THE OMNI SHOW

Lee Garrett: I tend to keep everything in OmniFocus, because OmniFocus, at its core, is just a series of lists. It's lots and lots of lists set out in different formats and perspectives. So if it's a very good organizer of lists, why not use it for all of my lists? And I know that I'm going to go into it every day because if I don't go into OmniFocus every day, all of a sudden I lose momentum, I lose flow, and I'm not as productive as I need to be.

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 Lee Garrett uses OmniFocus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we're excited to chat with Lee Garrett. Lee's the owner of ScreenCastsOnline. He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years. And he's worked his way up from being a technician in school through managing multi-million pound transformation projects in the UK. Lee, it's such an honor to be able to hang out with you today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Lee Garrett: I think the honor's all mine, to be perfectly honest, Andrew. I mean, I listen to Omni Show, I've listened to it from almost day one. And I think the last show I listened to was Rosemary, who I've got a lot of admiration for. There were people from my country you've been interviewing as well, like William Gallagher. Love him. I think he's fantastic, all of his stuff. So yeah, the honor's mine to be here, so thanks for asking me.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, super, super grateful that you could spare some time just to hang out with us and talk to us more about how you use OmniFocus. I'd love to know if you wouldn't mind giving a little bit more around your context, your world. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. You mentioned UK, tell us a little bit more about where you find yourself in the UK and what you currently do.

Lee Garrett: Well, I'd love to give you some color about where I am. But as I look outside, the color is gray, which is very normal for the UK. And I live in one of the sunnier bits of the UK as well. I live in Margate, which is right on the southeast tip. So generally we get quite a bit of sun in the summer. But what day is it today? 27th of February, yeah, it's grim and grotty out there, but it's a nice place to be in general. We're quite close to London, only a couple of hours away. As far as me and what I do, you've summed it up pretty well. I've got a couple of roles that I have. I'm the owner of ScreenCastsOnline, as you mentioned. And what we do at ScreenCastsOnline is we provide overview videos on different applications and services in the Apple ecosystem, so Mac apps, iOS apps, iPad apps, et cetera. Wonderful business. It's been around for 20 years now. And yeah, I'm proud to be the owner, but it's not the only thing I do. As you say, I've been in the IT industry for just over 20 years now. In fact, I started out my whole employment career in McDonald's. That was actually the first job I had. So I left school, went straight there. I think you could color my parents quite proud when I did that, but it still worked for me. I made it up to be the youngest restaurant manager in the southeast of the UK. I learned a lot when I was there, so mostly about customer service, communication, that kind of thing. Yeah, I moved into IT... When was it? I think it was about 2004 now. So very low level. I worked in a school changing toners and replacing broken mice, broken keyboards, having things thrown at me in classrooms, that kind of thing. I wasn't living the dream. But I was in IT, I was doing something that I was really passionate about, so I didn't mind it too much, quite enjoyed it. Then over the course of those 10 years, spent a lot of time studying, building up my certifications. I became a Microsoft certified engineer, Cisco certified engineer. I've got VMware qualifications, wireless qualifications, and lots and lots of studying. And eventually I became a solutions architect. So rather than supporting networks and managing server infrastructures and stuff, I was more in pre-sales and planning. So I'd be designing them, just helping customers realize what they need and then helping implement them. So yeah, that was good fun. But I seem to get these ten-year itches and I don't know what comes with them. So I spent just over 10 years at McDonald's. I spent just over 10 years as a techie. And then I thought, don't want to do this anymore, so I completely cut that out and retrained as a project manager. Because I tended to find that project managers, well, they got paid more and they didn't seem to do as much as I did. So I thought, yeah, I quite fancy some of that. So I retrained as a project manager. And then just to add a bit more danger to the mix, I thought I won't work for a particular company anymore, I'll freelance in it and see if I can make a success of that. So that was 10 years ago, and I'm now still doing that. I'm working as a program manager more now with a client I've had for around seven years and delivering lots and lots of, as you say, multi-million pound projects for them. And I'm thinking, yeah, 10 years. 10 years has gone now. What itch have I had? Well, I bought ScreenCastsOnline last year, so I'm planning, hopefully, within the next 12 months, to make the full move across to managing that full time.

Andrew J. Mason: And well said too, I mean to be able to three different career transitions and all of that into just this concise overview. But I love hearing this story arc of where this is headed and-

Lee Garrett: Well, I'm a bit concerned, to be fair, because I've now realized I've been in employment for 30 years. When you're interviewed, actually you listen to what I've done. It's like, no, there's more of it behind me than ahead of me now. What am I going to do? What am I going to do in 10 years time? Am I going to retire? Nah, I'm not going to retire. But we'll see. It's scary when you're lay it all out there.

