Focused - 127: Focusing a Team, with Ken Case

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Ken Case joins us to talk about how the Omni Group focuses their work teams, the lessons they've learned from forced changes due to COVID, and the benefits of planning for disruption.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about yourself? Fantastic. We have a guest on today's show, and today's guest is going to scratch a particular itch on the show. a particular itch on the show. I understand we bring a lot of people in the show who are working for themselves or a small company, indie folk. And a couple of listeners wrote and said, hey, wouldn't it be great if you had somebody that had more than two or three people that reported

to him or her to talk about being focused when you've got all these inputs going? And the person that immediately came to my mind was nice enough to join us. Welcome to show ken case thank you david appreciate your invitation uh you know ken and and i have been friends for a long time ken is the president and chief of the omni group and probably chief room sweeper too i feel like can you do everything over there sometimes and but you've also got a lot of people working under you making the omni groupGroup productivity software for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. And I know just from our friendship how busy you are, not only as a manager, but also as a programmer. Like, Ken's one of the only CEOs I know that commits beta builds at 2 a.m. in the morning,

which I occasionally see. So I thought that you'd you know, beta builds at 2am in the morning, which I occasionally see. So I thought that you'd be a great guest today. Thanks for coming on. Oh, well, thank you. It's fun to be here. You know, fun to talk about the work that we do. Of course, it's definitely not just me. There's no way I could get all this stuff done that we do as a team. Sure. Sure. It is. It's an operation. And it's a lot of smart people. I mean, we're here to talk about Focus Day.

But, you know, I've told you individually, so I'll tell you on air, I think OmniGroup is, you know, one of the most quality app developers in the business because the stuff you guys make is so great. But that doesn't just happen on its own. make is so great. But that doesn't just happen on its own. So tell us a little bit about how kind of you got started. I mean, I don't think you probably started your career thinking that you'd be running a big company. No, and well, we're not that big a company, to be clear. But when we got together about 30 years ago, we were starting to do some independent contracting work together. And we were working on various projects on the Next platform because that was the platform that we felt had the most forward-looking development environment. And so we really wanted to see that succeed and got together with some friends. We were contracting for Next and working on some projects.

And then we decided, well, maybe we should keep doing this after this project ends. And so we turned it into the Omni group, which we founded 29 years ago. Wow. And love building apps. Yeah. nine years ago. Wow. And yeah, love building apps. Yeah. And then, uh, I know you guys made a web browser and, you know, then an outlining program. I think, um, Omni outliner was one of the, the first productivity apps I bought in a software store, you know, where you bought the box and all that, you know, but either way, you you know so you've built this this company up

that now has multiple um applications um and you've got people reporting to you that are doing things from programming to design to marketing and all the other other bits in between but at the same time as i was talking about, you have not stepped away from, you know, from plying your trade from cutting wood and putting things together as a programmer. Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, I hope that I never have to step away from that because it's, you know, part of the reason that I'm in this field. I love doing, uh, what I'm doing, both designing software, writing code. Mind you, I also love bringing together smart people, putting them together on a project and building a product.

But then, of course, the biggest reward is when it goes out to the outside world and it makes people's lives better. That's what we really enjoy, gives us satisfaction and we enjoy seeing. And I want to talk about focus, not only on the individual level, but also on a company level. It's like you need to keep focus for yourself, but you also need to keep focus for the Omni group. But just one thing, Ken, every time I see you, you've got this hat on. How did this happen? So I certainly didn't grow up wearing hats. I didn't even wear baseball caps or anything.

But I'm imagining fifth grade Ken wearing the same hat. I'm sorry. You know, hats were things my grandfathers wore. I don't recall really seeing them on anyone else very often. But I didn't really think about hats for myself until my wife and I went to visit her family in Vienna. And there seemed to be a pretty great hat tradition there. And she thought I might look good in a hat. And so she took me to the local hat shop, Nagi Hut. Apologies to anyone who actually speaks good German and knows how that's supposed to be pronounced. Anyway, so the rest is history. I've been wearing a hat of some sort ever since.

Usually a fedora, often a black one. But especially if I'm just going on a trip and I only have room for one hat, the black one is flexible because it goes with lots of different things. But if you see me in my home environment, I might wear a green one on a different day or a brown one or, you know, kind of depending on what's going on or branch out into non-fedora options. But certainly those are the things that I wear the most often. You mentioned, Ken, a line when you were talking about the work that you do in the apps that you make about making people's lives better, I'm kind of curious of what you happened into based on like, that's where you saw the need and you're open to other things going, going forward? How do you kind

of define your niche? Who are you trying to help? Sure. So I wouldn't say that it has always been our exclusive focus. In fact, you know, at the beginning of the Mac OS X platform, we were involved in bringing a lot of games to the Mac. A bunch of Quake-based games, some other games like Giants of Citizen Kabuto, some casual games like the PopCap games. And so, I don't know, we did something like 30 games in a few years at that time. I don't know, we did something like 30 games in a few years at that time. And that is, I think, one way to make a platform more enjoyable for people and in that sense to make their lives better. But I think we found that we have a particular talent when it comes to our own software for things that help save people time

and make them more productive. And so that's really been kind of the niche that we've landed on and now focus our attention on. So follow up question to that, helping people become more productive. I'm curious how you might define productivity, because I feel like a lot of the apps that you have now in your lineup are kind of focused on helping people determine what the right thing is. So maybe it's a little bit different than the standard definition of productivity that people might have, which is just how much can I actually get done? How many widgets can I crank? That sort of

thing. Yeah, let's see. How do I define productivity? So from my point of view, productivity is not really just an end goal in and of itself. It's to help make space for other things, right? Like the, if you're more productive in your work life, that gives you more time in your, in your family life or, or for personal projects or, you know, doing other things. So the more efficient that people can be as they try to accomplish their work, I think that just time is one of the few resources that we can't make more of. And so if we can be more efficient in how we use our time and get time back as a result, then we can spend more time at Disneyland or wherever we want to be. Inevitably, I get that email every time I write about something I do to organize my projects and tasks or block schedule or anything like that, someone emails me and says that, they say, don't you realize you're taking away all your freedom?

