THE OMNI SHOW

Brent Simmons: You're listening to The Omni Show. Get to know the people and stories behind The Omni Group's award-winning productivity apps for Mac and iOS. Music.

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Brent Simmons: I'm your host, Brent Simmons. On the line with me today is Jason Atwood, one of the founders of Arkus, a Salesforce consulting partner, and we'll be talking about how he uses OmniFocus in his business. Say Hello, Jason.

Jason Atwood: Hello Jason.

Brent Simmons: So, happy New Year.

Jason Atwood: Happy New Year.

Brent Simmons: A new decade, even. This is going to be the decade of OmniFocus, I think.

Jason Atwood: You think so? I was going to say, last decade, it was pretty much my decade of OmniFocus. So this one can be the second decade of OmniFocus.

Brent Simmons: The second, even bigger and better.

Jason Atwood: That's right.

Brent Simmons: So tell me about Arkus. What do you do? I don't know that much about Salesforce, I have to confess. I haven't been in the enterprise side of things all that much, so ...

Jason Atwood: Sure, so Arkus is a Salesforce consulting partner, as you said. We specialize in implementing Salesforce, Salesforce being a CRM, Customer Relationship Management software. When we started with it so many years ago, we actually had to explain what Salesforce was. Now pretty much everybody knows it's the number one cloud computing CRM on the planet, and really, organizations of all types use it to track their customers, to track their sales, to track their marketing activities, or even on the nonprofit side, to track their donors, their board members, any constituents. So really for tracking all things. Big, big database in the cloud, I guess, but that's oversimplifying it.

Jason Atwood: So we started Arkus 10 years ago as a way to get out of working from a big, big, big company to helping organizations implement Salesforce, and that's what we do.

Brent Simmons: That includes ... You do work for nonprofits as well?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, over half of our business now is with nonprofits. It's a strange mix. People always say, "Why do you do both?" The other two partners of mine, one came from a nonprofit world. So when we started Arkus, that's one of the big areas we went into, and over the years, has actually just grown bigger and bigger, a bigger part of what we do. So we work with ... I think it's about over 50% of our business now is with nonprofits.

Brent Simmons: Oh, that's cool. So obviously, Salesforce provides a whole lot. What are the opportunities then for a company like Arkus? Is there some kind of customization or coding? Where do you step in?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, absolutely. So Salesforce is a very big and complex universe. Everything from licensing to setup to training to getting people up and running using their analytics package. In a lot of ways, it is set to be a very simple piece of software, but when you're an organization rolling this out, replacing your CRM system, replacing your donor management system, moving from Dynamics, or you're a company who never had, or has been using spreadsheets for five or 10 years, or I've worked with companies have been using spreadsheets for hundreds of years, 50, 60 years, that kind of change is not easy.

Jason Atwood: So it's kind of difficult to do it yourself, and Salesforce as a company is ... They're a licensing company, they sell licenses, and they don't ... They actually got out of the world of providing services. They realized they couldn't scale and become as big as they wanted to become if they were the only people implementing it, so they built a big, a huge partner program with thousands and thousands of partners. Everything from the biggest of bigs, the Deloittes and the IBMs, down to tiny little one person shops, with us somewhere in the lower middle part of that, and we help organizations implement it.

Jason Atwood: So what I was going to say is it's a nice little triangle. Salesforce sells the licenses, and we implement it for them, and we work with a client to do that, and we kind of work in a tandem there.

Brent Simmons: Okay. There's an awful lot of client-specific needs, and you're figuring out how Salesforce can meet those needs, and then getting it all set up and getting them trained, I suppose?

Jason Atwood: Yeah. It's everything from migrating their data. It could be from just having the requirements of what they want to do with the system. It is a lot of customization. So Salesforce out of the box is a very malleable piece of software. You can change it to do anything. So you are adding in new ways or new records or a new look and feel that you want just for this type of organization.

Jason Atwood: So it really comes as sort of a platform, and you build on top of the platform, you build up what they need to do, what the customer needs to do with it. So our job is to come in, work with them, find out what they want to do, and then kind of take them through that journey. Sometimes it's getting 10 people at a nonprofit into doing donation tracking. Okay. Other times it's taking a bank with 300 different users across five different groups from marketing to business development to the CEO, and training them up and implementing the software, integrating with a backend database, let's say, for transactions or something like that. So it can be a lot, and we've done, I think, over 1200 projects at this time.

