THE OMNI SHOW

Jason Atwood: I was texting with my daughter the other day. She's at college and she's studying to be a lawyer. And I'm like, "Oh, how's studying going?" And she sends me a picture. Sends me a picture, it's her laptop, it's open, there's some pictures on a thing, and then her iPad is next to her, open up to OmniFocus. And I was like, "Okay, I did well."

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's Andrew J. Mason. And today we learn how Jason Atwood uses OmniFocus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of the Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we talk with, Jason Atwood, CEO of Arkus Incorporated, a Salesforce consulting partner. He's a long-time OmniFocus user and he's been with us on episodes 45 and 70. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jason Atwood: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be back, one of my favorite podcasts.

Andrew J. Mason: I have to say. The one thing that's different if you've listened to the last two episodes with Jason versus this one is that the title is now CEO versus COO. Congratulations on the, I don't want to say the upgrade, but the career shift there.

Jason Atwood: Thank you. A couple of years ago, my two business partners decided to hit the early retirement button, if you will, and so I got promoted to CEO and I've been doing it since I think 2023, 2022, something like that. So it's been a couple of years. It's been really good. Definitely a challenge. Definitely have to align all my productivity skills to keep on top of it.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, nobody better suited for the role. I'm 100% sure of that. A few things have happened in the last couple of years since we last talked. You were last on in 2021 and we're in 2025 right now. Talk to me a little bit about how the environment shifted. Has your use of OmniFocus happened to have shifted as well? Just kind of catch us up to speed on what's been going on for you.

Jason Atwood: It's interesting, my use of OmniFocus, and we talked before, I've been using since, I found my birthday, my OmniFocus sneaky peak birthday when I think Ken sent me the invites that you're allowed in, it was May 17th, 2007. And so I've been using this piece of software pretty much every day on every device that has been available for the last almost 20 years. And so I am obviously someone who sticks to something. Once I get it, I like it. I really don't really want to learn a whole new tool. And there's some tools that just hold my heart so much that I won't move off of them. From a daily perspective, I don't think I use OmniFocus any differently, although just more. I just use it more. I put more into it. I put more things that I want to do in the future. I use it more for capturing long-term things and I use the filtering abilities and the ability to see what I need to see, but not see everything more and more. So my OmniFocus database has probably blown up in the last couple of years, especially actually turning around 50. One of the things that that became as a point in life, I don't know if you've hit one of these milestones, but you've definitely hit one of them, is it's a time of reflection. You could say it's halfway of my life, maybe if I get to a hundred, but it's a great time to... you hit those decade milestones and say, "Hey, am I happy with what I'm doing? Am I where I am? Where am I going?" You can measure it against your friends, your family, or your children. I leaned actually very heavily on OmniFocus as a way to go back and do, I wouldn't say a decade review, but go back and just look at stuff that I had said and captured years and years and years ago, is this stuff that's still true to me? Is this stuff that I'm still committed to? And then I just captured a bunch of other stuff. I was having ideas and businesses and things I wanted to do, and so a lot was captured in. So I think that in the last couple of years, I think the biggest change is that my OmniFocus database is probably double or triple size that it was before.

Andrew J. Mason: For me, something that I've noticed over the years as I'm journaling is how often I have the same thought and think it's a novel, fresh, new thought. And then when I look back I'm like, "Oh, shoot. I was thinking that five years ago. This wasn't anything new." I hadn't traveled new ground there. What for you do you feel like is fresh territory for you as you're looking to the future?

Jason Atwood: Well, five years ago or only Todd's conversation, things like AI really wasn't on anybody's roadmap, so that changed everybody's lives. For me, I think it was a way to, and we'll talk about journaling practice, which is an interesting one because I've asked around a lot of people how they do it and everybody has their own thing. But as a way to map out where I'm going to go and what makes me happy, and a lot of it was a checksum to the career I'm in, the job I have, the company I'm running, the people around me and what if this all went away tomorrow? What if I had to change careers? What if I had to move out of here location wise, or what if I had to change a whole new career? Am I happy where I am? And a lot of it came out as just, yeah, I am. I'm in an ecosystem that I've been around longer than OmniFocus and I had that re-upping of, "I actually love this ecosystem. I love the job I do, I love the people I work with and I love the company that I run." And a lot of it was doubling down. It was saying, "Okay, I'm going to do more of that thing and maybe less of other things." There's a great book, Seth Godin, I always reference him, but Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip. He's written like 30 books, but The Dip is all about if you really want to become the best at something, how you have to let go of a lot of things, like narrow your focus, stay really true to that one thing. And ever since I've read it, it has been something that every year, every decade I try to take to that book. If I really want to be great at these three or four things, and that could be parenting, that could be running a company, that could being a GTD coach, what are the things that are stopping me or that I could take out of my purview or do less of? It's always taking that, are these really commitments I'm excited about? Maybe there's ones that I'm not and the chance to go into that pending or that on hold list in OmniFocus and go dropped, dropped, dropped. These are not things that I have to keep around forever.

