy and
And hopefully it will bring joy to the Ukrainians who will use it for free and get everything
organized and hopefully at some point the war will be over and people will need to get
organized in Ukraine and they could use Nozbe to get organized completely for free so that
they can rebuild the country and rebuild their strength.
When we've been around for about 10 years, our business has, and we've been using Nozbe
for about eight of those years.
And as we grew, we kind of got to the point where I just couldn't remember everything
anymore.
I'm pretty organized.
I would just kind of keep everything in my head and with post-it notes and things like
that.
And it just got to be too much.
And so I started looking around for some sort of project management software that could
help me have a set up really trusted system.
But really, I just wanted a system where I could know that I had everything in there.
I wasn't going to forget anything.
I wasn't going to drop any balls for clients or miss deadlines.
talk about Fridays. Yes, so again, as we said, you know, we have to continue living and let's
talk about something that brings us joy and a change in our company that brought us lots
of joy and is still questioned by many companies or questioned by many people. Mighty Fridays.
So the way we do Fridays. And I would like to start how this policy came to be. And it
It was five years ago already or even six, no five and a half years ago.
2016 I think in the autumn.
Yes.
And it was this thing that like there are three questions.
First question, how can people work less but better, more effective but less but not like
pulling all-nighters and burning candle from both ends?
And then second question, how can people learn more?
And then third question, how do we encourage regular weekly reviews?
And we know weekly reviews are very important because they help us summarize the week and
then prepare next week.
So yeah, I went through many iterations of this.
I was checking through many things and especially on one Friday when I was doing my weekly review,
I realized how many of our team members are not doing weekly reviews, are not progressing
or just don't have time to learn new technology or new stuff.
That's how the policy basically was born.
It really proved that it was a good call because all the foundations for new Nozbe, like Zags,
Watermelon DB, all those technologies, open-sourced technologies that we published are the now
foundation of new Nozbe.
That started as a Mighty Friday project,
for this dedicated time to learn new stuff, new technologies, explore new ideas.
Yeah, it started with this.
If you think like this, it's actually an investment.
In the future, because people are growing,
we learn new stuff and later what we learned, we use day-to-day work
to work less but better.
There is this phrase coined by
great time management productivity thinker
Mr. Stephen Covey, and it's "to sharpen the saw."
And in his book
"Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,"
or "First Things First," or both,
He was explaining the concept that before you want to use the saw to take down a tree,
you should spend a few hours sharpening the saw first.
Because if you have a sharp saw, it's going to be just easier, more effortless to get
down the tree.
And if you have not so sharp saw, then you might spend just lots of time huffing and
puffing and not really getting anywhere. And that's the thing with Fridays.
Like we decided that we should work from Monday to Thursday on day to day stuff.
On stuff that's relevant to our work, to our job description. And then on
Friday is the sharpen the saw day. It's the moment where you do when you do a
reflection, where you do a weekly review, you review your tasks, your projects,
everyone else's tasks that you want to review,
and then you explore some new ideas.
Then you have this time to watch an online conference.
Like we became kind of hoarders of, you know,
I will save this for later.
I'm gonna watch this later.
I'm gonna read this later.
And then you never do because you never have the time.
And that's why we have these Fridays,
because then on Friday, you can completely legitimately,
it's legit, it's, you know, it's,
you're not doing anything against your company,
you're not doing anything against your boss,
you have the time to do it your way.
And that's why also this trick is that Friday
is completely designed by the employee, by the team member.
So there is no way your manager or me, the boss,
can tell you how you do your Friday
or what you work on on a Friday.
Friday is yours.
Friday is free for you, but it's not a free day per se.
It's not a free day of work.
Although, you know, it's a lighter day.
Like you can, you know, work less on Friday.
Like it's up to you.
But it's a day where you can dedicate your time
to reviewer stuff and then learn something new, basically.
- Actually, I like to, what I learned from all of these years
that my most effective weekly reviews are in the afternoon
because, yeah, because this weekly review concept
is from getting things done
and it's about personal productivity.
And it's much easier to do weekly review
in your personal systems
when you don't have any input from the team.
But as we do, the whole team is doing weekly review
on Friday, there are many activity in the task.
So it's hard to finish weekly review
because there are more comments in the pipeline
and they are coming and some mentions
and some notifications.
So I try to start Fridays with learning something new first and after lunch, like doing a weekly
review when the activity is much calmer situation inside Nozbe and it works.