Brent Simmons: Wow.

Jason Atwood: So we've seen every different kind of implementation.

Brent Simmons: So with this kind of work, it's obvious that you can't drop the ball anywhere, number one, and number two, there are a whole lot of details to keep track of. Did you always use OmniFocus for managing this stuff? How did you come to that?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so my history with OmniFocus is actually longer than my history with Arkus. I was a Kinkless GTD user. I actually was listening to your podcast with John Gruber, and you guys brought that up, and I was like, "Wait, you should have waited for my intro." I got into GTD about 14 years ago and kicked around a couple of different pieces of software, from Palm Pilot to paper, and I'm a Mac user and I was looking for something that could do it better, and I think I stumbled into some forum or something back in the day, where someone's like, "Ooh, you can use this OmniOutliner thing, and you get this Kinkless GTD template, and then it turns into this great way of tracking GTD."

Jason Atwood: So it was, of course, a new tool, shiny and fun, so I went right after it, downloaded it, got into the forum, saw how you did it, and really was using that for as long… until the OmniFocus beta came out, and then, of course, I was immediately on the beta, and I kind of haven't looked back. I've been using OmniFocus in every one of its iterations, I think. Pretty much every release, and sometimes every pre-release as well. So it was a natural thing for us, when we moved to — and the two other partners were both GTD practitioners — when we moved to starting Arkus, it was like, well, that's just one of the tools we use, so it made sense to just keep using that tool.

Brent Simmons: So what's a typical day like for one of your employees?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, everybody at Arkus generally is in implementing Salesforce for their clients. They're working with probably five to eight different clients at a time, which is pretty demanding. We're a little bit different in consulting. We don't send in a team of people to one client for a long period of time. Everybody works very remotely, and they work collaboratively with the client, but they work with many clients at the same time. So they might be running, again, five to eight different projects with two different nonprofits and a financial services firm, and doing a lot of different things. So keeping track of everything they need to do is really important, and I can say everything they do on a daily basis could be very spread out. So I could be doing a kickoff for a client on Monday morning. I could be doing a wrap up of a training on Thursday afternoon. I could be doing configuration of Salesforce and then showing it to the client all Wednesday, but basically, it's jumping around between a lot of different projects and keeping all of those things in the air, and making sure that every ... I like to say for all the clients, they don't know that we're working with other clients. They always think that they're working just with us, so keeping them happy and thinking that we're their only person they're working with.

Brent Simmons: That's great. If you can keep them with that feeling, then yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. So at some point, you made the decision to buy OmniFocus for all of your employees and train them in that. How did that decision come to be?

Jason Atwood: Like I said, when we started Arkus, the three of us were all OmniFocus users, so that was just very natural. Okay, great, and then we brought on our first intern, and as any first company would do, and we had an intern, and then that intern turned into our employee, and of course, we said, "Well, we think you should probably read GTD, because we think it'll be helpful. We think it'll help you in doing this work." So he read GTD, and he comes back and says, "Okay, what tool should I use?", and I said, "Well, you could use this tool, OmniFocus. It's good, we like it." But we didn't sorta make it part of sort of the corporate standard, I guess, so we used a bunch of different tools, and I think he landed on one at some point, and then we hired two more people. And eventually we started to figure out that, like any system, like a mail system or like a CRM system, it's kind of easier to have everybody use the same tool.

Jason Atwood: So since the whole company is a GTD practitioner, everybody comes into Arkus, and as part of the onboarding process, they read the book, they go through training on it. We think it's just natural to give them a tool to practice their GTD, a trusted system, and we see OmniFocus as the best, and the best of the breed of doing that, so it's just very natural to give them that tool. So that's where it kind of went from, and so for, at one point it was sort of an optional thing, and then eventually it turned into a, you get a computer, you get a software license to Salesforce, and you get your OmniFocus.

Brent Simmons: Are there any particular features in OmniFocus that make you prefer it? For instance, do your employees use a lot of custom perspectives, or is it just kind of the whole thing together just has the right mix of what you guys need?