You know, that's like, that's a very common reaction to productivity software and some of the things we talk about. But I have the exact opposite feeling. I think that putting those pieces in place actually allows me to make time for freedom and to enjoy myself without having the worry on the back of my head about what I'm not doing. Yeah, I agree that it's really easy to fall into this trap of thinking,

oh, well, I got more done in these hours. So now I should just go do more work, more work. But maybe even if you are going to go do more work with it because you're billing by the hour or whatever, it's nice if that work can be more productive and accomplish more. That's just, why are we doing the work? It's not just to fill the time, it's to accomplish a result and the faster we can accomplish those results the better i know there are a million projects i would love to uh to pick back up including omniweb for example uh if i had more time available and uh you know none of us have all the time that we would want so again the better uh tools can

help us make good use of that time. I think the better off we are. How do you decide what not to do? I think that's something that's difficult for everyone. Deciding what not to do. I guess I'm not sure what my process is for that. I certainly want to do it as quickly as I can. So as soon as I hear something, I'd rather not spend a bunch of time thinking about it and then three months down the road decide not to I'd rather not spend a bunch of time thinking about it. And then three months down the road, decide not to do it. That's a waste of a bunch of sort of mental overhead between now and then, right? Even if I didn't spend a lot of time during that time, it's still a distraction. So I, you know, I want to keep my attention focused on things that matter right now,

and focused on things that matter right now, things that I can deliver out to its end result, whether that end result is helping customers or whether that end result is helping my daughter with her homework. There are lots of different things that need doing. It's not just about work from the office. And then there are a bunch of things that maybe I don't have to do. And it's okay to say, you know what, no, that's just, I think it's a great opportunity you're talking about, but it's not an opportunity we need to focus on right now. And so good luck. And I hope you're

able to, you know, pursue that somewhere else. Yeah, that's so hard. That is so hard, though. Yeah. One of the things that I've been impressed with is when you write out your roadmaps for this is everything we're going to work on for basically the entire year and the order that we're going to do them in and how you more than not can stick to those those projections uh so i'm kind of curious as to your, and I know you've got the tools that help you do this, but how do you pick what, like where that line is between, I want to get this done as quickly as possible. Obviously I want it to be quality so we can actually ship it. You're also balancing saying no to things that you want to do. Do you have any sort of process you're willing

to share on how you keep things on track? Well, we don't always keep things on track. I'll have to say that right up front. But it's certainly the case that, you know, one thing that helps us to be planning ahead a bit and to understand what your landscape looks like. Like, as I write that roadmap in January, I know that come June, we're going to have WWDC and it's going to disrupt our lives in some way or another and disrupt a bunch of plans. So rather,

so to try to minimize the disruption involved, we usually attempt to just set aside a bunch of time in our schedule through, you know, from June through when the iPhone launches in the following fall, because we know that Apple is going to introduce something that we want to pay because we know that Apple is going to introduce something that we want to pay attention to and that we're going to need to do something

about. When you asked this question, it kind of reminded me of when we decided to bring our apps to the iPad. That was definitely not part of our roadmap for the year. Maybe that was, in fact, the first roadmap blog post that I really made was the iPad or bus blog post where I explained, hey, Apple just announced this new platform. It's not even shipping yet, but we want to be there and have all of our products there. So here's what we're going to do to try to get there.

And sorry, that does mean that some of the other things we had been hoping to do, like OmniFocus for the web at that time, are going to be placed on hold. And instead, we're going to focus our attention on this new device that you can hold in your hands and touch the screen and that sort of becomes whatever you want it to be. I distinctly remember attending Macworld that year and you guys had, I think it was before 3D printing,

but you had these plastic tablets that were iPad sized and you had printed out UI. You were sticking to them just to kind of figure it out because at the time you had no hardware. Right. Yeah. Because Apple didn't distribute it yet. But I do want to go back to that idea of a roadmap and specifically a public roadmap because you're right. Some years you do a pretty good job on it. And other years there's a certain fruit company in Cupertino that decides to announce something you didn't expect. And you've got to like throw some plans out the window. And,

and often you'll do an update and say, okay, well, we were going to do that, but now we're going to do this. But the idea of putting your yearly goals in a public forum like that, um, what, you know, caused you to do that in the first place? And what have been the good and the bad of taking a stand like that? Well, I suppose my background kind of contributed towards thinking in those terms. My father was an industrial engineer, which is a fancy way of saying that he developed project plans. Okay, yeah. That was what he did for a living.

So he worked on the project plan for stage one of the Saturn V rocket. Wow. And he did project plans for, okay, we're getting out 747 airplanes and the 777 airplanes later on. And here's what that schedule has to look like and to make these things happen. So these were plans that were many years in advance kind of happening, but, uh, but we're being tuned all the way along, right? Like you, you make that plan several years in advance, but a plan is never static. Uh, you have to be ready to adjust as, as things go along. And that's, you know, I guess part of what I was alluding to with this, with this story about the iPad. But in my father's work, you know, he would lay out this Gantt chart on the wall, and, you know, had these long markings of, all right, here's when this phase

happens, here's when this phase happens. And you kind of see this waterfall of tasks going down the wall. But then what would happen is, some airplane would run slow on a previous project. And so now one of the tools, and by tools, I mean like a room-sized tool for working on that airplane wing, is not ready in time to work on the new airplane. So they need to figure out, well, how can we adjust the schedule or get a new tool built in place? And they're doing that planning months in advance in order to try to keep the process moving. And so from that background, I guess, I feel like what I'm doing with these limited plans that only are published a year out in advance instead of several years and that have fewer disruptions and so on are relatively simple. Work is complex in its own way, but, um, but yeah, that's kind of where, uh, where that whole notion of, well, let's come up with a plan and then be prepared to adjust it and, uh,

and publish just, you know, when that happens, we let people know what changed so that, uh, so that they're not caught off guard. If someone's listening, thinking that maybe that's a good idea for them or for their company to kind of like plan forward and maybe even publish it uh what are the steps you go through i i imagine you know just wake up one day and and type it up and hit the publish button no not uh certainly not in one day usually uh well the process starts with talking with the teams yeah and and you know us making priority lists or wish lists maybe to start with. What are some of the things that we wish

were different about our apps? Looking at the feedback from customers, what are the things they've been asking for that they wish were different about our apps? Sometimes what are completely new apps that they've been wishing for? That's how OmniFocus came to exist in the first place. And then once we've got a for. You know, that's how OmniFocus came to exist in the first place. And then once we've got, you know,

a bunch of those ideas, we kind of talk through, I think through it and think about, well, what are the assets that we can bring toward a particular project? Does this make sense for us to do? Or is this something that just anybody could do and it's not, it doesn't really require

our specific involvement. And then maybe we start to get a little more concrete and like okay well uh what exactly could this look like if we're trying to deliver this in the next uh six to nine months i think it's that middle step that that i miss too often it's like is this something that i could uniquely do because i think for a lot of us it's easy just to say well i like, is this something that I could uniquely do? Because I think for a lot of us, it's easy just to say, well, I have time. This is something that might be a good project for me, so I'll do it. But adding that middle step to consider whether this is something you're uniquely suited for would really help to getting more no's on the board so you can really focus on the good

stuff. That's certainly something we try to do. I don't know that we're always perfect at it. But we don't try to reinvent apps that other people are making, for example. So we didn't try to rebuild a word processor or a spreadsheet because Microsoft does a fine job of those and Apple does now as well. And we thought they were important parts of the platform. So when they didn't exist, that was something we were contemplating building like on the next platform

where there just weren't a lot of vendors. But when we got to a more popular platform, then we started thinking about, okay, well, what are some of the things that we can uniquely bring to the table and that can help push the industry forward, we hope. At least that's our intent. This episode of Focus is brought to you

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Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Ken, you mentioned in the previous section something that I had not even considered with the roadmap, and that is that Apple throws a big wrench in your plans every single year with WWDC, and you have no idea how much you're going to have to do to fix things. So I'm assuming that you have a certain amount of margin built in to your roadmaps to accommodate for things that maybe aren't going to be new technologies or new features, but just we got to update things to support new frameworks and things like that. Do you incorporate that margin into well, first of all, I guess how much margin do you set aside for something like that, if you don't mind sharing it? And then also, is that something that you try to build into your

process throughout the year or just around the times that you know, like WWDC, where there's going to be maybe a significant amount of work that you have to do to get things up to date? It's definitely a time that we set aside every year. Yeah, it's part of the roadmap. So it's now in its own way, kind of a part of the roadmap is that WWDC is going to come along and disrupt things. But the thing that's really hard to plan for is we don't know how big that disruption is. Is it a new opportunity, like when the Apple Watch came out? It's a new platform. Or is it maybe it's something we don't care about as much? Maybe it's the car technologies, for example, where we're not building stuff that goes in the car. Because Apple does a lot of stuff.

