THE OMNI SHOW

Ivan Weiss: But coming out of COVID, one of my employees, their computer died. I was leaving for a business trip and literally just gave her my computer, ran out trying to get something. And thanks to COVID, the only thing that they had available was a Mac. I've never used one before. Grabbed it, went on the trip, full intentions of returning it. And loaded up OmniFocus, figured I might as well give it a try. And here we are, what, five, almost six years later? Still have it, still running on a Mac and loving it.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show, where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Ivan Weiss uses OmniFocus. Welcome, everybody, to this episode of The Omni Show. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we are honored to be able to have president and COO of elite|studio e, Ivan J. Weiss, here with us. Their company helps lead a multidisciplinary team delivering end-to-end food service design, and we get to learn how Ivan uses OmniFocus in his life. Ivan, honored to have you. Thank you for joining us today.

Ivan Weiss: Thanks, Andrew. Looking forward to this.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Where do you find yourself in the country? And tell us a little bit more about what you do at elite|studio e.

Ivan Weiss: Sure. I'm based in New York. I'm on Long Island, just outside of the city here. And on the business side, as you mentioned, I'm the president and COO. We're a family business, so I oversee pretty much everything day to day with my partners. I'm a part owner in the business. When most people hear about us, they don't even think about it as an industry. But basically we're a design-and-build firm for the food service and hospitality space, but we specialize in large corporate spaces, healthcare, higher education, and markets like that. So, Fortune 500 companies, in their headquarters, they'll have employee dining. They'll have catering, executive dining. Certainly. If you think about college and university, all the different food service spaces they offer. That's really what we specialize in across the entire US. On the personal level, husband, three boys, kids, two dogs, so it's pretty busy at home, as well.

Andrew J. Mason: Do you have any recollection when you first came across OmniFocus or even the Omni Group, a little bit more broadly, and what those first interactions were like?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, so I'm a longtime GTDer. I've always really loved that methodology. And prior to COVID, I was kind of always looking at it and saying, "Boy, I'd like to try this." I think I tried the web version, but because I had a PC at the time, and that just didn't work at the time. But coming out of COVID, one of my employees, their computer died. I was leaving for a business trip, and literally just gave her my computer, ran out trying to get something. And thanks to COVID, the only thing that they had available was the Mac. I've never used one before. Grabbed it, went on the trip, full intentions of returning it. And loaded up OmniFocus, figured I might as well give it a try. And here we are, what, five, almost six years later? Still have it, still running on a Mac and loving it.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow, Ivan. Well, so glad you did. That's awesome. It's so funny. There's one little action that has this cascade of events that lands you in a certain spot in life. It's so cool. There's serendipitous things that happen.

Ivan Weiss: Yeah. Complete accident and worked out.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about the day to day for yourself. Number one, is there a typical day for you? Because you just mentioned things are all over the place sometimes, and that's kind of how you expect it to be. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're chaotic, just because the input is chaotic. But if there were a typical day for you, could you walk us through what that would look like?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, it's actually very typical for me. So, even though what I'm doing can go in a lot of different directions, I really make sure I'm very structured. First of all, I'm an early riser, so I'm generally in the office by about 7:30. I can get anything really pressing done early before anyone is here. That helps me just so much just to get my real work done so that I can be available to help people and not tied down to, "I need to get a proposal signed off," or something like that. And like I mentioned earlier, I'm also really routine based. So, every morning I have a whole startup routine. I follow it verbatim. It's a checklist in the system, and it just helps me scan what's happening. I'm looking through the ERP system. I'm seeing what's going on within the business. I'm seeing financially what's going on. Takes me about 45 minutes, but it gives me the lens as to what's happening. I finish that generally around 9:00, 9:30, and everyone is getting in and getting settled in. And now the day is just whatever I need to do, whether it be meetings, whether it be actual working time. And then after that, I do the same thing. Around 4:30, I start that shutdown routine where I get everything organized, clean it out, as close to Inbox Zero as I can get, put everything in its place. This way, again, it just helps me feel much less stressed when I go home. That's so important to me.