Andrew J. Mason: Having the level of perspective that you have being almost two decades in on this, what is something that... You mentioned honing the focus that at the very beginning you thought, "Okay, this is something that I understand to be true, that over the years..." not that you've misunderstood it, but you find it to either be less true or has shifted over the time?

Jason Atwood: I would say the biggest part of my practice that has expanded is just the higher levels. We don't have to go into the full GTD thing. I'm a Certified GTD trainer, and so I always lean back to that because OmniFocus is the realization of that methodology for me. But it's getting that higher and higher focus and how that aligns to what you do on a day-to-day basis. I think that took me 15 years to get to and I've been doing GTD for twenty-something years now, 21 years, and I think I get to another layer higher, another level of that, another altitude almost every year. And it's when you get to these next levels and you can see, apply those to your daily tasks. When you look at something to do this little item, this little twenty-minute visible physical thing to do, and then you can quickly align that to something that's bigger in your life, it becomes much easier to make decisions around prioritization around what do things mean to me? And as I've gotten somewhat older, I can't stop myself. You've already dropped my age on the podcast.

Andrew J. Mason: Sorry. We'll erase that.

Jason Atwood: Can't hide that anymore. As I've passed beyond five decades on this planet, that piece of it has gotten more and more. I'm actually excited to get, what would it look like in 10 years from now or in eight years from now when I look back and what does my practice look like? And if I could even get higher levels of that, that I think would be fascinating to think about. As well as I still do the day-to-day stuff, I still capture, I was just, before this call, of course, going into my inbox, I'd captured a bunch of stuff, I capture throughout the day. So I'm still using it on the very, very basic projects, tasks, repeating, next actions, the whole thing. But it's those higher level things that I've found I've really gotten more and more into the system and it's been helpful.

Andrew J. Mason: I know one thing that has shifted since the last couple of years is the release of GTD for Teams. Has that really worked on, shifted, narrowed your focus or how you do things or approach things there at Arkus?

Jason Atwood: Absolutely. In fact, while reading it, I did have a moment of, "Did they come and interview me and sort of steal what we do?" Because I was like, "Have they've been listening to me?" Now, have had some podcasts with David Allen and I have talked about how I implemented it at Arkus, so I'm hoping that somewhere in the universe, some of that actually made it into the book. But it's a great way of thinking about it from an organizational standpoint. And I've been applying GTD terminology and practices to my company from the beginning. Everybody comes in, they read the book, they learn it. We actually just released a brand new internal assessment tool so we can see where everybody is. And so we're excited to level set everybody and be like, "Oh, well here you are and here's where we're expecting you to be in your GTD practice." So that's a brand new thing. But just the concept of having everybody have a methodology and a tool set behind them to be able to handle the amount of work and amount of stuff in our lives and just be good. We deal with so many people in so many places and you know who they are. There's the people you email and they never email you back and they forget. There's the ones that don't return your phone calls, there's the ones who say, "Andrew, I'll get you that paper by Friday." And then they don't. You have to follow up with them. Or the ones that you leave a meeting, they made seven commitments, but you know they're not going to keep up with them. All that stuff is the stuff that is so easy to avoid. So if you have a good practice, and so just weaving that into the DNA of Arkus has been a way to create a space that everybody is at that level. And it actually turned to me when someone came back to Arkus. We call people who leave and come back, boomerangs, for obvious reasons. And I was interviewing this employee, I'll try not to out the person. I was interviewing them about coming back and I said, "Well, what'd you learn?" They went to a straight-up competitor and were there for about a year. And I said, "Well, what'd you learn? What was different?" There's some internal practices and sales methodologies and things like that. Okay. I said, "Well, what about that whole GTD thing that we're crazy about?" He said, "You know, I saw it when I got to this other firm they didn't have it. I missed it. I missed it that everybody didn't have that common language." And he said, "At Arkus, GTD is our working agreement." And that's really where teams talks about it, it talks about a lot of the working agreements of people working together. And again, it's not just a team at a company. It could be a group of friends, it could be people putting together a podcast and this way we are in a team right now. But having that working agreement, those standards of how we're going to work and play together and how we're going to get the thing done, and we lean on GTD as part of that working agreement.

