THE OMNI SHOW

Brett Terpstra: I love building new things, whether it's on top of existing things or from scratch. Just the rush of creating on its own is half of it and then sharing it and watching it affect people's lives and getting people saying, "Thank you. This changed something for me, this changed..." Whether it's big or small. That when I talk about needing attention, it's more needing to feel like I've been helpful.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The OmniShow where we connect with the amazing community surrounding The Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Brett Terpstra uses OmniFocus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of the OmniShow and today we are beyond thrilled to have with us Brett Terpstra. Brett is a writer, developer and podcaster living in Minnesota. He's the creator of Marked 2 software, if you're familiar with that, and Bunch and many other software, honestly, hundreds probably and happens to use OmniFocus. So, Brett, great to see you.

Brett Terpstra: Yeah, good to be here.

Andrew J. Mason: I'm stoked to be able to have this conversation. We've already had one conversation prior to this show. For listeners who might only happen to know you through your blog or apps or maybe the podcasts that you do, how would you describe to them, hey, this is what I do these days?

Brett Terpstra: Well, I do what I want to. Right now, I'm currently self-employed and I am bipolar and ADHD and a host of other three-letter, two-letter disorders, and my brain works in such a way that I am most productive if I'm working on what makes sense at the time instead of what I have to do at the time. So I'm often, if I have a bug to write, I write generally pretty well or I code or I record a podcast. Podcasting is a little more scheduled. You got to do that when other people are available. But I would say I'm just a person who does what makes sense at any given time and any success I've had has been the result of lucky timing that I was doing what I wanted to at the time, at a time that someone else needed that thing.

Andrew J. Mason: I do believe in the element of timing. I'm also going to say that, Brett, you're probably not giving yourself enough credit there at least because podcasting with Christina Warren doing book collaboration with David Sparks and the average person may not have heard of these names, but you happen to roam in. I'll go ahead and say the Nerd space because I are one. But these are recognizable people and you're like, okay, this doesn't happen by accident. But let's rewind it and talk to me a little bit about do you have a moment or an area of time where you first realized I really like making good tools, good content, just putting my music, so to speak, out there for the world to listen to and see and interact with?

Brett Terpstra: I got out of college and I got into a job that I hated and after a couple of years of literally crying at work, I decided to stop doing that and start my own company and I started a design firm called Circle Six Design and I was the CEO and principal there and I started a blog called the Circle Six Blog. And as I was learning, I got into web development and I got into design practices and everything I learned, I just wrote about on this little WordPress blog at maybe 20 people a week were reading it and then I started to stumble on some knowledge that was of interest at the time, Dig, do you remember Dig?

Andrew J. Mason: I do indeed.

Brett Terpstra: I started getting Dug and Hacker News and even Daring Fireball was crashing my sight at some points and I went from that 20 viewers a week, 20 readers a week to a thousand a day. After the peaks would die down, I'd be left with a solid 50,000 visitors a month, and that was over just about a six-month period that that increase happened, and it was all just because I was sharing what I was learning as I was learning it and in a way that was accessible to people that were also dealing with the same problem. And sometimes I would discover something that not many other people knew and it would make the news as it were, the Digs and the Daring Fireballs and whatnot that was sustainable because I wasn't doing anything abnormal for me. I was learning things and then I was writing them down essentially, and it got me an audience. Then there was this app I wrote called Moodblast and it started as an Apple script. What it did was update, I think at the time, 12 different social media services, many of which do not exist anymore, but this is when Twitter first came out and there were a whole bunch of other platforms like Jaiku and I don't remember what a whole bunch of Microblogging platforms that didn't make it ultimately where Twitter did. But I had a little app that would update all of them at once and it got more and more complex and you could use syntax to send an update to Facebook that didn't go to Twitter and send the weather to Jaiku and send your current listening, and it got crazy and the unofficial Apple weblog picked it up. A writer there started really tracking the progress of this app and as a result of needing it to go further, I learned Objective-C and I bridged my Apple script into Objective-C and started developing in Nextcode and it became... You remember Quicksilver?

Andrew J. Mason: I do, yeah.

Brett Terpstra: I stole the code from Quicksilver to make a pop-up HUD that you could type your status update into you with a quick keystroke. And as a result of that, the writer who was writing about Moodblast on Tuah left Tuah and recommended that I take his place and I had never professionally blogged anywhere, but I was excited to do it. So I started writing at Tuah and thus began... The rest of my career all sprouted from that moment.

