THE OMNI SHOW

Brian McCabe: So we all get excited. We end up with a massive tags and a massive perspectives, and then just complicate ourselves, and it becomes almost an industry in itself, maintaining your system, but actually, you need to fine-tune it to yourself. I use OmniFocus for everything, my personal life and my work life. I've organized it into the horizons of Focus, so I've got my personal folder and my work folder. I mentioned I've got 130 clients, so I have a tag per client so that I can tag the work and get a client's view on it. I have a tag per person that I work with on a regular basis for the agenda so that I can form those views dynamically.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show, where we connect with the amazing communities surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today, we learn how Brian McCabe uses OmniFocus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today, we are excited to chat with Brian McCabe. A little bit about Brian, he's the SVP for Global Managed Services at Inoapps in the UK, and we're honored just to have him here with us. Brian, thank you so much for joining us.

Brian McCabe: Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for inviting me on. It's great to be here.

Andrew J. Mason: The honor's ours, honestly, when you reached out and we got to connect a little bit, and talk a bit about how you use OmniFocus in your day-to-day life. It was really exciting and cool to see the usage of that. But before we get into that, I'd love to hear a bit more about who you are, what your role as SVP looks like, and where you find yourself. Just feel free to kind of riff in that direction.

Brian McCabe: Okay. So where do I start? Well, I live and I work in Manchester, in the UK, up in the northwest of the UK. It's raining here as we record, but that's pretty normal for this area. I've got a partner, we've got two grown up children who both moved away, and an Irish terrier dog called Colin, who is the love of our lives. Workwise, well, I've worked in ... Unfortunately, people can see me now so they can see how old I am. I've worked in ... No, so I may as well confess. I've worked in technology for my entire working career, which is, what, 35, probably getting on for 40 years now. Initially, I was a technologist, an Oracle database administrator for those who are in the industry, but for probably the last 20 years or so, I kind of down the technical tools and moved into a career of leading consulting practices, delivering software services and managed services to organizations around the world. So I swapped my technical skills for leadership, sales, and service management skills, again, for people who are in the industry, predominantly ITIL, or Agile, or Agile for the people on the other side of Atlantic from me. So as you mentioned, I work for Inoapps. I'm the SVP, Global Managed Services, set on the exec leadership team. I'm responsible for about 30% of the business today, but prior to that, I've spent many years in many organizations from Big 4 accounting and consulting firms. So I used to work for PwC in a similar role, global systems integrators, all the way through to startup organizations, some of which didn't actually start. So, yeah, that's me. I've got about 120 people working for me across North America, Europe, and Asia Pac, and we deliver services. My teams deliver services to about 130 organizations, looking after their software systems based around Oracle technology, so it's fairly busy and varied, really.

Andrew J. Mason: I'm curious, are there any patterns that you see across that range of different businesses or different clients? There's so many different things, so many different industries, I'm sure, that are impacted and affected by databasing and stuff, but are there any commonalities in that, that you do kind of use pattern recognition to be able to help manage in that way?

Brian McCabe: There are differences based on the technology that the customer is using from the Oracle suite. So I don't know how familiar you are with Oracle, but it's everything from applications all the way through to the database and infrastructure. So there's different behaviors from our clients because we engage with them at different levels, so pure technical clients. We tend to engage with the IT director or the CIO, applications, customers more and more in the kind of software as a service or cloud-based applications. We're engaging with the CFO, or the HR director, and people. So you have to be very chameleon-like and you have to be able to blend into the environment that you're working in, so that's challenging and interesting in equal measure. And then you have the various different working cultures across North America. I've just come back from Houston, spend a lot of time in the U.S. working with U.S. clients, but different cultures. I think people say we're separated by a common language, two nations separated by a common language, so very different work culture in the U.S., very different business culture in the U.S. than it is in Europe. Yeah, I've got clients who stretch right over to Australia and Asia Pacific regions as well. So again, you have to be kind of like chameleon-like in that as well, but it's all good fun. Variety is a spice of life, isn't it?

Andrew J. Mason: I'm really curious, though. When I hear that, part of me just wants there to be some sort of pattern where it's like, "Oh, they all have this in common," or, "They all have that in common," but the fact that you have to kind of morph and meet the clients where they are in whatever business they happen to be in, in order to have that kind of custom fit that shows up there is really, really interesting, because I mean, there's something in me that's like, "Okay, there's at least some level of predictable randomness there," but this is like, "Hey, each client out of these 120, 130 are truly unique." That's a lot to take on.

Brian McCabe: Well, they may be listening, so they're all unique and they're all equally important, but there are some common analysis, Andrew, yes.