Jason Atwood: Well, I think there's a couple of things that ... As a GTD practitioner and as someone who has been doing this for a long time, that I think there's a couple things that you want to have in your software. Actually, when I go talk to other people about productivity and I help them with it, I say, "Look for these things in the tool you pick." The first one, I think, is the ability to ubiquitously capture things. If you create Croft, if you create a barrier to capture things, then you're not going to capture them. So you want to make sure that it's easy to do so. So actually having OmniFocus on the OS, live on my Mac or on my iPhone, and be able to easily key command, boom, boom, open up a capture window, I think is actually so important, and I think where a lot of these web systems and web-based ones really kind of missed the mark, because if I have to flip over to Chrome and then go to another tab to then capture my task, I might not do it, but if I can hit two key commands and have it be present right there and capture it, I'll do it more often.

Jason Atwood: So for me, that's one of the main, main ones that I always point to as a massive, massive feeling, or a massive great feature. Then, obviously, things like perspectives, the ability to narrow in and show just what I need to show at certain times. It's awesome, right? So I have a perspective for one of my employees.

Jason Atwood: I don't say who it is, although that employee knows who it is, and it's a key command away. It's a shift, command, and then their first initial, and then up comes all my waiting fors from that employee. That employee is doing a lot of work, lots of different things, we're involved in tons and tons, but it allows me to zoom in on just what I need from that person at one time, and so that ability to build your custom perspectives and get them to really fit your life, it's, again, super helpful.

Jason Atwood: So those two, and then lastly, and I know, because again, it was back in the day, following Merlin Mann and his journey, knowing he came out to Omni Group, met with you guys, there's stuff that's built in that's very sort of high end GTD.

Jason Atwood: The concept of reviewing a project and setting up a cadence to review that project is extremely powerful. The ability to say, "I want to review, I want to put this project on hold, but I want it to come up back into my life every X," maybe every two months, every six months or every year, "So I can set the cadence of how I want that to come back to me," kind of takes over huge parts of GTD, like the someday/maybe list, and it doesn't have to come back to you every single week, because I don't need to review my 50th birthday party every single week. That's not for a couple of years, but maybe once every six months, it should pop up in my view and go, "Hey. Here's another six months. How's your thoughts on your 50th birthday party coming?"

Brent Simmons: How are your thoughts on your 50th birthday coming?

Jason Atwood: Well, every time I talk about it, they do come a little bit closer, so ... Let's see, it's six reviews away, I think.

Brent Simmons: Everyone's going to Vegas? What's the plan?

Jason Atwood: You know what? The project has not been activated, so I'm not really sure. It's somewhere between a big party and a cruise. I don't know.

Brent Simmons: It's one of those birthdays where, because I've had mine, it's easy to go back and forth on what you want. "Let's do something huge. No, let's pretend it didn't even happen at all."

Jason Atwood: I'm definitely more on the huge than the "didn't" pretend.

Brent Simmons: That's good.

Jason Atwood: I would like to do something that would be fun.

Brent Simmons: Cool. What's your training program like, getting people up to speed with OmniFocus? Do you have in house stuff done? Tutors? How's that all work?

Jason Atwood: So it's interesting. Because we're a company that trains people a lot, and every party that we roll out for Salesforce, for every type of organization, we always include training. So training and education is a core belief at Arkus. We believe it's really important. So when we kind of started to build our program of, "Well, how do we get people on board? How do we get people to learn GTD or to use this software?", whether it's Salesforce or whether it's Google or whether it's OmniFocus, we wanted to build that in to sort of the whole onboarding process. So we actually have a program called the Arkus BootCamp. It's ABC.

Brent Simmons: ABC. Learn the ABCs.

Jason Atwood: That's right, or it's as easy as ABC, which is actually a 90-day program that has hundreds of items that need to be done. Everything from setting up your email to downloading and installing OmniFocus, to getting your license, to getting it syncing, so we have lots of different pieces that we put in there. So the onboarding piece has a lot about it. There is everything from meeting one-on-one with somebody and going over their OmniFocus with them, which I find is really something that is extremely helpful. Getting someone to see how they do it. "How do you organize your folders? Do you do it this way? Do you do it by your work? Do you do it by your personal?", and we have that as part of it. We have recorded lots of our internal workshops that we do, where maybe we'll do a question and answer. I did one just last month where I said it was like the holiday OmniFocus and GTD workshop, or just internally, we just open up a GoToMeeting and people come on and just ask questions, give away tips, like, "How do you do this? How do you do that?" So we build that in as well.