Andrew J. Mason: That is incredible, Brett. My gosh, what an origin story when you're talking through it. It's funny because I hear this presentation of life being a series of happy accidents in terms of career, but at the same time, you've really distilled probably an important principle for many people, which is showing up and sharing what you know and being there to help and whatever former vehicle that ends up having to take, whether it's coding in one language or another or whether it's, oh, it seems like people want this now, being able to see where you can do the most good, I feel like that's serves you well, which is cool. It's interesting to me that you've worn different hats, the hats of designer and coder and podcaster and writer, and is there anything that you have seen over the years really start to tie all of those roles together for you?

Brett Terpstra: I like what I do to be visible. Working behind the scenes at a company as an accountant for example, doesn't appeal to me because I'm not getting any feedback from an audience on that. I'm getting a feedback from auditors and I'm getting a feedback from my boss, but I like attention and honestly, everything I do, it's not that I do it for attention, it's that I get reinforced by positive attention and thus I do more of what got me positive attention. So it's a somewhat canine-like behavior where I'm just seeking out affirmation, I guess. So what most of what I do is in the public eye to some extent, and I've never been happy behind the scenes, so I'm a star waiting to be born, I guess.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, think that there's a slice of this where people are probably attracted to the level of authenticity that they can sense that you have. Being able to just lay things out there and say, even from the get-go in the intro of this conversation, a couple of three-letter acronyms after your name and the willingness to just share, hey, this is where things are easy, this is where things are a little bit difficult for me, and just being able to lay that out there in a way that's accessible for folks, I think is what resonates with people.

Brett Terpstra: Yeah. Well, I'll be honest, part of what really built me, the audience I have today was my willingness to talk about mental health and Overtired, the podcast that I continue to do with Christina Warren and Jeff Severns Guntzel. We're a tech podcast who occasionally talks about Taylor Swift, but our driving focus is mental health and every episode we all check in, we're all ADHDs, two of us are bipolar, one of us is OCD. We have our acronyms that go with our initialisms. I'm sorry, that's a technicality. Did you know, you have to be able to pronounce an acronym? Like NASA is an acronym.

Andrew J. Mason: No, I didn't.

Brett Terpstra: ADHD is an initialism because you can't say edit. ADD, on the other hand, if that were still used, ADD could be an acronym. If anyone said add-

Andrew J. Mason: Add.

Brett Terpstra: I have add, but no one would say that anyway.

Andrew J. Mason: I'm totally keeping this in the podcast, by the way. This is perfect.

Brett Terpstra: Mental health has been a driving force and I have bet so many people over the last 20 years that have thanked me for being public about what I go through, what I deal with, how I deal with it for just making things heard, I guess. People have come to me and said, "I was afraid to talk to my boss about my ADHD or my bipolar and you being open about it gave me the opening to bring that up at work or with my partner or to go get diagnosed. Hearing you talk about it made me realize that sounds really familiar. I'm going to seek help." And those stories, that's the positive affirmation that really hits home for me, that makes me want to keep doing what I do.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Well, you talk about building public and positive reinforcement that happens through public behavior. What more could you ask for in that sense, especially this community that's cultivating around it, not necessarily even the direction I was planning on going in this conversation, but like heck, let's come in through the side door on this. What advice would you have for somebody who maybe is feeling like, yeah, there does still seem to be some stigma around this. How do I make this kind of a more conversational, more easy thing for people to talk about?

Brett Terpstra: I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that. I know what works for me and that is just blurting out exactly what I'm thinking at any given time and not in an offensive way. I'm not a mean person. I lack a filter and fortunately, I really never have mean or judgmental thoughts about people because if I didn't have a filter and I had mean thoughts, I would have a lot of enemies, but I don't. Generally, it works for me to just say, okay, here's why I am reacting to you the way I'm reacting to you. It's because I feel this and I have this going on and it's affecting the way I'm hearing what you're saying. That kind of thing, that kind of self-awareness puts people at ease, helps people be sympathetic to what you are saying without getting defensive, without saying you don't understand me. Help them understand you, help them understand the way that you see things, the way that you feel things and the more you learn about your own disorders, your own disabilities, the easier it is to communicate what you might need from somebody. And so I guess the key is just to learn as much as you can about yourself. You can read the DSM, you can know all about a disorder, but you have to know what it means to you and what it causes in you and examine your own behaviors and understand maybe you don't fully understand why you do something, but you can say, I know that this is a symptom of ADHD and here's how it manifests for me when I'm talking to you. And I think that would apply at work with a boss. I think that would apply in a relationship with a partner. I think that would apply when you go to visit your folks and things get defensive or heated or you feel misunderstood and hurt by that. Just being able to communicate.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, it's an admiral skillset, I would say, to be able to, at some level, dissociate from yourself and say, I know how I experienced me and maybe the reality that other people are experiencing me through is a different reality. And so you're almost playing translator for folks saying like, okay, what you're saying.