Andrew J. Mason: It removes the pressure. These are conversations we don't have to have about, like you mentioned, level setting. It's just like we all know what page we happen to be on, and then there's less of that mental energy that I have to take up with, "Can I trust what they said that they were going to do what they had to do? Is it going to become a waiting for for me? Or how often do I have to review that waiting for that they have." Very, very good stuff. And talk to me a little bit about AI and how AI is affecting, if anything, your workflow, how you use OmniFocus, how think about things, what role does that play for you? And I know with Salesforce it plays a pretty decent sized role as well.

Jason Atwood: It is. Obviously the AI wave has been fast and furious and just keeping up with it has been difficult. And I actually, for people who can't spend an extra five, 10 hours a week learning about this, playing with it, I would say find that time because it's that impactful. Interesting going back, we looked at where our use of AI was, and since we are using the Salesforce platform, Salesforce actually has had machine learning with their Einstein product for I think since 2016. So we've actually had it in the background helping us out a little bit. Obviously it's been in Gmail, it's in your spam filters. It's when it became that ChatGPT moment where it's now talking back to you. Where we are, last year was a lot about enablement. I found that my company was full of a lot of interesting people who, some were on it, using it every day, figuring it out, and others were like, "I don't even know that thing exists," or "Why would I use it?" And so last year it was a lot about training and education and enablement courses. We did some internal things where we created a space where we could all play together and show each other what we're doing in a collaborative environment. So it's sort of to say, "Hey, look, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm doing. Oh, I tried this thing." And then we started building out tools. I'm not sure it's the right thing to do in every scenario, but we're builders of tools. So we decided to build out a bunch of internal tools to help us. And watching the adoption of that, watching people start to use it, get it like, "Oh, I could use..." "Oh, this tool's really helpful. It saved me two hours, it saved me 10 minutes," or whatever, really thinking about it from the productivity side. Obviously a company that has productivity in it and its part of its thing and that follows GTD. For us, it's about productivity. And if I can boost people's productivity by 1, 2, 3X, I'm very happy. So that's really been... last year was building out that. And this year we are rolling out agents. Agents are the new thing and they have tool sets. They're great. So we've rolled out three or four already internal, have a roadmap of up to 30, I think, by the time we're done. And it's getting to where everybody thinks in that first state, "Well, how can I use this agent to help me do this?" In terms of a GTD and OmniFocus. I'm waiting for the OmniFocus AI moment. So, hey Ken, if you're listening, call me, you might be. And obviously the platform on the OSX side, on the MAC platform, there's been a fits or starts. I have used it in my practice. I've taken certain pieces. I'll sometimes just take my day's task list and just plop it in GPT and say, "Which of these should I do?" Or "Which ones of these are aligned to myself?" I've built custom GPTs that have my GTD concepts in it and asked it of things. I've built custom assistants and thrown them into our GTD channel at Arkus so people could ask questions of it, "How long should it take me to do my weekly review?" or "I'm struggling with this concept of the engage concept, can you give me some pointers or test me on it?" So we've been playing around a lot like that. And the last one I did the other day, I found fun, is I took my areas of focus, my roles and my responsibilities, which is something that I review every week. And I popped it in, I said, "Tell me what I'm doing here. Where can I do better? What are the things that I could do? List them out." And it's amazing how I can go through and give you pointers and be like, "This thing doesn't apply to this," or "You have this listed twice," or "Is this really a role or an area of focus?" So all sorts of ways. Again, I'm waiting for the moment where it's built right into my tool set so I can just could just ask of it right there in the tool.

Andrew J. Mason: Shout out to the Kairos Assessment. I know you're probably familiar with that and them where they talk about how you like to take in information, whether you're a reader or a listener. It turns out I was off the charts on verbal, meaning I need to hear myself say something, which is awful for somebody that's thinking that I'm trying to talk with them when I'm really just trying to process information. But a way that GPT has really shined for me in regards to OmniFocus has been as I go out to walk the dog, just take seven minutes, hit the audio record and just brain dump verbally, anything that's top of mind that I hadn't gotten to or put into the inbox recently. So it's just like, "Hey, got to clean the kitchen, got to put that thing in the dishwasher. There's a pair of dirty clothes that need to go into the hamper. Oh, I got to get back with that client." All the things that I just talk through to myself, I then asked GPT to summarize and bullet point, and then that becomes fodder for the inbox. And then it's at least at some level synthesized. I still need to think about next actions for real, for real on that. But at least it chunks it together into categories and throws it into the inbox for me. That's been so helpful for me.