Andrew J. Mason: Do you have any memory or recollection of when you first came across either OmniFocus' software or the Omni Group as a company, and whether it was just like a moment, hey, as of whatever date that, that was the date that I remember, or just over time, it just kind of grew into my awareness, and it was like, "Okay, this is something maybe I should pay attention to"?

Brian McCabe: I knew you were going to ask me this question because I'm an avid listener to the podcast, and so I did some digging back through all my old history, and I can't find my first point of contact with the Omni Group, but I'm thinking it started around late '20s, sort of 2010 era. I found, and I think it was OmniFocus 1. I found an upgrade to OmniFocus 2, so certainly around that sort of time frame, if that fits. At that time, it was iOS only, iOS, and then iPadOS. The company I was working for right then mandated we use Windows laptops for work, and the web version clearly wasn't available in those days, so it was all around the mobile apps, I guess. Again, OmniFocus only. Although I did venture into OmniPlan for a period of time when I was doing more project planning, and then I moved organizations back in early 2013, and had the luxury of being able to use a Mac and at that time, and from that point onwards, I've been all in on the Apple ecosystem with OmniFocus and a little bit of OmniPlan. When the watch was launched, I got on my watch and my watch as well. We don't yet have the Vision Pro in the UK, although I did go into the Apple Store in Houston last week and stroke it, touched it. We'll see on that one when it arrives in the UK. Quite interested in the M4 iPad as well, so I might invest in one of those in the next week or so. So that's me. Yeah. So OmniFocus through and through, from 2010-ish onwards, I've dabbled with some of the other products out there, some of the competitors, but I keep coming back to OmniFocus.

Andrew J. Mason: I have to imagine that there is a level of complexity to your current setup. So whatever kind of around the world tour you want to give us that involves tags, context, perspectives, the floor is yours. I'd love to hear how this happens.

Brian McCabe: It's certainly been more complex in the past than it is now, and I think I've been on that same journey that lots of other power users, as you call them, have been in their time with OmniFocus. So we all get excited. We end up with a massive tags and a massive perspectives, and then just complicate ourselves, and it becomes almost an industry in itself maintaining your system, which is fantastic from the product's perspective because it can be all things to all people, but actually, you need to fine-tune it to yourself. So where do I stand today? So I use OmniFocus for everything, my personal life and my work life. I've organized it into, to use a GTD term, the horizons of Focus. So I've got my personal folder and my work folder, and within there, I've got a variety of different projects. I mentioned I've got 130 clients, so I have a tag per client so that I can tag the work and get a client's view on it. I have a tag per person that I work with on a regular basis for the agenda, again using GTD terms, but I'm not quite sure why it was called agenda. It doesn't really work with me. But anyway, so I've got tags for customers and tags for people, and tags for groups that I'm a member of, so the exec leadership team, the departmental leadership team, so that I can form those views dynamically. From a project perspective, what do I have? I have projects in the true sense of the word, where for things that have a beginning and end and an outcome, so bid work that I'm working on or service improvement initiatives, so I have a project for each of those. And then I have that kind of miscellaneous project for everything to single action work list for things that don't fit into a start, middle, and ending project. So that's kind of that piece. What else can I tell you? Perspectives. I had hundreds. In fact, I checked, I've got about 40 perspectives today, and I use four of them. So my four perspectives are due and available, split by personal and work, and they are the ones that I use every single minute of the day, every day. So if I'm in work mode, I'll have my due tasks, which are things that are genuinely due today or flagged, and my available is everything that's available, that's not been deferred. And then the same, again, for my personal life. And I use Focus modes across my Apple devices to flip between work and personal mode at different times of the day. And when I do that, my watch changes color, the OmniFocus, to-do list or due list change from my work to home or vice versa, as do all the widgets on all my desktops and laptops and phones. So I can try and discipline myself to be in one mode or another, and fail abysmally, because throughout the weekend, I'm forever switching back to work mode just to check on things, but that's my personal failing that I'm working on. So that's kind of me. It was a very complicated system, and it's been fine-tuned to something that does everything I want it to do. I'm a big user of deferred dates, by the way, and that's something that I haven't found anywhere else. So deferred plus flags, they're kind of the things that help me prioritize things.

Andrew J. Mason: I love hearing kind of the story arc of your usage, where it starts off with the supercharge, "Hey, I can do more things than I knew how to take on," and moving into that place of ... You almost have to break the model, and then fix it again just to see the simplicity that's on the other side of that complexity. And it's a really cool journey to take, now that you're on the other side, where it's like, "Hey, I don't have every single bell and whistle enabled, but I have what works for me and it helps me live my life better." I think that's really the point of it all, which is perfect. Talk to me more about where the software sits in the overall ecosystem. Are there any programs that kind of flow into it? Are there any programs that you take the data from OmniFocus and send out? Just kind of maybe place it in the middle of the environment for us and just kind of talk about how that looks for you.