We don't need to worry about every single thing that they do. But sometimes they'll make a change that affects all of our apps. And sometimes it's even all of our apps on all of the platforms. And that could be an incredible amount of work just to keep things working as well as they did before the change happened, right? So we're maybe not even making any user visible improvements, but we're making sure that the app now runs on sandboxing, or the app now runs in 64-bit mode, or the app now runs with dark mode support, or with new UI, or sometimes it sort of looks like an operating system feature, but it's one that we have to add a bunch of work ourselves to support, like multi-window support on the iPad or FileBrow. So every year,

it's something different. The amount of time that goes into it varies a lot, which teams are involved varies a lot. Like, are there UX changes that mean that we need a lot of interface work and new icons and so on? Or is it just behind the scenes, converting from one hardware platform to another, but it's going to look exactly the same when we get there. And those are all big factors. I can just see sitting in traffic and your car says, hello, Dave. I see you're not moving. Would you like to review your projects in OmniFocus?

Right. But a good developer friend once told me that WWDC is funny because he says you get two things as a developer. You get Christmas presents and you get homework assignments. And homework assignments are where you have to do work just to keep your app running. Like Apple effectively breaks your app with whatever updates they've made. And you've got to put real time in just to keep the lights on. And then Christmas presents are where suddenly things that you have in your apps are just better because there's nothing to be done.

And he says, every year you get both. Right. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And of course, uh, I,

I don't mean to discount the Christmas presents that we get along the way. Those are really fun. And, uh, and it's, you know, wonderful when, uh,

when those come along and we can just say, yes, our app now, because it's running on big, sir, we can just say, yes, our app now, because it's running on Big Sur, it gets this new feature for free. Yeah. But by free, I mean, because we did all of our homework in the previous years, right?

Like if I OmniGraffle 7 running on Big Sur gets some new features like better hardware support or whatever, but if you try to run OmniGraffle 6 on Big Sur, well, it's going to crash when you try to open a template or whatever. It just doesn't work anymore. And as we record this for the week before WWC and as this releases, it will be the Tuesday after WWC. So right now, gang, as you listen to this,

Ken is in his office rubbing his hands together or rubbing his forehead, one or the other. I'm not sure which one uh more of the forehead but i i don't know i always really uh and i kind of actually try to not listen too much to the rumors of what's coming out because i enjoy the way apple you know that surprise that apple brings uh to the keynote presentations yeah uh but it's uh yeah it's always a lot of fun. And yet also, there are all these concerns around, well, what is this going to do to the plans that we laid at the beginning of the

year? How are we going to have to adjust? And knowing that no matter what's coming, I'm going to have to set aside some time and figure that out next week and the week after. And I talked at the beginning how OmniGroup is a big company. And as far as like Mac and iOS development goes, you kind of are a big company, but you're not a huge company that you're right. You know, it's not Apple for goodness sake. But I know you have teams of people that specialize in different areas, you know, like the back-end programming or the UI design and all of that. And you are, as you said, an active programmer yourself. How do you deal with like that team focus question? You know, when you decide, okay, you know, we've published the

goals for the year, our roadmap, and the next quarter, we want to add this feature. How do you keep on track of that? And how does everybody you know how is everybody accountable and and do you move that ball forward well so some of it comes to how do we structure our work and and sort of just make sure that that's out in front of people and that they understand what our goals are and and uh how we're going to get there from where we are which resources we bring to the table and so on so So, you know, we have an internal, we call it our bug tracking system. It's not really just for bugs, it's for all of our features and everything else. It's our internal coordination system, really, that is where we, you know, sort of set out some of the basic milestones that we're planning to work towards and what the basic schedule is. And then our product managers, you know, are looking at the material we put together for the roadmap. You know, not all of it gets published in the roadmap,

but certainly we spend a lot of time thinking about what are the priorities that we're looking to accomplish. And they got summarized in that roadmap. And then that gives them something to use to plan. All right, well, here's what the milestone should look like to get from here to there. Here are the things we're going to put in each of these milestones. And, you know, again, those plans need to change as things happen. Developing software is really a process of building something that has never been built before. It's not like building a car or something else. The part of it that is exactly the same as the last time you did it is something that we can almost completely automate away. So we don't even see it, right? Like distributing a copy to everybody's device. That's now something that's basically automatic

and happens through the app store. It wasn't always automatic. You know, it, there was a time where we spent a lot of time just producing CDs and putting them in boxes so that you could get that box at the store that you talked about for outliner. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, but as we get sort of more to the core part of our business where we're just talking about doing the development, getting up to the app store and now letting that distribution process, uh, automate it, uh process automate it. This is now a process of research and development that is trying to figure out how to do something for the first time ever. And that often can go either direction. It can be easier than you expected it to be, or it can take much, much longer. Or sometimes you just have to say, that's not going to work out at all after all, and we need to try something else.

And that happens both with coding problems and with design problems. Maybe we try something, and then we put it in front of our customers in a test flight build, and we start getting feedback about it that indicates, oh, we should really do something different because this is not going to accomplish the goals that we had when we set out to do this. You talked about a bug tracking system that you've kind of developed into kind of an overall workflow system. And I was just reading Cal Newport's newest book. It's called A World Without Email. And he talks about in that book the way, I think it was Cal Newport's book. Now, I've read too many books, Mike.

I'm like you. But I think he had talked about bug tracking and how the software developers have come up with a very unique solution to prioritize work that most non-software developers just don't have a tool like that. And I think this is something for anybody listening that has a business to consider like an automated system to decide what the priority is. And so many problems with focus, I think, are just not knowing where your priorities are. Yeah, that may very well be. I don't know how much of it can truly be automated.