Andrew J. Mason: No, no, I can't see that happening for you.

Lee Garrett: No, I don't see that.

Andrew J. Mason: I just don't see retirement happening for you. I am curious though, talk to me about this transition to ScreenCastsOnline. So like you said, just a very fresh transition. What gave you the nudge in that direction and what landed you to say, "You know what? I think this is for me"?

Lee Garrett: When I started freelancing, and any project manager worth their salt will tell you that risk management is something that you need to know about. And when I was freelancing, I was concerned, especially when I started, what happens if nobody wants me? What happens if I go six months without a contract or something like that? It's a very, very common sale. So I started getting some side hustles at the same time so that, if for whatever reason I couldn't get a contract, I'd know that I'd have something else to fall back on. So I did some productivity coaching with a company called Think Productive in the UK where I was delivering productivity training, et cetera. That was quite a nice residual income that was coming in there. But I also met Don McAllister, who was the former owner of ScreenCastsOnline at a podcast bash, I think it was around eight years ago. And I just started getting into the Mac at that particular time. And I said to him, "I quite enjoy what you do. I'd love to be able to provide some screencasts for you. What do you say?" So he said, "Yeah, okay, send a couple in and we'll see how you get on." And I was awful at first. I was really, really bad. I didn't know how to talk into a microphone. My microphone that I had was just like the inbuilt one on the MacBook Pro. I had no idea about transitions and how to train people. I was awful. But he gave me lots of help. And then it wasn't long until I actually became a part-time presenter on there. So that was over seven years. And then it was the end of 2023 where he gave me a call and I thought he was telling me I was gone. He said, "Lee, I need to speak to you." I was like-

Andrew J. Mason: Oh, no.

Lee Garrett: ... "Oh no, that's it, he's had enough." But he said, "No, I want to take semi-retirement and I've had ScreenCastsOnline for the last nearly 20 years. How would you feel about taking it over?" And because Don and I have got a very similar background, so he was in IT for the same amount of time as me, he did exactly the same sort of things. He was the same age as me when he formed ScreencastsOnline. It just seemed to be, yeah, let's take a risk. Let's see how it goes. So I had to convince obviously my better half that it was something worth doing. That took a couple of months. But eventually she was on board with it. Yeah, so we're now the proud owners, myself and Kelly, of ScreenCastsOnline.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the tale too, and fresh vision as well, fresh vision for the future. I know you probably have some things in the works that you're thinking about moving toward using that, which is very cool. Let me shift over into the Omni Group and OmniFocus as well. Do you have any kind of recollection as to where that entered the storyline for you? What were you doing? What were you thinking about when you see, "Okay, OmniFocus, what is this?" Tell us a little bit more about that.

Lee Garrett: Well, OmniFocus was one of the first apps that I actually used on the Mac. And to be fair, I hadn't touched the Mac until 2014, so just over 10 years ago. And that's quite late. Because when I was working in the IT industry as a tech I was a Windows engineer. And I do apologize for the fact I was quite an arrogant Windows engineer in that, in the Windows versus Mac debate, I was very much, "Well, we're Windows guys, we're server guys. We know how to set up configurations. We know how to do all this kind of stuff. You use a Mac, it's all done for you. You've got this lovely pretty little bow in this nice expensive device. You guys don't know anything." So what happened was when I first took a contract as a freelancer, the CEO of that particular company wanted to buy a Mac and it was an all Windows estate and he wanted someone to be able to support him. So I thought, "Well, this is going to be easy." I've never touched the Mac before, but I thought there's an opportunity here. So I said to him, "Look, if you buy my company a MacBook Pro, then what I'll do is I will be your personal support for Mac." And what I actually intended to do was just take that device, use it for a couple of months and then sell it. Because I thought, I'm never going to need to use a Mac. But within half an hour of using this device, I was sold. It was like, "I'm never going to use a Windows device again." And to be fair, I haven't touched one, never wanted to. And one of the first applications that I downloaded was OmniFocus. And the reason behind that was because, towards the end of my tech days, I was struggling. I don't mind admitting that everything was getting quite much. I was pushing 40 at that particular time, had a young family, the commute to London was a good five hours a day. And I had to do so much studying to try and keep on top of all of the certifications I had, because I was quite successful as a solutions architect, but I needed to keep on building and building, and it was all getting too much. Somebody pointed me towards Getting Things Done, and that just resonated with me. It took me two days I think to just completely blast through the book. And as much as I tried to implement it on a Windows device, there were quite a bit of friction with some of the apps that I was trying to use. I listened to an episode of, I think it was Mac Power Users. It was one of the first podcasts that I listened to. David Sparks recommended OmniFocus. I downloaded OmniFocus and I just didn't look back. Because it was the only app at the time that just fit that whole methodology for me. It just worked. It had context, it had perspective, it had everything that I needed to be able to feel confident in the systems that I had.