Brian McCabe: So you said the middle of the environment, and that's exactly where it sits actually, whether that be my work environment or my home environment. So OmniFocus is at the core, and it's the bible in terms of what I'm going to do next, and then it spins off into those two different domains or horizons of Focus. So when it spins off into my work mode, we're all in on Microsoft 365, so I email. Calendar is all through Outlook, and if anybody, any of the listeners have a seamless way of integrating OmniFocus into the new Mac desktop version of Outlook, then please do writing, call in whatever else. It's a failing, not on OmniFocus' side, but certainly Microsoft's side because I don't think they're being particularly nice playmates, but yeah. So that tracks my inbox, my mail, my calendar and all that sort of stuff in my personal life. It's Google, Gmail, Google Calendar. Also, closely tied into OmniFocus, I would say, is my note-taking up. I, like many people, now spend far too many hours in meetings and spend more time talking about work than doing work. So my note-taking tends to be meeting notes, and I'm a big Obsidian nerd, so I'm all in on Obsidian, both for personal and work, which is a fantastic tool. I saw the thumbs up from you there, Andrew. Fantastic tool in itself, but it has many of those tempting configuration rabbit holes that OmniFocus has as well. So the tech is amongst us, have to fight that temptation to go down those rabbit holes. In terms of project and team collaboration, it's not an area that OmniFocus ever proposed, but sort of pretends to be strong in. So project and team collaboration, Office 365 at work, so teams planner, project, and a bit of Jira as well. So we use Jira Service Management to manage all of our customer activities. Again, not a great deal of overlap there between those and my personal task planner, as in OmniFocus. And then for thinking, I'm a big mind map user, so when I need to think for those and get them out of my head, I use MindNode, which has a fantastic integration into OmniFocus. So I'll get to the branches of a mind map and I'll click a button, and everything comes out as a task. It's fantastic, so definitely that. So, yeah, it sits at the heart of everything that I do, really. I would like it to be better integrated into some of my work tools, but partly corporate strategy and security, means that I have to have some friction and duplication, but it's enough to live with.

Andrew J. Mason: I would love to hear a bit about your advice for beginners. Maybe somebody that doesn't consider themselves power users, they hear, "Man, Brian has a really complex life with a lot of things that he's managing here. It sounds like he's kind of gotten it all together." What advice would you have for somebody that maybe is not yet in the space that you are? Maybe they're a mile or two behind you on the road, and they're looking ahead saying, "Wow, that's great. I want to get to that level of responsibility, because it seems like he's able to be present with Andrew in this interview, he's able to give all of his attention there because he's got everything kind of taken care of in the background." But what advice would you give to somebody that's like, "I want to take a step in that direction, but what great first steps can I take?"

Brian McCabe: So the first bit of advice is don't believe everything you hear, because I'm nowhere near and as much control as I'd like to be, but the tools, and the system, and the process we've talked through certainly help. Yeah, they certainly help, and help me survive and not look 75 when I'm hopefully 20 years lesser now. But what advice would I give to somebody starting out? I guess the first thing, and the reason I started looking at GTD and tooling to support it back in the sort of 2008, 2009 era was because I started to feel overwhelmed, too many different draws on my time, didn't feel like I was in control, and as a control freak, that panicked me. So the first bit of advice is just make sure you're writing things down, whether it's a whiteboard, a scrap of paper, in an inbox somewhere. I like mind mapping, as you do, Andrew. I jot things down in mind maps, and I have them open all day, but just get it written down so that you remember, these tasks are not spinning around in your head all the time, and then you can set them aside and either develop them or disregard them when you're in the correct frame of mind to do so. So just get things jotted down, and I think that's a common piece of advice I've heard on this show, on previous episodes of this show. Use your inbox or whatever to write these things down. So I guess my second bit of advice would be don't over-complicate your system. We all went down our rabbit hole of multiple tags and tags for how I'm feeling that day, and the amount of effort or energy. Never use it. It's just not something you use. So have fun, but don't over-complicate your system. So I think they're the common ones that come out on this podcast, and I completely agree, and I've fallen foul of them both myself several times. Failing's not actually a big issue because you'll learn from your failures, so I guess that's number three, really. And I've come down those rabbit holes so deeply, that at times, I've just had to step right back out and say, "Trash my system and start again." I even looked at other products to try and simplify the system, but always came back to OmniFocus, because it kind of had some features that I couldn't live without. So, yeah, keep it simple, write everything down, organize it later. They're the key bits, I think.