We certainly tried to make it easier to filter this data of, all right, well, here's the feedback that we've gotten. Here's, uh, here's what a bunch of customers are saying about different things. And we can use that to, I guess, do some research and, um, uh, that helps us establish our priorities in the first place. But when it comes to actually putting things into release, typically that's a pretty, uh, human, uh human supervised effort where somebody decides, all right, these things go together. They make sense to go together, both from the point of view of how they get used by a customer and also from how the code gets written. Because either of those, if things don't go together, it's a good reason not to put them in the same

release. And then, of course, we distribute that work to our team members who start don't go together it's a good reason not to put them in the same release and then uh and then of course we distribute that work to our team members who who start building it and testing it uh supporting it i'm curious you shared the story about the ipad and how that kind of shifted the direction that you were going uh is the primary i'm assuming wwdc is is kind of the primary, I'm assuming WWDC is kind of the primary source of disruption for you, but have there been any other instances where something has happened and you've just felt compelled to chuck the plan? And how do you steer that ship? I mean, I would assume that the roadmap is great for people like me who may be working

at the Omni group because they kind of know the direction that the company is going. And I've been in situations before with someone walks in the room, like, hey, actually, just kidding. We're going to do this now. So how do you get everybody on board with going in the new direction? Yeah, fortunately, those times don't happen as often in the middle of the year for us anymore. I think they happened more often when Apple wasn't yet on a predictable schedule. So, for example, that iPad launch, it was announced not at WWDC, not at Macworld,

but just in the middle of the year. And we were starting to hear rumors about that Apple doing a tablet in advance. And I remember thinking as we were developing the roadmap for that year, okay, well, you know, what, what kind of time do we set aside for this? I'm like, well, we don't know anything about it yet. Is it, is this tablet going to be based on the Mac operating system on the iPhone operating system? Neither of them seem quite appropriate. And that would change a lot the way that we might actually end up doing the work. So, so in the roadmap itself, even though we had sort of heard some of those rumors, we didn't include anything about doing a tablet.

And, you know, even though this roadmap wasn't public yet, I should be clear, you know, it's just our internal discussions of what are we planning for this year. And I remember having a conversation with our marketing manager at the time who was like, okay, so we've set all of these plans up. And I'm working towards these goals as we talked about. And I just wanted to double check with you. Now, we're going to stick to this plan, right? Like, Apple announces some new new tablet or something, we're not going to change plans midstream. And I said, why would we stick to the plan if our environments change? Of course, we're going to throw that plan out the window. And I'm sorry, because I know that that's disruptive, especially when you've put a bunch of time into a particular plan. And now we're doing something completely different. But the reality is, if we want to be able to

succeed in this environment, as it changes, we need to be ready to respond and make those changes. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes is by Dwight Eisenhower, who said that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. And I think there's a tendency, especially if you make a very detailed roadmap like you do, to want to say, well, I put in all this effort for this plan. Look how great it is. We should just stick with this. Yeah, right over the cliff, you know? Yeah, it's easy to get attached to a plan. But the plan isn't why we're doing things. We're not doing things for the plan. We made the plan to do other things. And so really, we need to be attached to our goals, not to the plans. You know, one of the topics we were talking about as we prepared for today is like,

what happens when a control freak is a manager? And I know this because I have personal experience. I am pretty bad as a manager because I want everything done this way or that way. And you've got those tendencies too, but you've managed to pull it together. So how did you do that? those tendencies too, but you've managed to pull it together. So how did you do that? So I think in some ways I actually suffer a bit from the opposite problem where, uh, where I am far too willing to give people, uh, hardly any guidance at all and just say, well, here are some goals, go towards those and, uh, and good luck. And so as a result, uh, I feel like the problem that I run into is that I don't, uh, pass along my own, uh, learning from, you know, uh, the work that I've been doing or the planning that I've been doing along to them so that they can, uh,

avoid reproducing that same thing. So, uh, so i have to generally moderate myself in the other direction of remembering that um not to give people too much flexibility because they might not then have structure enough to uh to accomplish their work as efficiently but i think it's easy to uh to go overboard on either direction where maybe you're not really leveraging their skills and letting them have their own agency over what they do next or how they get there. Or where you give them too much rope and they're trying to figure out, now, what am I supposed to do with all of this? Yeah, I think so much of it is just hiring really quality people that you can trust and letting go. Yeah, you have to find people that are going to work with whatever your skill set is as a manager, of course. And so somebody that works well for me is not necessarily going to work well for the person that reports to me.

It is interesting, though, as a company idea of focus, I think it's really difficult. And, you know, a company is not a person like all of us that do talk a lot about Apple always seem to turn it into an individual for some reason. Like Apple doesn't believe this. And that's never true. I mean, my contact with people on the inside of Apple, there's a bunch of people arguing both sides of every issue. And what you see from the outside is just whatever they decided. You don't see the ugly process.

But at the same time, you have to go through that process if you're a manager and you have to kind of still keep people on task. What are the challenges that you've seen as a manager in terms of like focus and, and what are some, some good ideas for folks listening that, that are dealing with the same problems to, to try and bring focus to their team the way you've done it at Omni? Well, I think it has to start with some shared, uh, shared values. You know know what is it that uh that we all agree that we want to accomplish because if you don't have that level of uh shared values for things it it's going to be uh you know that's going to fall out as we get to the next stage of okay well i'm going to give you some

autonomy to work on this and this other person autonomy to work on that and they come back together and if they had different goals in mind or values, then they're going to end up with very different results that might not work well together. Mike, what's that quote about the cathedral? I never get it right. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

So I'll try to make this the TLDR version. Tourist walks up and sees three people who are working on building this wall. Walks up to the first one and says, what are you doing? And very disgruntled is kind of like, what's it look like I'm doing? I'm laying bricks. And goes to the next person and says, what are you doing? I am building a wall. And it goes up to the third person. What are you doing? I am building a wall. And it goes up to the third person,

what are you doing? I'm building a great cathedral to my God. And the attitude that each one of them has kind of reflects how they view the work that they're doing. So the first one, he's just doing a job. He's collecting a paycheck. The middle one, the second one's got a career. He's developing a skill. But the third one views this as his life a career you know he's developing a skill but the third one views this as like his life calling and so he's completely invested in his work he's doing it with excellence and he's motivated to follow through and do it in a really great way i like that a lot yeah it's certainly a lot easier if uh if everybody's on the same page about am i building a cathedral or am I just building a wall?

Yeah, a lot of it comes down to motivation, right? I mean, you could get people to do the task, but getting them to buy into the bigger vision is another issue. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm fortunate enough to have people around me at Omni who have worked, we've worked together as a team now for, well, our first employee from 29 years ago is still with us. So yeah, I get the impression

walking around the Omni group, there's a lot of people there building cathedrals, and that makes it a lot easier. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you build your online presence and even run your business. From websites to online stores to marketing tools and analytics, they've got it all and they've got you covered. Squarespace combines cutting-edge design

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group of people at OmniGroup, but how do you manage your own to-do list? I mean, you probably use OmniFocus, but where's the differentiator there in your brain between this is something that goes in my personal list versus something that goes with the the company list is it just personal versus work or how do you divvy those things up yes i do use omni focus quite a bit uh and but i a lot of my actual work uh product things that i'm responsible responsible to other people for accomplishing, I try to get into the central system so they can see what the status is and have that visibility and do what I'm doing now, what I'm doing next, what I've completed recently, and so on.