Andrew J. Mason: Even before OmniFocus, you mentioned GTD. What caused you to feel like there's a need for something here to start to operate or manage my life systems based on? Yeah, there's a point, usually something like GTD or OmniFocus or a productivity system, your Covey stuff or anything like that starts to show up in somebody's life when there's inflections that show up where it's like, "Okay, I have expanded a responsibility or a situation that has changed here. What am I going to do to manage all this?" How did that manifest for you?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, life was pretty simple. When we started the business, there was only a handful of us. Life was simple at home. I had my wife, that was about it, and everything was cruising along. And then all of a sudden, before you know it, it turned into three people turns into eight people turns into 15 people. Now we have 20 people knocking on my door and asking for things, kids. And I've always been pretty serious about productivity and trying to find little nuggets of time wherever I could, but I said, "I need to get serious about this. I need to figure something out that can organize my life." That's kind of what started it.

Andrew J. Mason: And what do you end up saying to somebody who's like maybe 10, 20 years you're junior, just saying like, "Okay, I know that I need to start working on getting things handled better. I have great intentions when I give my commitment or my word to do something, and sometimes that doesn't always show up in reality." What advice do you have for somebody who's like, "I want to do more to keep track of my ideas, my commitments, my time"? Is there any good first go-to pieces of advice for you?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah. Well, first off, don't roll your eyes because I talk about it all the time here, and people may not always want to hear it, but the most important thing for me was to learn to really capture absolutely everything, to really write those things down. But maybe a little contrary to some parts of GTD, give it some space. I learned that you can really quickly just pull everything in, and all of a sudden you have this list of a thousand things to do, and you don't know what's important. So, letting it sit, coming back to it, taking a look at it, make sure you have a structure or something that helps you guide what are your priorities, that was really the most important thing. And then just keep it simple. Don't over complicate it.

Andrew J. Mason: It's sometimes difficult to do. Sometimes it's a simplicity that you have to fight for because life naturally just kind of expands, especially when you talk about all those expanded responsibilities, different hats that you end up wearing. The advice about having multiple things all in the same inbox at the same time, there's a version of ourselves, whatever the current version happens to be, that sits there and thinks like, "Oh, this makes absolute sense to me." But if it's an idea that you go after 2:00 AM, and then you see it in the light of day, you're like, "Okay, I don't know what I was thinking."

Ivan Weiss: Yes.

Andrew J. Mason: "Throw that thing out of there."

Ivan Weiss: Sometimes you look back and you say, "That's terrible. What am I doing with this? I need to get rid of that." Just that space really helps. It lets you see, "Okay," like you said, "this is important to me," at an exciting dinner with a couple of drinks in hand. And now I'm looking at it the next day and going, "Oh, bad idea. Get rid of this thing."

Andrew J. Mason: Do you mind maybe placing OmniFocus in an overall context? Is there a corollary software that you use that hooks into or out of it? What does your input and output, like the daily ones and zeros, look like for you?

Ivan Weiss: It's at the center of everything for me. I'm an Apple user, so I definitely use all the integrations, and the reminders, and Siri, and all that stuff pulling into it. And then we have an in-house ERP-CRM system that we've developed. And even though it has tasks and things like that in that, we bring everything over, or at least I bring everything over into OmniFocus because I just need everything in one place. It's really important to me not to be looking in multiple different things. And then, by nature, I'm a very routine-driven person. So, again, I like to just think about what are my startup routines, my shutdown routines to end and wrap up my day. Right after this it'll be my weekly review and finishing up the week and making sure that all of that is organized so that I set those clear boundaries for myself as I'm switching throughout my different modes of work, if you will.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me about... Is automation show up for you, at all? I mean, you just mentioned routine. I consider any kind of routines or repeating tasks to be a form of automation, for sure, all the way up to the JavaScript-style OmniJS plugins stuff that's happening out there.

Ivan Weiss: I wish it was more a part of my life. I do a very simple version. I have templates, and I just duplicate projects, and I put them back in where they need to go, that type of thing. And I've always wanted to dabble with it, but it's really just a time and an energy and a focus type of thing just to really learn it and sink my teeth into it. So, I'm looking at it. I'll get into playing with it, and then it just gets back-burnered. So, I keep it pretty simple.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, I think your intuition probably tells you what's important. You're moving pretty fast and furious and to know like, "Okay, I have the guardrails I need to be operating within, and working too much in the system versus on the system is not going to be beneficial for me." That makes absolutely 100% sense.