Andrew J. Mason: Such a cool storyline that shows up there, and similar for me actually as well. So 2008, 2009, ran across the, I'm a Mac I'm a PC campaign, staunch Windows supporter. And it's so funny because one of my best friends is a solutions architect. He actually works in IT, and we go butt heads quite a bit about... He still is absolutely convinced that Macs are for people who either don't know how to use Windows or aren't smart enough to use Windows [inaudible 00:11:07].

Lee Garrett: That people still think that, then I wasn't just a dinosaur at the time. Good.

Andrew J. Mason: It not you. No, it's not you. And it might just be, of course, a preference, personality thing. Very cool to hear about that. When you see somebody who is just in that space that you were, you're mentioning the five-hour commute, you're mentioning the work on your plates growing exponentially beyond your ability or capacity to handle it. I don't know if it's a moment as much as it is just this growing awareness of, "I can't do it all the way that I'm doing it now." What advice do you have for somebody who needs to start doing something to help manage their productivity? It doesn't necessarily have to be an OmniFocus thing or a GTD thing, but what's your go-to like, "Hey, listen, if you haven't been doing anything, do this and this should help you out a bit"?

Lee Garrett: One of the models that we used to teach at Think Productive was called the CORD Model, which the stands for, the C is the capture, then O organize. We've got review and we've got do. And I think spending some time where you just sit back and you just concentrate on capturing everything that is currently happening in your life, I think it's such an eye-opening exercise. It can make some real dramatic changes instantly to your whole outlook on how your mindset currently is and how much you've got on your plate. Because you may not realize exactly how much you are trying to deal with and how much of that actually is not important in the grand scheme and things. So dedicating yourself some time, even if it's only an hour a week, where you just sit down and you just empty your head, just get rid of every single thought that comes down. Put it on a sticky note, put it in drafts, put it in Apple Notes, just put it somewhere where you're going to be able to review it and you're going to be able to read it and analyze it. And then you just start moving them about. It's like, okay, so I know that I've got to pick up a birthday cake. Yep, excellent. I know that's something that's got to happen because my kids can't not have a birthday cake. I'm definitely going to do that. I know that I need to plan next year's holiday, but I don't need to do that yet. That could wait a couple of weeks, and you just start slowly moving things about, but most importantly, dropping the things that are just unessential and not important at this particular point in time. If you can find ways to be able to carve time out to be able to do that, I think it can make an absolute massive difference. It's certainly what I did. It was one of the first things that I did when I read David Allen's book, and it was quite transformative.

Andrew J. Mason: It's so hard to see once you're in there with it, when you're in the fishbowl with it, when you're in the ring with it, fighting against all those thoughts or seeing all those thoughts. And then externalizing and seeing them all and saying, "Oh my gosh, all of these are different levels of importance, relative different weights." And I've been looping about buying bread for the last 40 minutes. It doesn't deserve that much space in my brain, to be honest, and compared to, like you said, other things that are far more important, I'm curious about where does OmniFocus sit in your overall ecosystem? Do you mind placing it into context? Any inputs flow into it? Does action just happen or does data get exported out of it? What kind of software gets used in conjunction with it? Just start to begin to describe the world that sits near it.