So I start out really capturing a lot of stuff to OmniFocus in the first place. I should maybe back up and note that the way I use OmniFocus is based around David Allen's Getting Things Done system. That was the inspiration for building it in the first place. And I'm not saying that I'm a perfect practitioner of the GTD system or anything. But I use that as my inspiration for how I use the software. So I capture things into the inbox. I process them into projects and tag them with different contexts well, I guess to kind of stay focused in on

a particular activity or set of things to do. So one of the contexts that I have is called OmniBugZapper, which is our centralized tracking tool for all this work. And so if I think of something that really is about work stuff and ought to be in that system, then as I process it in OmniFocus, or even capture it in the first place, it just is tagged with OmniBugZapper. And I, you know, when I see that task, I go and file it over there instead. And then through the day, through my normal workday, then I'm spending a lot of my focused time on a project actually working out of BugZapper itself and saying okay well here here are the ux bugs that i'm uh working on or here are the engineering bugs that i'm working on

and i just kind of go through that list now you mentioned context and i know that's like a big tenet of gtd is identifying the context that you're going to do the thing in and i know that was a really big deal, but OmniFocus 3 came with tags because that allows you to have more than one context. So you mentioned OmniBugZapper for those types of tasks that go in there. Is that the only tag that you are applying? Is that how you're using these things as individual contexts?

Or do you use multiple tags in any scenarios for the things that you do? How do you kind of classify these tasks that end up inside of OmniFocus for you? I primarily use a zero to one tag on most tasks. There are a few tasks where maybe I will tag it with multiple things. And I'm trying to think, well, what's a good example of that? Maybe if it's something that I need to talk to somebody about, and it could be one of multiple people, well, then I'll tag it with both of their contexts so that whoever I happen to talk with next,

I can talk with them about it and then check it off, and I don't need to talk with both of them about it. If I did need to talk with both of them about it, then it really should be two tasks, each tagged with one person or the other so that I can check them off individually and know that it's done. So that's how I personally use it. I don't really see there. There are a few times where it can make sense to tag a collection of things with with sort of an orthogonal tag that has nothing to do with the traditional sense of GTD contents. So maybe energy level is one. I don't actually use that very often myself,

but I know some people do. Or sometimes I've experimented with using our forecast tag to toss something into the daily forecast. But I tend not to live out a forecast that much, so that's usually not that beneficial to me. And I haven't found myself using it as much as when we first added that feature. You know, the idea that you have your tasks, but then you also will dip into the bug zapper and you'll spend, I would guess, probably hours in there dealing with on the ground problems is one that I want to kind of put a spotlight on because I think a lot of people get this wrong. When you hear people like me and Ken talking about task management, and if you're of a particular mindset, you're like, oh, you guys are just

wasting your time. You're making this really fancy looking list, but you're not actually doing your work. And I think that for most of us, we know when we go to work on certain projects, what needs to be in a task list and what doesn't. Like for me, when I'm working on a field guide, I have an outline and I have a bunch of stuff I work from when I build those, but I don't, you know, have an OmniFocus task to like, create the video, add the title cards, you know, work on the script, work on the video. I don't have an omni-focus task to create the video, add the title cards, work on the script, work on the video. I don't do that. And you don't either.

You go in your bug zapper, you do your work. And I think it's like a straw man argument to say that people that use these task managers are wasting time because we know where the lines are drawn. And you just have to be intentional about it. And I'm glad to hear you are. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

When we were designing OmniFocus still. So before we had even done our first public betas, I reached out to some of the people who were using OmniOutliner to do a GDD task management using Ethan Schoonover's Kinkless plugin. Yeah. So Apple scripts, I should say. Uh, and so actually for a while there, I was having these weekly conversations with Ethan and Merlin man about, uh, all right, well, kind of, how do you use this system and what do you use it for? And, uh, you know,

what, what would make sense to put in a dedicated app that is really kind of more focused than Outliner on this specific task and so on. And one of the things we used to talk about was using this app as a tool to make space to do your other projects rather than as a place where you do those other projects,

your central project work. So it's not that I'm putting all of my programming work or design work or whatever else in OmniFocus itself. It's that I'm putting all of the other stuff in there so that when I'm ready to sit down and work in BugZapper for a while, I have the mental clarity knowing that, okay, I've got this trusted system that's taking care of all of that other stuff and I can leave it now, uh, and focus on, on just the work that I need to get done. Uh, and then yes, of course, uh, things will come up and I might quickly capture something to OmniFocus. And, um, you know, as I already mentioned, some of those things will, will come back to bug zapper um you know maybe i'll think of an idea on the weekend and i'll quickly dictate it to siri get it in omni focus um and then later i'll get it filed back in bug zapper but um but it's not where the majority of my day-to-day work

really lives yeah i mean the task system gives you the um the ability to understand what's on your plate so you can make time for the focus i also think it it gives you the um the ability to understand what's on your plate so you can make time for the focus i also think it it gives you the ability to know when you're overloaded which i think if you don't have some system you're not going to realize you're overloaded until it's too late yeah yeah absolutely and sometimes as i take on a new type of responsibility i will add that as a project to omni focus to because it's not part of my familiar pattern. And so having it in there will help me learn the ropes. And then maybe later it'll start falling out because I don't care anymore. But it's fun to, I guess, see how this stuff

evolves as I need it one way or the other. I mean, when I think of the day-to-day stuff, that's the stuff that doesn't really go into the task system. It's the outliers. It's when you run into a friction point and you're like, oh, I need to call Mike about this, or I need to write Ken about this problem. That's the stuff I want to capture so I don't forget to do it later. But I do think, and I know this is a little bit of a rant, because I get so much email on this stuff, it's really not that hard. Once you start doing your work to know what needs to be tracked in a task system and when you can just put that down and get to work. Right. You definitely don't want the task system to be taking up more of your time

than it saves you time. Yeah. That's not the purpose. I did an interesting time tracking experiment because we've talked a lot in the show about time tracking lately. And I actually discovered that OmniFocus and just planning in general was taking far less time than I thought it was. It's to me, I think it's one of the most valuable investments of time I make. But it's funny how in your brain, I thought I was spending an hour a day on this stuff and it turned out it was like 20 minutes. I mean, once you have it set up, it's not that hard to keep this managed. Right.

Well, part of the design of OmniFocus is that it should be a system that grows as you need it. So you can use it at a light level if you need to, and that's often the only level I need to. But then sometimes you'll get overwhelmed with a bunch of new stuff, and it's great to know that it can sort of handle that depth. And you can build new systems out of it if you need to, to tackle some new type of work that you've suddenly started doing.

Another tool, and we're not trying to make this an Omni-focused commercial gang, but we've got somebody on here who knows a lot about it. And this is a feature that I honestly don't understand why every task manager doesn't have it it's the ability to um to review your projects regularly and to me this is another excellent focus tool and that that's a feature you have in your app where it can after a designated period of time say hey you haven't looked at this project in a month or a week or six months, and do you want to review it? Do you use that feature? Yeah, I do. That was one of the interesting things that came out of learning David Allen's GTD system was the whole notion of doing a review. Now, in GTD, it's a weekly review because it's a paper-based system in its original conception.