Andrew J. Mason: We did mention a little bit earlier about the idea of pattern recognition, predictable randomness. This stuff shows up. Maybe you don't know when it shows up, but you know it will at some point. Talk to me a little bit about any pieces of automation that you do have in play here. What have you found that, "You know what? It's going to help me save some thinking if I routinize this, maybe create a checklist out of it," but for whatever way that you end up doing it, how does automation show up for you?

Brian McCabe: In several guises, really, and focusing really on the points that touch OmniFocus, I guess. So from a basic perspective, Siri, hopefully things don't start going live. Oh, yeah, hang on. My HomePod's just woken up. And that S word, I use that to capture new tasks via the integration into Apple Reminders, so I might be driving, I might be walking the dog wherever, get it out of my head, get it in, and the S word is absolutely the right way to do that. And then, just make sure you say enough so that it makes sense to you when you read it a day or two later when you're clearing your inbox. So that's the basic stuff. And then, I guess slightly more complicated but not terribly advanced, I use Omni Automation to update tasks. So there's one that I use on a regular basis, where a lot of my tasks tend to almost be iterative and lots of other people involved in them, and I want to keep a journal. So I have a keyboard shortcut, and I just have to look at the keys, because it's muscle memory, control, option, command, J, triggers an Omni Automation, which puts the date and time into the note field, allows me to type a comment in, and then that acts as a journal. And one request to the Omni folks if they're listening here is it would be great in a future version if we had a journal field separate to the notes field. I'd like the notes field to be notes about the task itself, and then the journal field to be a date timestamp journal field. But at the moment, I use Omni Automation to build that into the notes field, and then OmniFocus as part of kind of broader automations, typically through either shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro. When I get a new customer or a new opportunity with an existing customer, I'll have automation that builds the tags, the projects, the folders within Outlook, the Obsidian metadata, and all of the OmniFocus stuff. That's press a couple of buttons and it builds that integrated architecture across all of the different software components that I use to look after my clients. And what else? I travel a lot. We're getting back to the pre-pandemic traveling days, and I keep forgetting to pack things. So I've got a travel packing shortcut. So I run a shortcut. It asks me, "Where are you going? Is it in the UK? Is it overseas? Is it business? Is it pleasure? How many days for?" And it builds a packing list in OmniFocus, broken down by clothing, medication, technology, gadgetry, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's great. My colleagues poke fun at me for having a packing list, but they're the ones that are always coming to me asking for toothpaste and things, so there you go. So, yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: Any words of wisdom, advice for us? Actually, let me rephrase that. If you had maybe a minute, two minutes just to kind of share platform with the world, your billboard to the world about, "Man, if everybody could just get this one thing about productivity, task management," and just, I could wave a magic wand and instantly have everybody get this and be okay with it and work on it and do well with it, do you have anything that fits that criteria for you?

Brian McCabe: Guess are the different one every week because it depends who I'm listening to or what I'm reading. So at the moment, I'm partway through Cal Newport's latest book on Slow Productivity, and it's just makes total common sense, you know? You do less and you do it better, and you're more productive, which sounds very easy, and is extremely difficult to change when you've been sprinting, as most of us have for several years, especially through the pandemic. In some ways, and I'm guilty of this, you can mistake actions for progress, and OmniFocus, in a bizarre sort of way, and it's no fault of the system, it allows you to capture all of these actions and think about them later instead of saying, "No, that's not part of my agenda. Sorry, go find somebody else." So being able to say no to the peripheral activities that are not going to add value to your role, or your objective, or your company's objective. I think saying no early is the line that I picked up from the Slow Productivity thing. Much easier said than done because we're all people-pleasers at the end of the day. But yeah, you don't make progress if you try and do everything, or 50% of everything. Do 100% of the things you're good at. Yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: I'm so grateful to have you hang out with us, Brian. This has been awesome. If folks are interested in finding out even more about what you're up to, or even connecting with you, or just anything you want to share about how they can kind of enter your orbit, how do they do that?

Brian McCabe: So I, again, I have my split life. So if they want to know about my music taste, and I grew up in Manchester in the 1990's, so if you're into the Manchester music scene in the '90s, get on my Twitter handle or X, or whatever it's called nowadays. You don't find anything on there about OmniFocus or work. I suspect people are here because they want to know about OmniFocus and maybe what I do in my business. LinkedIn's a place to be. I can't remember my name on there. Well, I know my name. I don't remember the URL, but we can put it in the show notes, I'm sure. So LinkedIn. LinkedIn's probably the professional place to chat.

Andrew J. Mason: Brian, this has been awesome. Thank you again for joining us. This has been great.

Brian McCabe: Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Andrew.

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