Brett Terpstra: Exactly. And the more people can advocate for themselves in that way, the better relationships get. It's best if both parties can say, that just made me feel angry, but here's why and here's what happened for me. And when people are aware of those in-between processes, between hearing something and reacting in anger or annoyance, the more you can understand that and convey that, you're translating, you're breaking down. There's so many levels in between what someone says and how you respond that happen, that a translator is necessary.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. I so appreciate the willingness just to share that reality and maybe how it makes it easier for folks to talk about that as well. And you mentioned filters too. This is honestly, I couldn't think of a better transition into OmniFocus too, so this works out great. OmniFocus is software about filters. You happen to be using it for some of your task management and daily work and stuff. And you said to me in a previous conversation that you've tried every other task manager, you'll always end up coming back to OmniFocus. What about it or are you able to even distill that? What keeps bringing you back into that space?

Brett Terpstra: Yeah, I like power, but I like power that doesn't, I'll call it frictionless power. There's an app called MailMate, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there are dozens of better-looking, more elegant Mail clients that I don't use because MailMate has all of these power user features that I can't live without. And it's not the prettiest, and this is not to say OmniFocus isn't pretty, but OmniFocus, to me, there are newer to-do managers, especially on iOS that are designed to be prettier, but they lack so many features. They lack perspectives and filters and advanced search and automation capabilities that I only get with OmniFocus. OmniFocus' automation libraries alone set it apart from anything else I've tried. So every time I try another app and because I write about these, because I review them, because I talk about them, I have to try everything, but my immediate reaction to almost everything is it can't do X, and I can't live without X. The closest thing historically has always been Things. Things is elegant. Things is pretty, but Things is, to me, it's somewhat crippled in comparison to OmniFocus and if Things works for you, great, seriously, Things is a really good app for me. I want all of my keyboard shortcuts, I want all of my automations, I want all of my perspectives. And I came to OmniFocus before it was OmniFocus back when it was, what was it? KGTD built on top of Omni Outliner.

Andrew J. Mason: Yes, that's it.

Brett Terpstra: As a hack project that GTD fans were putting together. And that's where I came into OmniFocus. So part of it is just I know OmniFocus from the beginning and I've always used OmniFocus and it's easiest for me to come back to, so that sways my opinion, but all of the more powerful features that it offers is why I always... It's why I can never let it go.

Andrew J. Mason: I'd love to hear too, in the previous conversation we talked about this daily grid work checklist that you use that life comes in all different forms, it's messy, but you use this to study things out for you. How does that work?

Brett Terpstra: Okay, so I'm bipolar and I have rapid cycling bipolar disorder, which means that I'll go through anywhere from three to seven days of mania where I'm just... And my version of mania is pretty non-destructive. When I'm manic, I hole up in my office and I code like crazy for 18 hours at a time and I'm just coding. I'll sleep for half an hour and I'll be coding again and it's productive and a lot of my career is built on these manic episodes, but they're not good for me. I'm not sleeping, I'm not eating, I'm not showering, I'm just coding to a detrimental point. And then that's followed by weeks, even months of depression where I just can't get off the couch, nothing seems interesting, everything is lackluster and I'm still not eating well. If I am eating, I'm overeating just it's both versions of this are unhealthy and my happy place is in between. My happy place is stable, I'm still learning what stable is, but I've been what could be considered stable for over a year now. And what changed for me was a therapist recommended that I just make lists of a checklist of things to do every day. When I realize I'm manic, which usually happens within the first 48 hours of being manic, I'll be like, oh, I know what's happening here. It's harder to recognize depression, but because of my depression usually follows mania, I can plan ahead for it. And so this grid work is simple things like take a shower, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, walk the dog, get exercise, just real basic self-care things that most people don't need a checklist to do. But when I'm in either of these polar states, I need the reminder and I need something that isn't just like, oh yeah, I should eat, but there's a checklist item in front of me that isn't going to go away until I check it off and I'm not going to check it off until I actually do it, which is just an ingrained principle for me. And so I use OmniFocus with these templated daily routines on repeat tasks that just keep me when I sense these phases coming on, doing these checklists, reduces them from a week to a couple of days and there's just something, I don't know why it works, but it does and I wish I had known it a long time ago, probably could have saved my marriage and lots of other things. OmniFocus is just that way for me to, it kind of gamifies it. It's like I want to check off all my to-do items in this perspective for today, and these are tasks, they're not going to come up in a weekly review. They are such simple things that I'm going to do every day and I'm never going to have to review them and I don't have to use a lot of OmniFocus is more advanced features when it comes to GED stuff to do this, but it provides a really good framework for that.