I mean, what we've learned is that finally people are really reviewing stuff, reviewing
reviewing projects, reviewing tasks, which brings sometimes out some passive-aggressive
comments like, "Rafael, do we need this task?" or "Rafael, what's happened here?" or "Rafael,
do we need this project?" Like, all these things. And this is great. I love it. Sometimes
you have to explain yourself, "Yes, I still need this project because I want to do this
and that." And then it's clear, and it's fine. And then everybody can see that comment, which
is the brilliance of Nozbe. But sometimes you're like, "Oh, yeah, you're right. We don't
need that anymore or let's just abandon this task or let's just make it as done because actually it
was done but I never got around to it. I thought I wanted to do this but it was like two years and
actually nothing happened so maybe it's not that important. Exactly, exactly. So that was one of
the things that we learned like this, you know, but again it helps the team to learn to
communicate, you know, these passive-aggressive kind of comments are good because people are
pushing each other like you know Rafa make a decision like do you need that
like you know two years have passed like what's going on there and so it's
really really good and the problem I mean all these years that we've had in
Nozbeam is that contrary to popular opinion people want to work on Friday
they don't want to like they feel kind of weird that they should that it should
be their day. I think people have been kind of brainwashed into thinking that we, as a
company, we are setting up some framework for them to work and they just have to follow
the framework. And people need autonomy. And I think thanks to Fridays, people in our company
are learning autonomy, learning these who had not so strong autonomy in the past. They're
learning, "Okay, this is my day. I can do it the way I want." And it's hard for them, but slowly and surely they are getting into it.
But sometimes they just even needed a push. So for example, in our customer support department, they were always complaining that they don't really have Fridays because they still have to answer to emails and all that stuff.
And I was like, "Okay, so make a change.
Do something different."
And then suddenly they realized,
let's try to treat Friday as a weekend.
So somebody is on call for customer support,
but we answer not as fast on Friday
as we do every other day.
And when we answer, we actually add an information
that today is Friday, make it a mighty Friday.
And now we even have this brilliant website,
fridayisfree.com and you can just go there
and see how we do Fridays.
This way we can not only remember that this is Friday
so we should work differently,
but also teach our customers that this is how we work
and maybe inspire them to also do Fridays differently
because I really believe that this is a game changer.
- It really is because like, as I said,
not only like Zacks Watermelon DB,
our open source project by, for example,
like we have, we want to implement some feature in Nozbe
and there is still some technology to be learned
or to be explored if that's even possible.
And developers are free to work on,
if they feel like they want to explore this,
like Flyday is the way to do it.
And many features were implemented because of this,
because some of the developers felt like
he wanted to explore the stuff
and later it got implemented.
- Yeah, also on Friday, for example, I do schedule,
I try to schedule meetings with fellow business people.
So to learn from them, you know, to get inspired from them.
I have my, like, now it's a monthly.
It used to be weekly,
but now it's a monthly mastermind meeting.
I have it every second Friday of the month, actually.
And then when it's not there, then I
try to schedule a meeting with a different entrepreneur
or with my mentor or with somebody like this.
Again, knowing that it's Friday, I have the time.
I can talk to them for two hours, and it's fine.
I'm not spending time, valuable time,
that I could have answered some feedback in the comments
and put some things forward.
It's a Friday.
I can have the luxury to talk to them because again,
it's an investment, as you said.
So for me talking to them, to my mentor
or like a fellow business entrepreneur,
it's an investment of my time of getting ideas
and feeding each other of ideas.
And it's important that we do it.
And again, when do we do it?
And I can tell you that it's kind of contagious.
So some of my entrepreneur friends,
knowing that we do Fridays like this, are like,
Okay, so I should also take Friday slower.
I should take, they're also getting this pressure from me.
I mean, not pressure, but hopefully inspiration.
And I'm really happy about this.
It's contagious and it's good.
- Yeah, that brings you clarity from Monday to the first day
because you don't have to worry about,
okay, that's interesting, I want to read this.
Oh, I want to watch this conference.
You have the space on your current art to do it.
So you don't have to be bothered,
okay, today after the work, I will do it.
No.
- Yes, because this is kind of the thing
that many companies are saying,
personal development of our people
is most important for us.
But then when you do it, just like in our intro,
after hours, on the weekends,
if it's important, you schedule it.
And this is our way of scheduling personal development.
scheduled on Friday. That's it. So it's very easy. And now, Rafal, which I'm really
happy about this in our team, we are really changing our product, Nozbe, to
reflect these values. So one of the key features of new Nozbe is the reminders
feature. So when you have a task, it doesn't matter whose task it is, you can
set a reminder for it. So for example, I dedicated a task to Rafal, but I want to
check in a few days if he's really done it or something.
So I can set a reminder like remind me in two days or remind me tomorrow or remind me next week
But then I was going through my tasks and I realized oh, but there is no remind me on Friday
Because some tasks are you know, I'm just gonna check on Friday how it went
You know if it if something happened through throughout the week throughout the week
Or maybe there is a task for me to you know, watch something watch a conference or read an article again
remind me on Friday, so I
I suggested it and I think within a week or two weeks we had it already shipping in the app.
That right now, when you quickly click "remind me" and it's a Thursday or Friday, it says "next Friday".
But if it's any other day of the week, it says "on Friday".
So very easily, you don't have to just tap "calendar", find the Friday and go.
It's just "remind me on Friday". Bomb!
Because on Thursday you still have option tomorrow, predefined.
Exactly, exactly. On Thursday you have option tomorrow. But then
on Thursday you might think, "I'm not going to do this this Friday. I'm going to do it
on next Friday." So that's why we did it like this.
But this is brilliant because then I can really postpone tasks
from my incoming view to Friday and then review them on Friday,
which I'm going to do anyway because it's my weekly review day. So I love
I love it how we not only live by these principles,
how we spread them with our Fridaysfree.com website,
but also how we integrate this in the product.