Jason Atwood: Then we also have a lot of shadowing. So one of the things we like to do is have people shadow other people when they're doing things, so we build that into the process as well. One of the sets of tasks is to sit with three people and go over their weekly review with them. "How do you do your weekly review? Where do you do it?", and kind of just go through that process. So that builds both into OmniFocus and also the GTD methodology that we're teaching.

Brent Simmons: Cool. So it sounds like there's continuing education and improvement for everybody. It's not just training and onboarding, but it's a continuous thing with workshops and so on.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. We're a remote company, so we have collaboration software, and one of the tools that we started using a couple of years ago, this little thing called Slack, which now I feel like it's everywhere.

Brent Simmons: It is.

Jason Atwood: Yes, it is everywhere. So we created a Slack channel for it, where we share tips and tricks on productivity and OmniFocus. In fact, I post probably something once a week. I posted something the other day. I was like, "Hey guys, you know this little button on iOS that you can click to make a task into a project? Isn't that cool?" Because it's a lot. The software is very powerful, but it has a lot of features that you've got to dig in to figure out. So just constant reminders, constantly showing people how to do stuff, giving them tips, screenshots and stuff like that. We realized it's not just one thing. You can't just read a book and figure it out. You can't just read a pamphlet or a guide and be done.

Jason Atwood: We also include things like podcasts. We've recorded lots of our own podcasts and stuff, and we've put those on the list of things for people to listen to as part of their onboarding.

Brent Simmons: Like internal, company-only podcasts?

Jason Atwood: External podcasts, but we do a whole series every ... We do a podcast that's about Salesforce and the Salesforce ecosystem and news. My cohost and I have been doing it since 2010. So one summer, I think three summers ago, he said, "You know what we should do? Instead of having ...", because we were recording weekly at the time. He says, "Instead of doing it for the whole summer, why don't we record five of them in one day in June, and then spread them out throughout the summer?" But everything we do is very news based. It's like, "Hey, what did Salesforce do?", or, "What's new coming out in Salesforce?", so he said, "Well, why don't we do a whole series on GTD?"

Jason Atwood: So every summer now, for the last three summers, we did a sort of a whole GTD, because it's not time-based, and then we'd release it over the summer. So we don't have the podcast for the whole summer, so we can take the summer off. Yeah.

Brent Simmons: Oh that's cool. That's a long day, though. I've done multiple episodes of The Omni Show in a day, and that's enough to tire me out, and our episodes aren't that long either, but five? Wow. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: I think we did six in one day.

Brent Simmons: Six?

Jason Atwood: That was the most we ever did, and I will tell you, by the last one, you are… Then, of course, we're pretending that it's a day or not a day, we're like, "So, it's August. How was your summer?", and we're doing it in June, but it was nice to do it on something else. In fact, this last summer we did a whole episode called "Why OmniFocus?", which we went through all of our reasons and why we pick it. So nice marketing material. Yeah.

Brent Simmons: Oh, that's great. So people in your company mostly use the Mac app. I imagine most people are in front of computers most of the time, or a lot of iOS users?

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So we're a Mac shop. Again, that's where you go with what you know. So everybody has MacBook Pros, and then everybody gets a phone from the company, because again, we're very remote, and so just to have a phone that you can use ... So everybody gets an iPhone, and so we give people both licenses of OmniFocus Pro for the Mac and for the iOS. So my guess is most everybody's using both.

Jason Atwood: Again, it would be shocking to me if people weren't at least using the high, high adoption of the desktop, but then the iOS, as I show it and I train people, like, "This is the capture tool, right? Say something to your phone, say something to your watch, and it gets pulled in, swept in. This is the ultimate ubiquitous capture tool." So when people really start to get it and they get that syncing, that ability to have everything just kind of sync within the cloud and come back to the other side of it, it really is a powerful message.