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, exactly, except I'm not always the best about that. I mean, I'll jump in, and that's part of my problem is I'll start playing with things, trying to find a better way to do things, instead of just working on things. So, that's always a struggle.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me a little bit about the perspectives. Do you use the stock perspectives that show in the OmniFocus, or is there a different slice or custom perspective that you have that shows up for you?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, and I use Forecast View. I use the Review. Other than that, everything else is really kind of custom. The way I work is... And again, this comes from my business side. I have three different perspectives I use most of the time. I call them WOBs and WIBs, and then the easy one is personal. My WOBs are work on the business, and I slice up OmniFocus so that I can make sure that I'm not seeing, "Pay the bills," "Deal with the insurance," that type of thing, but I'm actually working on driving things forward. And the WIBs are the opposite, working in it. Because I find it so easy to just get lost in checking things off and trying to move through things and not actually driving forward. So, I try to be pretty good about separating those out, and that helps me a lot.

Andrew J. Mason: I think you're the first person I've talked to that actually has those perspectives delineated in that way. You've heard of like maker manager, work in versus work, but the WOB versus WIB is phenomenal. I think it's great.

Ivan Weiss: WOBs and WIBs.

Andrew J. Mason: The WOBs and WIBs.

Ivan Weiss: Speak about it in the office, too, and people laugh. And they'll say, "Are you working on a WOB or a WIB."

Andrew J. Mason: Well, I'm really interested. I appreciate your time in developing and fleshing this out with us. But is there anything that you've experienced along the way, as you're using, especially when you're working on the system or working on the business, that you're like, "I am fully sure that this is something that I should try. This is an experiment. This is a direction I should take this system. This is a direction I should take my workflow," and then, after the fact, looking back saying, "You know what? Not necessarily I call that a mistake or a failure or anything like that, but when I look back on this, I would say, if you're following my by footsteps, maybe just skip that portion because it didn't really pan out the way that I was hoping that it would"?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, unfortunately, I do it all the time. I feel like I might be in the middle of one right now. The first thing I would say, and luckily I don't really do this anymore, but don't abandon the system. I found too many times I would get overwhelmed or over-committed and say, "Oh, I need a better tool," and I'd start chasing some shiny new tool. And then, all of a sudden, I'd spent four days moving all my tasks into the new system only to find, "Oh, man, I got to go back." And then I move everything back, and it just causes a ton of time. That's always an issue. And then the other thing is, it's a blessing and a curse, is that OmniFocus lets you get super organized, but that can hide how busy you are. So, I find that I really have to be aware of how much I'm putting in there because just because I have it really organized doesn't mean I really have the capacity to do all those things, and I can feel that stress build up when I just overwhelm myself. And it's all organized, it's all there, it's all neat, but you look at it and you go, "What do I do first?" You kind of have that freezing moment. So, that's always a challenge.

Andrew J. Mason: What are the indicators to you? When you're looking at that and you have that kind of amorphous blob of like, "Uh-oh, that shows up there?" Is that a capacity thing? How do you judge like, "Okay, maybe it's time to really start thinking about and culling down and simplifying these things"?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah. I mean, like I said, I'm joking, but I feel like I'm in the middle of this now because one of my contexts is blown up a little bit. So, earlier today, I was subdividing it into smaller chunks. And I bet if we talk in two weeks, I'm going to put it back because I'll say I made it too complicated. But it's just like a feeling in the back of your mind when you're looking at the system. And I find that if I'm spending time playing with the system, that's generally the first sign that there's too much in there because I'm trying to figure out how to make it work for how much work I have as opposed to being realistic and saying, "Hey, there's too much on your plate. You got to figure out how to either backburner some of this or move it to some other people," or something like that.

Andrew J. Mason: I think that's a phenomenal red flag for people to look through to say, "You're operating at the effect of your system versus really like, 'Okay, let's take a look at this and see what's actually in here.'" Brilliant. Talk to me a little bit about... What is it that you would say makes you as passionate as possible to be as productive as you possibly can be? But it's so funny because not everybody is born this way, but there's humanity, and then there's something inside of a bunch of us that say, "You know what? I think it would be wrong for me not to explore what the capacity of my potential might be. And that's why sometimes I bump up against these edges." Talk to us a little bit about what's going on for you there.