Lee Garrett: Yeah, so if I just look away from the camera at the moment, I just have my screen here so I can see my workflow working. So OmniFocus houses pretty much everything that I need to do. Now, I know that some people tend to use OmniFocus solely for project work, and they keep their home stuff away. And some people don't like having their list of things they'd like to do in OmniFocus because they'll put it in a different system, like Drafts or in Motion or Obsidian or something like that. I tend to keep everything in OmniFocus. Because, one, OmniFocus, at its core, is just a series of lists. It's lots and lots of lists set out in different formats and perspectives. So if it's a very good organizer of lists, why not use it for all of my lists? And I know that I'm going to go into it every day, because if I don't go into OmniFocus every day, all of a sudden I lose momentum, I lose flow, and I'm not as productive as I need to be. So everything goes in there, whether it's stuff that I want to watch on TV, whether it's books that I want to buy, whether it's ideas for how to improve ScreenCastsOnline, whether it's notes about program activities that I need to do, everything goes in there. But not everything is visible at any one time because I'm very rigid in how I use my perspectives to be able to only show me what I need to see at any particular time. How does stuff get in there? Well, I've got some automations with Zapier that will automatically put in there. Things like, if I get a customer contact from ScreenCastsOline, it automatically finds its way into OmniFocus. Obviously, I use the Mail Drop as well to be able to put stuff in there from there. That's basic. I think everybody does that. Other applications that I use with OmniFocus, DEVONthink is key. So in most of the notes sections within the task, there'll be a link to a DEVONthink document that I need to refer to because it's quick to do it that way, or an Obsidian note that I have sitting there that has the reference material that particular task assigns to. I use Hookmark quite religiously as well. Because the way that I manage projects are very high level. I'll have a project in OmniPlan, which is my go-to tool for managing any of the projects that I do professionally. In that particular project, there'll be lots and lots of tasks. And in those tasks, I'll just have Hookmark, which is a fantastic linking tool between different applications. And what it will do is it'll link to an OmniFocus task. It will also link to an Obsidian note that maybe has lots and lots of notes related to that task. And it will also hook to a DEVONthink tag, which is associated with that particular task as well. So lots and lots of hooks that way, no pun intended with regards to hooks. So yeah, OmniFocus basically sits there at the center. It's not my second brain. I know lots of people refer to OmniFocus as a second brain. But it's part of my second brain, because my second brain is actually a system. Because it may be my second brain with regards to my tasks and what I need to remember to do, but also DEVONthink is part of my second brain because it's got all of my documentation that maybe I would've been remembering. Obsidian is part of my second brain as well, because that contains all of those notes and all of those thoughts potentially that I want to be able to review. But OmniFocus definitely 100% is almost like the hub with lots of other applications spoking off of it.

Andrew J. Mason: As you look at this and you look at, like you mentioned, this second brain that's comprised of a system of inter-working software that all works together to give you this final result of increased productivity, I'm thinking back to you on your commute to London in five hours a day where you're starting to see a lot more show up, or five hours total, a lot more show up in your life. And there's something in you that says, "Well, yeah, I want to rise to that challenge." Instead of saying, "I'll forget all of it. Why even be productive in the first place? Just lower your standards. It's a lot easier," there's a level of you that's saying, I want to rise to this and see what I can make of myself or see what potential I can reach. What is that in you? I guess the way to encapsulate it or condense it is, what makes you passionate about being as productive as you possibly can be?

Lee Garrett: Is it really cheesy if I say that the day that I became a father, all of my outlook for how I wanted to be changed? Is it?

Andrew J. Mason: Not at all.

Lee Garrett: Because it's the truth at the end of the day. I want to be somebody that my kids look up to. I want to be the best version of myself. And when we bought ScreenCastsOnline and actually told the girls... The girls are very different ages. They're 26, 17, and 12 at the moment. But every single one of them was proud of me for taking that leap and for getting to a point where, actually, "Yeah, my dad now runs his own business properly. He's a proper entrepreneur." And I felt good. I felt really good about that. Being a father or a parent or any kind of person with responsibility for someone else, it just makes you want to be the best version of yourself. And when I was delivering productivity coaching workshops for Think Productive, just seeing someone's face when you give them a little tip, even if it's like the two-minute rule, you say to them, "If something's going to take two minutes to do, just get it done now." It's a very quick, very simple rule, but the look on their face is like, it's like you've just transformed something in them or you've just flicked a switch.

Andrew J. Mason: [inaudible 00:19:27].

Lee Garrett: Yeah, it's a brilliant feeling. And productivity is something that it affects everybody. I could decide that I want to be a piano coach or something, and that'd be brilliant being a piano teacher. But there's only a subset of the population that would want to learn how to play piano. Or I could be a language tutor. Again, only a subset of the population wants to be a language tutor. But productivity, surely everybody wants to be in the most productive version of themselves, do they not? So yeah, it's not a hard thing to be passionate about.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me about automation. You mentioned Zapier, you mentioned Mail Drop. Is there anything else that you would consider to be an automation that runs in your system? And it can be as simple as just, "Hey, a recurring task every Thursday, I got to remember to take the garbage bin out," or something like that. But any automation that shows up in your task?