Brent Simmons: I'm curious, do you guys run your own syncing server?

Jason Atwood: No, we use yours.

Brent Simmons: Okay.

Jason Atwood: Thank you.

Brent Simmons: Yeah. Our pleasure. Absolutely. I mean, it's encrypted, it's wonderful, but there are some organizations that, for whatever reason, prefer to run their own, which I'm glad we offer that ability.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. The reason we actually use yours, and it was a thought, we thought about it, is that I really think the adoption of GTD hits a different level when it steps outside of the work. I think someone who uses OmniFocus and GTD at Arkus uses it for all the Arkus stuff. Okay, they're kind of semi-adopting it. It's when people start to use it for their other stuff, their other things in their life, their other internal and external commitments, that I know that that's when they've really fully adopted it, because your mind doesn't know you're at work and all this sort of stuff.

Jason Atwood: So one of the reasons we leave the sync in your side, and we actually tell them to sign up with their own email address, is because they should take it with them. If they go away from Arkus, and I hope nobody goes, but if they were to move on and to retire in 50 years, let's say, they could then just go buy their own version of OmniFocus and sync back up, and away they go. They haven't lost anything, and they could delete their Arkus folder if they wanted to, but they would have all their stuff. So that's one of the reasons we like to keep it kind of away from our stuff. It's because we really think of OmniFocus as their personal tool. I can't see it. I can't go into it. I don't know what's in it. It's your tool to manage your stuff.

Brent Simmons: That's super enlightened. I like that. Yeah, and I think you're right. If it encourages adoption of the kind of the GTD lifestyle, that probably also just benefits the work too.

Jason Atwood: There's certainly stuff I would not put into OmniFocus if I thought that the company that I used to work for could read it. I would not put it in there. Update resume, find new job, yell at boss. I don't know.

Brent Simmons: Yeah. Well, there's a reason we like to use end-to-end encryption these days.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, absolutely.

Brent Simmons: So no matter where it's stored, hopefully just the person whose OmniFocus it is can see it.

Brent Simmons: So what am I not asking you about OmniFocus that I should be asking?

Jason Atwood: The thing that kind of makes us a little unique is ... Some of the things I've talked about is that it is a corporate tool, and that we take it as just like giving ... I'm sure there at The Omni Group, you get an email client. They say, "Here's your email. You're going to use this email." They probably don't say, "Well, you could use Hotmail and you can use Gmail and you can use our corporate one, and you over there, you can not use email." Some things we just take as part of it, and I think it's pretty unique to what I've seen, is that we've just said, "Hey, this is the best of breed productivity tool."

Jason Atwood: Because I want our people at Arkus to be able to satisfy their clients, to be on top of it and to be extremely good at what they do, I want to give them the best tool, and so we just see this as the best tool, and that's why we give it to them, and that's why we train them on it, and don't leave that up to ... It feels like every other organization in the planet allows everybody else just to pick your productivity tool. "Oh, you want to use Outlook for tasks, you want to use Google Keep, you want to use Evernote." Well, that seems as messed up as giving everybody their own email server, so I think that's what's kind of unique, and I think it's actually made the adoption and the use of it much easier, because everybody is using the same thing. We can all talk the same language, we can all talk perspectives, we can talk how to set this setting up as opposed to sort of having different tools for everything.

Jason Atwood: For us, I think that's the winning piece, and what's the most interesting that's come of it, and maybe not the secret sauce, because I'm saying it aloud, but the ...

Brent Simmons: It's just sauce.

Jason Atwood: It's just sauce at this point. It's a recipe on the internet. Clients notice. I've had more than one client come to me and say, "How is it you guys are so good?", and I'm like, "Well what do you mean?", and they're like, "Well, how do you like organize your stuff, and how do you do stuff? It seems like everybody is so kind of on top of things." Then I say, "Well, we use these things, we use these tools, and we train them on it, and everybody has this methodology and we have this great tool."

Jason Atwood: It's interesting, because in the last couple of years, it's become more and more people asking us not just how to use Salesforce, but also, "How do we do this other stuff? How do we become good at those other things?" That's kind of been an interesting change in what we do.

Brent Simmons: Oh, that must be a great feeling to have your clients come to you and say, "How are you so good?" I love that.