Jason Atwood: It's great and you can go there and ask it to talk to you about the practice or ask me questions. I did an analysis where I was like, I wanted to align some of the things we do at Arkus to the three pillars of GTD. And I said, "All right. Take these things and align them and let's talk about it." So talking with the AI and having them answer and then come up with ideas around, "oh, you could align them this way or if you did..." Fascinating stuff.

Andrew J. Mason: Thought partnership, yeah, that's there. Talk to me about, this is a fun one, but if you had to remove all but three features from OmniFocus, like down to the essence of, "Man, I can only keep these three things," what would show up for you as like, "You know what? As much as I like all the other stuff, I can't get rid of these things, these are essential for me to stay afloat and alive on OmniFocus."?

Jason Atwood: All right. That's pretty easy. I just sorted it in my head, came up with the top 10 and through... Forecast View, I live in Forecast View single day. It's where I start my day. It's where I end my day, it's where I renegotiate my commitments at the end of the day when I look at my Forecast View and there's all those reds, I go, "Okay. Well, I need too..." Some of them are like, "Oh, I better do that, I said I was going to send that email by the end of the day. I got to do that." A lot of them are like, "I want to do that today, but I can't do that today because I ran out of time." So moving those and just selecting them and dropping them on the next day is one of my favorite things. So it's like, "All right, I'll put those on tomorrow's task list." Perspectives, obviously. The power to be able to filter out things so you're only looking at the things that matter to you and the things that are important. Again, I use my OmniFocus like another person, a piece of my brain. It has thousands of projects in it, thousands, thousands on hold, thousands pending. But I only need to look at the active ones, the ones that are in front of me that I'm working on. I try to keep that list under 40 or so just so I can look at it and take it in. So if I didn't have Perspectives, I couldn't do that. It's one of the things that is just... and you could build now with, I'll put a plug in, 4.2, I think, has some really nice new filters and ability to do more granular Perspectives. And so those are awesome. I could not go without them. And then lastly, it's the most simple because it's probably one of the first features that I still haven't seen anybody come up with, which is the ability to defer a project, to say that I don't want to see this project until this certain day. It's based on 43 folders. It's based on, "I'm going to put this in this month so I can not think about it until that month comes due. And then when that month comes due, this is when I want to see this pop back up in my head or in my view or in my Perspective." And that is so powerful because you can then say, "Oh, it's my 50th birthday," or my 60th, let's talk about my 60th already. I don't need to see that until seven years from now. So let's put the defer date and then when it pops up, I'm like, "Oh, my past self put that literally in seven years ago and said, "You need to look at this in seven years and start planning it." And that feature is just... you couldn't go without it. So those top three, and I feel bad for the review feature and I feel bad for the quick entry. I feel bad for sync. See, I've thrown in a couple extra there.

Andrew J. Mason: When I think about how many projects you just mentioned, you have thousands upon thousands. Somebody from the outside looking at is probably "Really? Really thousands and thousands?" And like recognizes like. I'm nodding my head along with you thinking when you think of the four quadrants, crazy maker, visionary, visionary on the empowering side and how to effectively steward that in the right way, what for you makes you, take a crack at this in any direction that you like, but makes so passionate about having that level of integrity, having that level of, "These are thoughts, my attention is on them. I don't necessarily have a next action fleshed out for them or I do," and starting to move in that direction, but why tend the garden at all? What is it that's in you at that first level, first order that's like, "Man, I want to be as productive as I possibly can be as a human being."

Jason Atwood: I'm just following the GTD methodology pretty simply. If it's... get it out of your head, and I have a lot of stuff in my head and I spend at least maybe an hour a day now probably getting things out of my head, not all of it ends up into OmniFocus, which is part of my new practice, which I let a lot stay pre, right? There's a lot of stuff that comes out that's like, "Okay, that's not at the commitment level that I'm going to throw it in there." But if you go back to projects being the real core, anything that is more than two actions, I think in the official documentation it's due within a year but I would say that's not great because anything more... That vacation you want to take in Italy in three years, your 60th birthday party, anything that's coming up and happens all the time, those were all in your head. And if you just get them out of your head, you can really get to a point where you can automate your life. I like to say it's like automating my life. I don't want to have to remember to check the fire extinguishers every three months. I don't want to have to remember to empty the whatever water in the laundry machine every two months. I don't want to have those moments at three in the morning where I go, "Aah." I don't want to. So if I can get those out, the worst case is I'll go, "Ooh, I need to..." I'll be like, "Oh, it's an OmniFocus, don't worry about it." And actually it creates an, this is going to sound strange, but I forget a lot of things and I intentionally do because I don't want to remember them all. I want to have something else remember them for me. This is where I think if we get to some really built in great AI, I don't want to remember this stuff. I want someone else to remember it for me. I want to know their brain system, another system for me to take over that stuff because that's not where I'm going to be the most creative, or powerful, or get the best ideas thinking about fire extinguishers and laundry water. That's not it. What's going to bring the best ability out of me in creativity is if that stuff's gone and outside of my head. So that's why I embrace it that way and let things come up once every six months in my review folder, my review perspective, let them come up every couple of years and I look at it and go, "Oh." My favorite is I look at something and I say, "Oh, I did that. I had that as a project. I just did it. Great." Or I look at it and go, "No, that's not something I'm committed to." I might've committed to that four years ago. Learn something, read something, watch something, I don't know. And then I go, "No, I'm not committed to that at all anymore." And I'll be able to say, "Yeah, I'm moving on," and drop it out and then it's off my radar out of my head.