And you're constantly basically rewriting all of your lists each week to have them be up to date. Because otherwise, with a paper system, they're completely out of date. So it's super essential there. As we did it, as we sort of brought that concept, though, to OmniFocus, yeah, we added this notion of, well, some projects do need to be reviewed on a frequent basis just because the work is changing quickly. And, you know, when you entered something into the system, it reflected the state of the world at that time, but the world is constantly changing. So what was there two weeks ago or three months ago or whatever is maybe not what should be there now. But that period of time is very different for different projects. So I have

some things in OmniFocus that have much longer timelines, like renewing my passport. And that I only need to do once a decade. And I don't even need really to review it once a year, I could review it every few years and be okay. As long as I have the reminder in there to say, oh, this due date is coming up. But then there are other things in there which I definitely want to review on a more frequent basis. And the way, you know, I don't think reviews need to happen constantly. Like you don't need to stop what you're doing

just because OmniFocus says, hey, this project is ready to be reviewed. It's just a good way to focus your attention when you are ready to do a review, whatever frequency you decide is appropriate. There's nothing more satisfying than doing a review and being able to drop a project. I don't know. I get it. Absolutely. I get an endorphin from that.

It's nice to let something go that you no longer need to worry about. I mean, it's easy to get attached to things. Adding support for dropped projects and individual drop tasks was really freeing for me when we got that support and nominee focus. Another feature that I really like talking about not looking at projects that don't matter anymore, is the start date. Is there some sort of story behind the start date versus the due date and how that feature came to be? Yeah, so as this is, again, a part of the GTD system that, you know, as I was sort of reading, well, how is how is David Allen implementing the system on paper, he was using this thing called 43 folders, like, okay, what, what is that about? And as you dig into that, you realize, well, how is David Allen implementing the system on paper? He was using this thing called 43 folders. I'm like, okay, what is that about? And as you dig into that, you realize,

okay, well, 43 folders is for like the 31 days of the month and then 12 months of the year. So it's a way of basically sending some paper that you don't need to worry about right now off to a future date and worrying about it then handling it then instead, because, you know, it's not time to file your taxes yet. So you're going to put it in your February folder. And when that year that time comes around, you're going to handle that. So as I thought about, well, how, you know, we're not going to implement 43 different folders inside the app, how are we going to do this in an automated system? Well, it just made sense to put a date there instead and say, here's the date that I'm going to defer this work to. When that date shows up, it will become available. And now it's on my plate and I know it's time to do it.

So a digital tickler file, which I love because that makes way more sense than the physical folders in the filing cabinet to me. Yeah, exactly. Are there any other places where you've taken a look at the GTD system, which this is obviously heavily influenced by, and said, you know, we can do this better? Well, I suppose in, you know, all of the things that we do in some ways, we're influenced by that. I'm trying to think of another good example, though, that I guess we added flagging support, for example, that GTT really doesn't have a notion of priority. And we didn't want to go too heavy on priorities, because easy to get caught up on, well, is this P2 or P3? And that matters at some level, if you're doing a system like our centralized collaboration system. So we do have priorities in OmniBugZapper. a system like our centralized collaboration system. So we do have priorities in Omnibug Zapper because you need to express these things relative to other things. But when you're talking about your own tasks,

it's really kind of, am I going to do this? And when am I going to do it? And often you don't need any sort of priority at all. So I really, in fact, don't use flags very often, except from time to time, there's just something that I want to highlight and kind of bring it to my attention. And I'll flag it so that when I see it in the view, it's got this extra color that draws my eye.

Yeah, I appreciate that a lot. Because the multiple levels of priority, I can get it, I understand it from the Omnibug Zapper perspective, where these are the critical ones, we got to fix these first, and then we can move on to these other ones. But from a personal productivity standpoint, multiple levels of priorities just drives me crazy. I remember reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown and he talks about the origin of the word priority and it was never intended to be multiple. It was always singular.

There's one thing that is a priority. This is what you should focus on. It's the very first or prior, prior most thing, you know task list to the detriment of getting work done. When I first started doing this stuff, it was the Hiram Smith Franklin Planner where everything was you had to go A, your category A, your category B, and you had to number them. And boy, it was very satisfying every morning spending 15 minutes doing that and not working. But then the next day I'd have to do it all over again. I feel like I've learned all these lessons, not because I'm inherently smart, but because I make all the mistakes. But yeah, I do appreciate that about OmniFocus. But I think no matter what task system you use, if you find yourself getting very granular on your priority stuff, that you're probably going down the wrong road.

In fact, the thing I like about OmniFocus is the fact that you can set those custom perspectives. And just rather than deal with priorities, just give me the stuff I need to do right now. Like before we got on today, I just said, give me the Max Sparky stuff that's really important to me today. And it was four things. And I was able to get them all done before we started recording. And that's, to me, a good task system. Yeah. The other GTD plus sort of innovation, I think that that is not anywhere in the GTD system was a notion of having dependencies between tasks. So in OmniFocus, you can create a sequence of tasks that need to be done in a particular order. And along, you know, I mentioned earlier that things might not be available until a particular date. Well, they

might not be available until you've finished their prerequisites, whatever those are. And so, so we wanted a notion of being able to list those out ahead of time so that you're not having to worry about, okay, well, what is the next step all the time, every time you complete a task, but not put all of those things in your face all the time. So we had a notion of availability versus remaining tasks. And that was, I think, a big innovation that we were able to bring by bringing this to a computer.

I mean, we interviewed David Allen a few times on Mac Power Users. And I don't want to speak for him, but the impression I got is that he does not view GTD as dogma. And I think anybody who's writing about this stuff is not expecting... Let me rephrase that.

If someone tells you, this is the way you need to do it, and this is the only way you'll ever be successful, and you need to follow my formula, then you should turn around and run. And everybody that I know that has been influenced by GTD isn't really practicing like perfect GTD the way it was written in the book. I mean, things change, technology changes. I think we all need to be fluid with this stuff, just like your company's fluid about what you need to be working on as individuals. We need to be fluid about how we figure out what our priority is and how we get it done. I think I'm preaching too much today. I was just going to say amen.

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RelayFM. So Ken, as we record in the United States, the vaccine is getting more prevalent for this terrible pandemic and people are returning more to normal, which is a good thing. But a lot of us change during the pandemic. We had a chance to work from home or change our work habits, which I always am in favor of a chance to reset. You know, I think we made an episode a few months ago called The Big Reset Button. How did that infect you? And as you start seeing the other side of this pandemic, what are you thinking about in terms of what you want to bring with you out of this? I know I'm not asking the question very well, but you kind of get where I'm going here. Yeah, I think, obviously,

the way that we've been working as a team at Omni is very different over the months since, well, last March, March 2020, when this first hit Seattle, that we've all been working from home. We've all been, you know, video conferencing for all of our meetings. People haven't had to spend a bunch of time on commutes anymore. It's, you know, there have been some positive things that have come out of this as well

as, of course the the things that we miss from life before i think as we look ahead we're never going to return back to the uh the same environment we had before we're we're going to have a lot more of our team who does work remotely uh you know even people who are working at the office some of the time are probably only going to do it some of the time, not full time. A few people might be there full time because certain things like answering the door or, you know, receiving email and so on are things that have to be done in not email, sorry, physical mail.