Jason Atwood: Yes. "How are you so bad?", is not the one you want hear.

Brent Simmons: Okay, but I see the point there that this kind of software in this kind of environment is just as critical as your mail provider or what people use for chat, or all these different things. This belongs on that same level of care and standardization.

Jason Atwood: Yep.

Brent Simmons: So I heard you ran a company in Africa.

Jason Atwood: Oh yeah. So somewhere in my bio, deep on my LinkedIn, having nothing to do with GTD or OmniFocus, although I wish I had those tools at that point. I graduated from college, and my mother had owned, and lived in Africa for about 10 years, and owned a company over there that made handmade carpets. Something had gone wrong in the sale of that company, and she had left the country and sold the company away to somebody else. It was one of those, "You can pay me later for it as you make money." Because again we're not really talking about some massive industry, but the person never paid, let's just say.

Jason Atwood: So a year later, I was heading into my senior year at college, and she said, "Hey, would you be interested in going back to Africa and taking over the company," because you know the person hadn't paid for it, "And running it? As an experience or as a life thing, or hey, if you can do something with it, go for it." So I took her up on it, and I graduated from college, and six days later, I was on a plane to Kenya, and I had probably one of the most mind blowing years of my life running a company of 20 something employees. I got an ulcer.

Brent Simmons: Oh no. That's so young, too, to get an ulcer.

Jason Atwood: I wrote a big business plan before I went, of which absolutely was totally just wrong. All my assumptions were terrible, but it was an incredible experience, and I look back on it as sort of something that has given me a lot of courage going forward. So it was a lot of fun.

Brent Simmons: Wow. Yeah, because you're jumping into the deep end of being responsible for an entire company, and you're in Kenya. That's a lot.

Jason Atwood: It was a lot. I was thinking about it today, maybe thinking you'd ask this question, and I was like, "What was the fun thing or the most interesting..." Oh, of course I didn't have any money, but I wanted to do advertising, because I had learned to do advertising in college, of course. Business degree, so you've got to do advertising.

Jason Atwood: So there's a little local paper called the Karen Chronicle. Their distribution was probably nothing, and maybe came out once a week or something, out of someone's back garage. So I went to them and I said, "Hey, I will write," and this is back ... We're talking '95, so computers and the internet not big over here, certainly not big over there. So I said, "I'll write articles for you about buying your first computer, and what is the internet, and all this stuff, if you'll give me ad space for the carpet company." So we made that deal, and I still have copies of the old articles I wrote.

Brent Simmons: Oh, that's awesome.

Jason Atwood: A lot of fun.

Brent Simmons: Yeah. Oh yeah, that's business. Sometimes you've got to be scrappy.

Jason Atwood: That's right.

Brent Simmons: Just figure it out, barter, whatever it takes.

Jason Atwood: Whatever it takes.

Brent Simmons: Yeah. Have you been back to Africa since?

Jason Atwood: I've been back a couple of times since. I haven't been back in the last ... Again, this was many, many years ago, but I haven't been back recently recently, in the last 10, 15 years, but it's definitely on my list. My now 14 year old daughter and my wife, they hear about my adventures in Africa a lot, and they've never been, so part of me really wants to bring them back and show them why I have all this crazy stuff in the house and all these pictures. So there's a trip in the future to go back.

Brent Simmons: Oh, that sounds like a great family trip.

Jason Atwood: It will be something.

Brent Simmons: Maybe that's your 50th birthday right there.

Jason Atwood: You know what? I think you just put the next action on that project.

Brent Simmons: All right. Wow. Thanks, Jason. How can people find you on the web?

Jason Atwood: You can find me, along with the other millions of people, on the big Twitter. @JasonMAtwood. If you want to read the blogs or see all the other stuff we do at Arkus, you can go to arkusinc.com.

Brent Simmons: Cool, and those will be links in the show notes, of course, so people can tap with their fingers or click with their mouses.

Jason Atwood: Awesome.

Brent Simmons: I'd also like to thank our intrepid producer, Mark Bozsko. Say hello, Mark.

Mark Boszko: Hello Mark.

Brent Simmons: And especially, I want to thank you for listening. Thank you. Music.

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