About the #NoOffice book project

Hello, I’m Michael and I’m writing this book because there’s one thing I want everyone to understand:

Work is not a place to go; it’s a thing you do.

Michael Sliwinski – Author

Professionally, I’m Michael Sliwinski and I’m the founder and CEO of Nozbe and Nozbe Teams – to-do apps for busy professionals and modern teams.

Essentially, our apps make people and teams awesome by giving them more time to do what’s important.

I’m leading a team of 25 people who work completely remotely from their 25 “home offices”, and we’ve been doing this since 2007. Now, Nozbe has more than 600K users from all over the world.

On GitHub, I’m @MichaelNozbe.

Magda Błaszczyk – Editor and co-author

Magda is the content curator at Nozbe and the editor of our Nozbe blog. She also coordinates all translations of our multi-language website. In the past, she was the Chief Editor of Productive! Magazine until our last publication in 2016. She’s been the editor of my past books: It’s all about Passion!, No Office Apps and most recently 10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity (also in Polish).

Magda is my trusted editor and text-sparing-partner. She revises all of my writing and challenges me to write even better. Magda and I have been working together since 2013, and she’s my right-hand person when it comes to writing. Without her, this project wouldn’t have a chance to succeed.

Apart from editing and writing, she is also coordinating the translations of this book to Polish (where she’s also the editor) and other languages.

On GitHub, she’s @blamagda.

Our project – the #NoOffice book

Whenever I talk to people about my app and my team, people don’t believe are successful in running an all-remote company. They always ask: “Where are you based?” or “Where’s your office?”. When I tell them about our remote team, they say something along the lines of: “While it might work for you, it will definitely not work for us…” – as if my team is a snowflake ❄️ or a unicorn 🦄 or something!

That’s why I decided to start working on this book, No Office. I believe work is not a place to go; it’s a thing you do, and an office is simply a tool that is completely non-essential to run a successful business.

The idea is to gather and present all my best pieces of advice on running an all-remote team based on my experience managing Nozbe and inspired by other remote teams.

In fact, my goal for this book is even bigger – I believe this book provides sound business advice for any type of business, whether or not it’s remote. What works for an all-remote team can substantially improve the operation of a team that does have an office.

Contributors

Together with Magda, I’m openly writing this book here. The book is free, and your contributions are welcome!

To ensure the English grammar and style are perfect, Daniella Conley proofreads and edits every chapter of the book.

Currently, we have several language versions in the works:

Brazilian Portuguese

Our first community-driven contribution! The translation is entirely done by Kleyson Prado.

Polish

The Polish version is translated internally by the Nozbe Team, with Katarzyna Cwynar as the translator and Magda as the editor.

Spanish

The Spanish version is translated internally by the Nozbe Team, with María Sampedro as the translator and Dominika Musioł as the editor.

Japanese

The Japanese version is translated internally by the Nozbe Team, with Keisuke Hayashi as the translator and Martyna Ambrożak as the editor.

Technical stuff

If you’re interested, here are some technical details about the book-writing process:

  • This book is being written in Markdown.
  • The site is generated with Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages.
  • It’s all done on the iPad using the following apps working together: Working Copy for GitHub support, IA Writer for content and Textastic for code.
  • The entire book is published on GitHub, and we collaborate on text directly there. When you review commits on GitHub, you’ll see that once I’ve finished a draft of a book, Magda directly pulls it from there, edits it and commits back. She also updates every chapter after it’s proofread by Daniella. All our edits are done out in the open. Feel free to contribute.
  • We coordinate all book-writing using both Nozbe Personal and Nozbe Teams.

Let’s write this book together!