Lee Garrett: So with regards to OmniFocus, yeah, there's a couple of bits. I mean, there's a lot more that I could do. There is an awful lot more that I could do. And it's one of my goals actually for the next quarter is to build my automation skills. Because only up until a couple of months ago, I was manually recreating every single video recording project in there. Even though I know I have at least four videos I record a month and the steps are always the same and the dates they have to be in is always the same, I was manually putting them in. I'm thinking, why? Why? So yeah, I went to Kaitlin Salzke's site and downloaded the repeating project plugin that she had there, and that's been reasonably transformative. It's such a fantastic tool. With project management, there's lots of steps. I have to rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat all the time. As soon as a stakeholder comes in and says, "Lee, I need you to deliver this," I know that the same amount of steps need to happen for me to make that delivery. So I've got project templates in OmniFocus that all I've got to do is click a couple of buttons and, bang, they're all out. I've also got some automation, just trying to think, relating to how my meetings are developed. So I use a piece of software called iMeetingX. It's actually part of Setapp. So if you've got a Setapp subscription, it's a really good application in there. That manages all of my meetings, all of my notes, all of my tasks. And I've got a couple of hooks that automatically pull out all of those particular tasks that I've got taken in the meeting minutes and imports them into OmniFocus via a script. That was quite cool, because I wrote that myself. I'm not very good at scripting, but that was nice.

Andrew J. Mason: Oh, good.

Lee Garrett: But yeah, automation, I do more than I did yesterday, but not as much as I'm going to be doing next year, that's for sure.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, yeah. Excellent. And for those that are listening, and they heard Lee mention Kaitlin Salzke's project, the ability to tear one off for a template. So if we call it predictable randomness, if you know that something's going to happen sometime, somewhere, but you just don't know exactly when, it is the ability to click a button, have the repeatable step show back up in your OmniFocus system in a way that you don't have to rethink of it every single time. It's a great way to introduce a fresh checklist. And we'll keep that in the show notes as well.

Lee Garrett: Yeah, it was really good.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. One thing I'd love to ask too before we let you go, is there anything that, as you look back over your career arc thus far, you've got these 30 years that you've traversed so far, anything that you look back and you say, "I don't necessarily know if I'm going to look at it and say, this is a mistake. This is a huge blunder. But there's something that I thought was going to be helpful in terms of productivity or my OmniFocus system or a way of thinking, anything that fits in this spaces that, once I tried it out, I realized this isn't for me. This isn't actually something that's going to work out for me. And yeah, maybe I'm glad I've tried it, but it can be instructional for other people to say, you know what? If I were, you may or may not try this, but for me, just skip it"?

Lee Garrett: I very much look back and think of mistakes that I've made, whether it's with OmniFocus, whether it's with productivity, or anything in my life. And sure, I've made mistakes the same way that everybody has. But the person I am now is basically the sum total of everything good that I've done, but also all of those mistakes that I've made. And I wouldn't recommend anything that I've done before to not be repeated by somebody else, because I may be denying that particular person the ability to learn from that particular mistake that they're making. Does that make any sense to you?

Andrew J. Mason: A hundred percent.

Lee Garrett: It's like, we're going through this thing with our kids at the moment, for example. So Lillia is learning to drive. So we are being the not possessive parents, but we're being quite scared and we're saying, "You've got to do this. You can't do this," et cetera. And we're thinking to ourselves, "Well, hang on a minute. I didn't get that kind of guidance when I was that age. I made mistakes and I learned from them. Am I denying Lillia the opportunity to learn for herself?" So I'd say no. That maybe the biggest mistake was switching from OmniFocus to a different tool for a couple of months and then realizing it just really wasn't for me. I won't say what that tool was, but that's another cheesy response I guess you could say there. That was potentially a couple of months wasted, but I now know, through doing that, that, yeah, OmniFocus, whilst it's not the right system for everyone, it's definitely the right app for how my brain works. But it could be that particular application I've used is absolutely perfect for someone else. Because it's not the application that is going to make you good, it's the system and the process that you have behind it. So not every app works for everybody.

Andrew J. Mason: Lee, I've loved this conversation. So grateful again that you were able to share some time with us and just dive deep into how your system works. If folks are interested in just being in your orbit and seeing what you're up to, of course, ScreenCastsOnline, but also anywhere else that folks can find you?

Lee Garrett: Yeah, so I'm on Blue Sky, so you can get me @leegarrett on there. And on Mastodon, so you can find me quite easily there @leegarrett there too, at sreencastsonline.social.

Andrew J. Mason: A hundred percent fabulous. Thank you so much, Lee, for joining us.

Lee Garrett: Thank you.

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