Andrew J. Mason: This is so cool to me because I've heard all different kinds of uses for OmniFocus. This is a pretty fresh one for me, and yet it's not something that you would necessarily see on the landing page sales page, remember to shower, oh yeah, I should do that. And yet you're not the first person I've talked to that's had this kind of level of granularity within their task structure and it's great. It's actually amazing for me. The example I always use when a year or two ago when we had our third kid was just like, Hey, I'm not getting a whole lot of sleep here and I need to brush teeth for our kids because if I don't, it's not going to happen and our dentist is going to start wanting teeth to falling out. So that level I think is fantastic. It makes me think of David Allen's crank widget schtick that he always talks about where it's like you need to intelligently dumb down your tasks so that it's just something you don't even necessarily need to think about. I think gamify is a great way to say it. People that listen to Mel Robbins in the five-second rule where it's just, just go, go and it's there in front of me and here I go. What I'd love to hear too is maybe a more fun, what if question about what would you do if you had this magic wand and you could wave it and instantly everybody on the planet either gets a concept, a framework, an idea, a rule, something about being more productive or understanding something about either productivity or getting things done in a helpful or healthy way. Is there anything that comes to you where it's like, man, if we could just fix that, my gosh, the whole planet would be better off?

Brett Terpstra: I don't know. I think it's a base GTD concept, but it might've come from Merlin man, but the two-minute rule, if you can do something in two minutes, just do it. And I don't think most people realize how long two minutes is, and I think if I could wave a magic wand and everyone could suddenly just understand exactly how much you can do in two minutes and be able to judge, I have this to-do item, I've been putting it off. It seems somewhat trivial, but I feel like it's going to take a while. Two minutes is a long time, even if you can just get started on something. I wish if I were to apply that to software, I would want a magic wand that made everything as frictionless as possible. I think software should be able to anticipate our needs and work with that, and we're getting closer and closer to that kind of level of interface. But really, I don't know. Productivity-wise, really, I would just want everyone to suddenly have an understanding and just be able to do those little things that bog your to-do list down and just magically understand. Yeah, no, I can get that done and I can do that before I even close this window on my browser. I don't know. It's a little abstract, but-

Andrew J. Mason: No, not at all. In fact, we're going to bring it out of the clouds into the ground right now. Have my watch everybody, unless you're driving right now, pull up your task list, find that two-minute item. We are going to wait for you for two minutes starting now. Okay, I'm just kidding. That's awful. I would [inaudible 00:25:06] that. I wouldn't do that to you all. So I love that concept. I love the fact that the days are long, but the years are short kind of mentality where it's like these things, my gosh, we so undercut the amount of things that we can do, and I actually spend more than two minutes fretting about the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.

Brett Terpstra: Yeah, totally. Exactly.

Andrew J. Mason: A hundred percent.