There's some things that have to happen in person. But there are a lot of things that we've certainly found this year we didn't have to do in person and that there's no reason to force people into a commute to do and so on. And so as I look ahead toward what life at Omni looks like next year and the year after, post-pandemic, I see it being very different, I guess, than where we were before. What about yourself individually? I mean, to the extent you want to share, I mean, I mean, have your habits changed and some of your your thoughts about focus and work habits? Well, I've certainly spent a lot more time just sitting at the desk in my, my home office here,

you know, focused on particular projects and so on. I think I'm going to continue spending probably half of my time here just because it's so easy to sit down, you know, maybe start my day quite early in the morning like I did today, you know, around 5 a.m., just walk down the hall to my office and sit down and start working. It's a lot easier to do when you can, when it doesn't involve a commute where, you know, you're still going to be around and can have breakfast with your family and, and so on.

Yeah. I discovered that when I went on my own, cause I had for 22 years and waking up every day, showering, putting on a tie, driving to the office, then doing the morning thing where you walk around and talk to everybody. And then like,

so I'd get up at around six and I'd actually start work between 830 and nine. Whereas now I get up at six and I start work at like 620. And I realized that I was getting like two hours of work done before I even would have started at the old place. Right. Yeah. And to the, you know, the topic of this podcast, it's really easy to focus in those early morning hours when nobody else is awake yet. You're not getting phone calls. You're not, you don't have meetings scheduled and you can just sit down and start working on a project. You got to make sure you get enough sleep though. Do you, cause see that, that worries me. Cause now I think about it. I see you doing these builds late at night. I mean, rest is a weapon, right?

late at night i mean are you rest is a weapon right no i i wait until i wake up naturally i never have an alarm okay for anything all right i'm curious you mentioned the meetings you mentioned the phone calls uh you're both just kind of talking about the the absence of the commute is there anything specific that you could say the pandemic forced us to change and drop this thing from what we were normally doing and we're not going to we're intentionally choosing not to do it anymore well certainly you know we used to expect that everybody actually get together in the office almost all the time we had very few remote workers. And our meetings had to drastically change during the pandemic, as we all learned to use video conferencing tools instead. And so, yeah, we're not, I think even going forward, we're not going to have meetings

in person quite the same way that we had been doing in the past. We're instead going to, even if people are, you know, some people might happen to be together in the office, but if anybody's remote, we're probably all going to hop on independent laptops in separate rooms so that we can make sure that everybody kind of has the same experience of what that meeting is like rather than have some people basically kind of being second-class citizens out there, not able to see the body language and expressions that other people are having to make sure that we're all you know communicating with each other on equal footing oh my goodness i'm so glad that you said that i feel like there are so many people who have no idea how to have a

good virtual meeting and what you just shared is very very important where everyone is on equal footing if everybody is is uh logging in via zoom or whatever other video conferencing call that you're uh you're using do you have any other tips for people that you've learned because i mean one of the stigmas i think is to have an effective meeting you got to get everybody in the the same place you're kind of learning that you don't have to do that but there are some different best practices that you can use when you have to meet virtually that allow the meetings to be effective. What other, is there any other tips like that, that you could share with people on how to have a better effective virtual meeting? Well, I think we're still learning ourselves. I, you know, we do, I should note that we do miss

being able to have some of those in-person meetings where you maybe get together in front of a huge whiteboard and start sketching out ideas and so on. But I think the benefit of being able to include anyone, no matter where they are, is, uh, is worth giving that up. Um, there may be some times where we still, uh, want to get together with everyone just, uh, uh you know like a retreat type of thing or something i don't know um but but that's a problem for another year i think we're still not quite there yet um no i don't i don't know that i have a lot of other tips uh for people yet but i would love to hear tips from people hear how this uh is working for everybody else and and what um what the future

this will look like. I think the lesson there is kind of interesting, though, that you have this certain way of doing things and you have maybe good reasons for doing things those ways. And then all of a sudden you have to change things and then you figure out out of necessity that there are other ways to do what you were trying to do. And I feel like having that mindset, even post-pandemic, has a lot of benefit at probably an organizational level, but also at a personal level. And there's a lot of downstream fallout to this change as well, right? Like we used to, well, everybody would prefer to have a house

near the office. If you're coming into the office every day, you want to minimize that commute time. But that has its own limitations around, well, maybe not everybody wants to be in that same neighborhood area, or maybe it's just gotten too expensive to live in. That's a particular problem in places like Seattle or the Bay Area. And so now opening this up to people being able to work from anywhere gives them the flexibility to say, okay, I'm going to move to Idaho or Montana where I can get a much nicer house for the same price. And I can still participate in the meetings the same way. Yeah. I do think though that you've got the right mindset for this. I feel like all of us, whether it's for just our own personal ideas of focus and what we're doing for ourselves or for our companies, I think exiting the pandemic with a question in your mind as to what can I learn from this process?

What can I bring out of this? You know why? I don't think we should all just go back to business as usual. I think we should try to learn from what we've been through and take the good lessons and apply them going forward. And this is another opportunity. And you've got to take those when you can. I just preached again. I'm so sorry.

Let's talk about Someday Maybe List. I know that you use it uh tell us a little bit about that sure so i'll confess right up front that i have an awful lot of uh someday maybe content in my uh in my omni-focused database uh you know i have lots of project ideas uh you know both work ideas and personal ideas um some for you some that might make money someday and some that definitely won't make money ever. Ideas for improvements to OmniWeb, for example, our web browser. I also keep lots of lists in OmniFocus for things like movies or shows that I might want to watch or books that I might want to read, music I might want to listen to.