So it's like, it's in there and that's why it's so cool.
- Yeah, and I like how this incoming and activity views,
like I always highlight this, how they work.
Because really, incoming, I try to have zero task in incoming
by the end of each day.
But after weekly review, I want to have incoming and activity
counters to zero.
Because there are many things happening in the projects
I follow, but I'm not that involved.
But the Friday is the way to review this activity.
Is there something I can give feedback on
or I need to work on in the next week?
And you know, there was pushback and there was pushback whenever we talk about Fridays
and when I talk to press.
We've been highlighted and we were featured in many press outlets about this.
And very often the journalists are coming to me like, "Yeah, but maybe Michael, you're
just a sucker.
You're just a boss that just gives people a day free and is okay with that and that's
it."
And again, they don't see the investment.
They don't see the boost of autonomy,
the boost of investing in people,
the boost of getting people better at organizing things.
They don't see that,
that these components are coming along on Fridays.
And that's why it's my duty to make sure
that people have good Fridays.
And whenever they don't,
then change something in the company
to make sure that they do.
And I think from,
You can also kind of measure sanity of our people in the team by how good they do their
Fridays.
Because if somebody is not up to speed with everything or is just chasing their own tail,
very often they have crappy Fridays because they're like, "Yeah, still trying to figure
this out."
So really these Fridays are paramount to what we do.
I have understood the value of it.
We have understood.
I mean, we have proof.
We have all these, as you said, we have all these projects
that were born on Fridays.
We know it works.
- Yeah, and we have this rule that if I delegate some tasks
to you on Friday or mention you on Friday,
I don't expect you to take care of this on Friday,
unless I really said, I literally said that in the comment
that, okay, this is urgent, we must fix that today.
But that happens like once a year or something like this.
- Okay, let's talk about something brilliant
that is so obvious that many people are not doing it.
We don't ship Nozbe on Fridays.
We don't ship Nozbe to customers on Fridays.
We ship any other internal version, yes,
but not customer-facing version.
And many software companies are doing it wrong
because they are shipping on Friday.
They want to have this clean thing.
They have finished the week and they're shipping on Friday, but then they stay up for the weekend
because things go wrong and there are bugs and they have to fix them.
So we learned our lesson the hard way.
So if you're a software company, take it from us.
You ship on Monday.
Because on Monday when you ship and something goes wrong, you have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
to fix it.
Like you have a normal work week to fix it.
You don't ship stuff before the weekend.
shipping to production on Monday, on Friday is like I don't know who the
owner is. But you say of course but but but many companies are doing it still like it's
still something new you know you shouldn't do it like I think this like
our inherent willingness to complete things you know to bring things to
completion like you know I've worked on this feature now I'm gonna ship it it's
It makes sense. We want to complete stuff in our mind.
And postponing it for next week, for Monday, feels kind of a waste.
We even don't ship internally on Friday.
There is no goal for
merging to master in our repository of Nozbe.
Unless it's really critical.
So we don't break our dogfooding internal app
and don't spend Fridays on fixing it.
We break our dogfooding app from Monday to Thursday.
Thursday. This is the time to break things.
Yeah, and another part is that if we don't push updates
to dogfooding environment on Friday, and on Friday is week review day,
so people are using app mode, they are adding more comments, switching views, etc.
So this is a good stress test before Monday release.
And after that, on Monday morning, we create the,
we merge like release branch from master.
And now the master is free to next improvements,
next merges.
- To be broken again. - To be broken again.
Yeah, yeah.
- But that's a good point.
Like because people are using Nozbe very much on Fridays
due to weekly review, yes, it's a very good stress test
before we share it.
This is also the plus of using your own tool
that you're working on anyway.
- All right, like, Jonas says that tomorrow
is gonna be a mighty Friday.
- Of course, of course.
- That's true, so are you okay with wrapping up this episode
because it's an hour already?
- I think so, yes.
- So thanks for listening and watching
and remember, like, tomorrow is mighty Friday, so--
- Listen to Jonas.
Go to Fridays3.com, learn how we do that, learn how to do weekly review, plan priorities
for next week, and learn something new to have a great weekend.
If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to support this podcast either by sharing
it with a friend or leaving us a nice review in our podcast or by checking out our Nozbe
app.
But the best thing you can do right now is to support Ukraine.
do so find a foundation or do some volunteer work because that's really
important they are fighting for all the Western world right now. All right that's
it for today say goodbye Michael. Yeah I just wanted to mention that on the
website on Friday is free dot com is very well done you can see exactly what
we talked about like all how we do it and also a good recipe for a good weekly
review so follow just all the guidelines on this website and enjoy your mighty
Friday and really help Ukraine. Let's stay united with Ukraine.
This episode has not been created in the office because in Nozbe there is no office. Your hosts
were Michael Stivinski and Tlafar Sobolevski. All the links and show notes you can find on
nooffice.fm/37. The whole production process of this episode has been coordinated in a project
in a Nozbe app. Control is good, but trust and transparency are so much better.
Thank you and see you in three weeks. Remember to have a mighty flight!
Bye bye!
(upbeat music)