Brett Terpstra: Exactly. And the beauty of the two-minute thing is you're getting something done, you're checking something off your list, and if you make your list granular enough that some, if not many of the tasks only take two minutes and then being able to look at it and say, I can do that in two minutes. Even as an ADHD, bipolar person, I have two minutes of focus right now. This is a good time, let's check something off the list. And then two minutes later, being able to check that off, get the dopamine rush you get from completing your to-do list, and that's productivity one step at a time. And the reason why productivity appeals so much, you will find in the productivity space, the people that are most the productivity gurus and the people that most follow the productivity gurus have a high chance of being ADHD. And that personality, we get dopamine rushes from getting things done, but it's so hard for us to get things done. So we look for systems, we look for tools, we look for tricks, we look for everything we can find to help us get those things done, so we get that little rush from it off and those two minute tasks are the easiest dopamine rush in that arena. Obviously, getting a like on Facebook, that's another way, but it's an unproductive way and everyone loves feeling productive. At the end of the day, maybe you got a hundred likes on your status update. What did you gain? Nothing. Maybe you got five things checked off your to-do list. What did you gain measurably? Five things.

Andrew J. Mason: It's so funny because it's the antithesis of everything we've been taught and proper time management. Do the big rocks first. Eat the frog at the beginning of the day. I'm like, I look at the frog and I get depressed. Man's so sad just to see that frog.

Brett Terpstra: Break the frog down into small legs and whatever other parts of frogs are.

Andrew J. Mason: For me, it's a momentum builder though. It's like, okay, if I check off make bed and then I check off brush teeth, it's like, ah, I'm too out of five. Done already. Let's keep going here. This is good.

Brett Terpstra: Exactly.

Andrew J. Mason: Last question before I let you go, and I know we've started to lean a little bit into a philosophical direction, so number one, why not keep going? But also number two, I really am curious about this. This is a topic that's near and dear to me. I would love-

Brett Terpstra: I would point out real quick, it has been two minutes since you made the joke about starting a two-minute timer, so everything that has happened since then would fit in two minutes.

Andrew J. Mason: So all of this stuff, you guys are just sitting here listening to us. You could be doing something unless it's video. I encourage you to keep watching, but that's it, that's how productive we could be in that span of time. I love that she timed that. That's amazing. But this idea of potential fully expressed, there is something in you that wants to give, create, and produce and share with the world, and I love that. I think that the level of authenticity too, to say, here's where things are really easy and other spots maybe not so much. What is it in you that makes you want to be as productive or as helpful, or there's something in you that's like, I've got some music to share with the world. I want to make sure I play it for everybody.

Brett Terpstra: Yeah, no, you actually summed it up really well in the desire to create and the desire to give. I don't want to be famous for anything other than helping people. If I'm going to gain any level of acceptance of love, I want it to be because I offered something. And I love creating. I love building new things, whether it's on top of existing things or from scratch. Just the rush of creating on its own is half of it, and then sharing it and watching it affect people's lives and getting people saying, "Thank you. This changed something for me. This changed..." Whether it's big or small. When I talk about needing attention, it's more needing to feel like I've been helpful and really wanting to create things that help people and that kills both birds with one stone, I've created something, I've helped someone, and often I've gotten recognition for it, so it's a trifecta.

Andrew J. Mason: It's perfect. Very well articulated. I just realized we haven't even talked about any of the software yet. Marked three, a bunch, all this stuff that you've been involved in, but let me wrap it by saying for folks that are interested in hearing more about you, maybe this is their first interaction with you or hearing what you're up to, what you're currently doing, the podcast that you're in, is there a space they can go to hear more about all that, and you are available as well too to take on projects or help people out?

Brett Terpstra: Yeah. You can go to Brettterpster.com, which is a horrible URL because it has three T's right in the middle of it. I'm sure you'll have that in the show notes. If you go to the project's page there, you can find all of the notable software that I'm working on as well as links to the podcast, merch stores, stuff like that. The podcast is Overtired. It is a very sacrilegious, we swear a lot. If that's not your thing, you can skip it, but if you don't mind, it's three very earnest people talking about mental health and tech and occasionally Taylor Swift. But you can contact me through Brettterpster.com if you want to talk about consulting or pitch a project, whatever you want to do, you can email me directly from there. My software, you can find Mark App is currently at Mark2App.com, but that's going to move to MarkApp.com very soon with the release of version three, which I'm very excited about. You can find updates about that on Mastodon, where I'm ttscough@hackaderm.io and Brettterpster.com.

Andrew J. Mason: All the things.

Brett Terpstra: Yes, sir.

Andrew J. Mason: I appreciate this time, Brett. This has been awesome. I couldn't have asked for a better conversation, such unique stuff, and then also, I wouldn't have expected anything different. Thanks so much for hanging out with us.

Brett Terpstra: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon at Theomnishow@omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omnigroup at omnigroup.com/blog.