It's just something that's really easy for me to capture. If I encounter something and like, oh, that sounds interesting. I don't want to lose track of that. I'm going to drop it in OmniFocus and let it worry about it. That said, I'm trying to think of the last time that I really ran out of things to read or things to do. If I open up my Apple TV and browse, there's plenty of video content there. I'm not going to run out of things to watch either. But there's a freedom, I think, to knowing that because it's in OmniFocus, I can kind of free up the mental space of, oh, I wanted to keep track of that. And I know that they're there if I want them, but they're not something I ever actually have to worry about. And so it's really easy to have them just kind of be in the system,

but not cluttering up most of the perspectives that I actually work out of. Yeah. I also think that kind of helps solve the problem of what I call junk food consumption. Like I got a couple hours and you put something dumb on netflix or something that after you finish watching it it was like eating a five pound bag of potato chips you just like what did i just do you know whereas you could go to your list and say oh there's a there's a really cool documentary that i wrote down you know that ken told me about i should just watch that now and get something out of this yeah exactly i exactly. I mean, I think that without this list of things to watch later, I might never have gotten to watching some of the Richard Feynman physics videos, for example, or whatever that

are up on YouTube and available. But they're not things that I'm going to stumble across when I'm just browsing Netflix. Yeah. I'm curious. So you have lists of books, the physics videos, things like that. But what about the things that you're like, oh, that's a really good idea. I just don't want to think about that right now. I mean, that's the kind of thing that I think typically would go on a someday maybe list. And my own personal experience, the more things I have in the someday maybe list that I

have to review. And I know I can do it on like different intervals. But the fact that there's something out there that maybe I should be moving to active like that causes me some stress. So how do you handle that sort of thing? Or do those like great ideas, those just don't even go to a someday maybe list. They just go into your personal OmniFocus and they stay there until it's time to be worked on them. And then you bring them over to OmniBugZapper or what's the process there? I guess I started a list for things

that I wanted to put in OmniFocus for years ago before we even got around to shipping OmniFocus 3, right? Like, okay, here's a great idea, but it's out of scope for what we want to do in version 3. So I'm going to just put it on the someday maybe list for OmniFocus 4. Some of those things I do capture into BugZapper right away and talk about, you know, we put it there. But some of them are, you know, maybe not well formed enough in my own head. And I feel like they need some more explanation before I put them in a system where other people have to start also filtering, skipping past that content unnecessarily.

And so I do have things in my list that are ideas for the future, and I usually try to give them their own project and then just defer that project for a few years rather than than having them in my general miscellaneous someday maybe lists sure and that's uh getting back to one of the things we were mentioning earlier the the beautiful part about task managers omni focus is great at this but other task managers can do this too, is essentially you can have thousands of tasks or even projects in your task manager and you can let the computer look through all of that stuff and decide this is the thing that's important

and you should pay attention to this right now. Yeah, or at least this is what's available. Like maybe it doesn't figure out what's important that you sort of do that yourself as you look at what's available. But you decided earlier that here's something that shouldn't be available now and you don't want it to clutter your life for the next few years. And so, so whenever I added another task to my develop OmniFocus 4 project, it was something that that project was already deferred. So assigning it automatically meant that all of the tasks inside it were deferred and it didn't show up until, you know, I was ready to make that project active and start thinking about it.

And it pushed, pushed the button. I like the idea of like letting it percolate in the back of your head until you're ready for it. But I just have to preach one last time, just because you can put a thousand projects in your task manager, please, please don't. Yeah. That's the thing is I know that GTD, like you capture things because your brain is meant for having ideas, not holding them. Right.

So where do you put those things that you have to do? You put them in a task manager and then you have all of these tasks and projects that you could do and not many of them are relevant. So how do you filter the signal versus the noise? I'm kind of curious, Ken, what's your process for that? I know you mentioned that you dump things in there and you've got a whole bunch of things that eventually maybe are going to show up in OmniFocus or another program. But how often do you go back and look at those? Is it like part of a weekly review process? Do you set a certain time period for each one of these project ideas?

And you look at those at a certain date as you're filling out your roadmap for the year? Or do they just sit there until you get inspired by them again? And at that point, you bring them over? I would say it's mostly that latter approach. So with OmniFocus, I think that it's pretty easy to clutter up your list with too many things. I really like to have my list be as short as possible. So I like to be kind of ruthless about deferring things so that I don't have to think about

them until later. Um, and the, uh, you know, the stuff that, uh, you know, that I can defer for a couple of years, well, then I don't have to think about those things for a couple of years. And if I realized that maybe that was too long and it's happening sooner, um, then I can of course go find that thing, search for it and make it available immediately. Or if I realize that a couple of years have gone by and I'm still not ready to do that thing, it's easy to defer for another year or two. And so I never look through those items in my normal review cycle.

If it's deferred, I'm like, that's fine, it's deferred. And if I ever think I'm going to want it early, I'll go find it. It's not something that I rely on review to help me resurface. Now, maybe there would be some that I shouldn't say. It's not part of my weekly review process. Sometimes I might just, instead of reading Twitter, I might read my OmniFocus database and like, oh, what was I thinking about doing a few years ago? And just read through my own, you know, ideas and think, oh, which of those might still be interesting to go do? And that can be kind of another way to surf this stuff. Yeah. And I think, you know, like everybody's talking these days about, you know, off, what is it, offloading your brain and, you know, second brain.

There's a bunch of different, like, people out there talking about products and ideas for this and in essence omni-focus a big task project or project list is like that putting things out of your brain and i would say just don't go at this with a completionist mindset you know don't feel like just because you put it there you're making a contract with yourself that you have to do it you know know, it's something for consideration. And like I was talking about earlier, when you do the reviews, if you do the review and you're like, you know what, I think I'm never going to learn Swahili. So I'll just go ahead and delete this. And that's okay too. It's all right. Yeah. Amen. No, yeah. It's a, you're the master of your list. They're not the master of you. They're there to serve you. And, uh, if, um, if're the master of your list. They're not the master of you. They're there to serve you. And if if they're not meeting your needs, it's OK to throw them away completely.

I think it's a voice we really needed to hear on the show. And I hope that folks out there, no matter what industry you're in, got something useful out of it. Where should people go if they want to learn more about you and your company? Well, our company is, of course, the Omni Group. And our website is omnigroup.com. And that's where you'll find information about us and our products. To find me personally, if you're looking for that, you can find me on Twitter at KKs.

The roadmap blog post that we talked about, you'll find featured on our blog, on our company website that I mentioned earlier. And in those roadmap blog posts, I always include my email address. So if somebody wants to reach me that way, that's another great way to find me. All right, that about wraps it up on Deep Focus today. We're going to talk to Ken about his OmniFocus custom perspectives because I'm dying to know what they are.

We are the Focused Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. We have a great forum over at the MacPowerUsers forums at talk.macpowerusers.com. There's a room there just for us Focused listeners, and it's a room there just for us focused listeners, and it's a lot of fun. You should check it out. Thanks again to our sponsors, Memberful, Squarespace, and ExpressVPN. And before I leave, I want to point you to another great podcast on the Relay Network, Pictorial. If you like this show, there's a good chance you'll like Pictorial because we all love art in some form or another, and learning the history behind the most influential art or the art behind video games doesn't just belong to expensive classrooms or museums.

So join hosts Quinn Rose and Betty Chen as they talk about the most interesting parts of art history. Neither one of them went to art school, and they're breaking down the elitism surrounding beautiful art stories by sharing what they're learning about art every other Tuesday. Quinn is a podcast producer who is passionate about recognizing the artistry of both low and high art, and Betty is a building design manager who's also spent years guiding tours of the Art Gallery of Ontario. If you're interested in learning more about art with them, why not start with episode 26 on flag design in North America, or maybe episode 15 on the most famous stolen artifacts in the British Museum.

Either way, head over to relay.fm slash pictorial and get started today. Like I said, we are the Focus Podcast, and we'll see you in a few weeks. Thanks for listening.