Ivan Weiss: The best way I could explain it to people, not that I'm a race car fan, but it's like a NASCAR type of thing. They're so focused on how do they get maximum efficiency out of everything? How do they pick up a fraction of a second? And I think when you look at how much goes on, I mean, in my role, my day goes all over the place. I might be dealing with a project situation. I might be dealing with a client situation, and one of my kids is sick, and the dog needs to go to the vet, and you just don't know what's going to come. So, anytime I can find just a better way to do anything, whether it be a checklist on doing the thinking ahead of time as opposed to in the moment or just being able to put a bookmark in something so if I get interrupted, I can come back to it. I think just all those minimal amounts of efficiency you can create, they don't just create more time, but I think they really reduce the stress. If I get interrupted, I don't feel like my whole day has gone sideways, and I've lost where I am. I can say, "Okay, this is where I am. I'm going to come back to it. And maybe I lost some time, but I'll be back on track, sure enough, in no time." That's really important to me.

Andrew J. Mason: What do you say to somebody who has maybe lost that confidence? Everybody falls off multiple times per day. "Okay, I got derailed. I'm over here, and there's an issue with how I was focusing. I need to get back on track." But for the person that says, "I was more productive in the past, and the wagon is gone. The wagon is out of here. I fell off it, and it's out of here." What's a great first step for somebody to just begin to pick up the pieces, do you think?

Ivan Weiss: It's a little bit of work, but I have found that emptying the system is the best way to go, of really being really honest with yourself. So, sometimes, if I've had to do that, I'll make a folder, and I'll literally move everything into that separate context or folder or something like that and force myself to put it back into my system. And when I do that, I find that I actually eliminate probably three quarters of it because I'll realize, "I really don't need to do that." I think it's just a good cleaning house. Actually, it's something I do... Not to that extent, but every year right before Thanksgiving, I do a full on clean out of the system. I block the whole day in my calendar. I go through everything. I get rid of stuff that has accumulated in my office, I get rid of stuff that's accumulated my email and OmniFocus, and just it gives me a fresh start as I'm getting ready for the next year. I love it. It makes me feel much more at peace, too, really calm.

Andrew J. Mason: 100%. I mean, there's stuff hidden away in projects here and there that you're like, "Okay, that was important at one time." And for those that are listening and sitting there thinking, like, "But doesn't that sound like failure? Doesn't that sound like giving up?" No. I mean, you're basically just updating the map. The territory has changed. The terrain has changed. We've moved spaces. So, we're just describing what reality looks like from now and working from there. And I think that feeling of clarity that we get once that happens, I mean, I feel a lot better when it happens.

Ivan Weiss: Yeah. And sometimes I look at things, and I don't even know what I was speaking about. I look at it. I go, "I don't even know what this means. So, how am I going to do it? It's going to sit in here forever until I figure it out, but I don't know what I'm talking about."

Andrew J. Mason: If you had a billboard to the world, magic wand, however you want to frame this thing, but there's something that you could give to humanity in forms of understanding and have them get it instantly, is there anything that just shows up for you there where it's like, "Oh, man, if we could have everybody in the world understand this immediately, we would be operating on all cylinders"?

Ivan Weiss: Yeah, I think it's all about demeanor. I think being calm and being collected, that's just my nature. I'm sure it comes across that way, and I really pride myself in that. And I think if most people just really took a situation that's an emergency, it's a good thing, it's a bad thing, whatever it is, take a deep breath, step back for a second and say, "Okay, what am I dealing with here, and how do I deal with it?" the answers present themselves to you, and it's so much easier to be able to handle it. And I think people just throw themselves into chaos and panic or excitement, and all of a sudden, they lead themselves down a real tough path. So, just keep it simple, keep it calm, and good things happen.

Andrew J. Mason: Couldn't ask for wiser words. That's perfect. And if folks are interested in connecting with you or what you're up to, how can they stay in your orbit?

Ivan Weiss: Sure, two ways. LinkedIn is certainly the easiest. Just look up my name in there. Happy to get messages or hear from anyone. And then the alternative is always on our website. My contact and info is all there, so feel free to send me an email or reach out in any way.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome. Ivan, I appreciate you spending time with us so much. Your wisdom, I mean, rapid fire, but awesome, and thank you for that.

Ivan Weiss: Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.

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.