Andrew J. Mason: For anybody that's sitting there thinking like, "Well, but why track that? Why track that every six months?" I can attest literally two days ago our carbon monoxide battery alone went off at 2:00 AM woke the whole family up because we didn't have that in the system or didn't have a reminder set somewhere. So it's like, "Okay, do you want to stave off a potentially distracting life disrupting moment? It's really easy to do if you track it in your system." Kudos on that. Talk to me a little bit more about, do you have any words of wisdom for people that are maybe just entering the workforce, or career, or just starting to manage bits of their life? They're getting to that space where I'm bumping up against the edge of what I feel like my brain can effectively handle as an office internally, I know I need to do something. We've got generation Z who maybe it's a stereotype that is more notification focused versus list focused, but there's something there that's saying there are habits that might need to be ingrained or begun. And what's a great first attack habit that you would suggest for somebody that's just starting to feel the pressure of managing their life?

Jason Atwood: Well, let me give you a... I'll do a pat myself on the back. I was texting with my daughter the other day. She's at college and she's studying to be a lawyer. And I'm like, "Oh, how's studying going?" And she sends me a picture. Sends me a picture, it's her laptop, it's open, there's some pictures on a thing, and then her iPad is next to her, open up to OmniFocus. And I was like, "Okay, I did well." Has she mastered all the pieces of it? No, she still forgets things, but I like the idea that I get that. So I'll go back to that. What I would tell somebody in this day and age, first of all, relying on notifications is relying on the smoke in your apartment to know that there's a fire. That's not going to work out for anybody. I think it is to get that tool, everybody has the one tool that everybody knows how to use and everybody uses, which is the calendar. But so vary people that I meet, or talk to, or try to help with have the other side of that tool. They look at their calendar as everything and they threw everything in their calendar and then that's a crazy maker, you're not going to work. I had an argument with someone the other day and I said, "Here's why it won't scale well." Gave them the 10 reasons. So to have that other piece of the system, that other piece of your trusted system that is not your calendar, that's one piece of advice, I say, "Go get that tool. Try one. Whether it's OmniFocus, whether it's something else, try another tool for those types of things because you're missing so much if you're just relying on your calendar, or your inbox, or your Instagram, or your notifications, those things don't scale. You need to have another place to put it." And so that'd be the one thing, just get to that point. Obviously I'd probably give them the book of GTD and say, start there. But if you could just get the other piece of your trusted system, realize that it's a pairing of the two. In fact, I haven't seen a lot of calendars that do both. So it's the pairing and it's to understand how to use that other tool. And the A, the one A bit is you got to check it as much as you check your calendar. And that should be the one, two punch of everybody. Every time you check your calendar, you should check your task list, every single time. And if you get into that habit, then things won't slip through. You'll live a better life. So that's the one thing, get that task manager tool and start populating with stuff.

Andrew J. Mason: I can't think of any better way to say it than that. And so that's where I'll leave it for this conversation. Jason, this has been awesome for a couple of reasons. One, is because I get to see that you are doing awesome and it looks like life is doing well and we actually get to see and talk to each other. So now there's the visual component of it as well, but also too just for your inspiration, hearing you talk about this and your adherence to it is, I think, really inspirational to me. And I think also a lot of people that are going to listen to this podcast. So thank you for that.

Jason Atwood: Great. Well, I really appreciate you reaching out and look beyond, maybe I'll be the first to be number four as well.

Andrew J. Mason: No, that's going to happen.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty.

Andrew J. Mason: Thank you so much, Jason, for joining us.

Jason Atwood: All right.

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.