THE OMNI SHOW

Andrew J. Mason: 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. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we have Luc Beaudoin, creator of the Hook productivity app, on how he utilizes Omni products in his research.

Andrew J. Mason: Today, we have Luc Beaudoin, he's the head of CogZest, the author of cognitive productivity books, the Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science and of Education at Simon Fraser University. And he's created the Hook productivity app, which interfaces especially well with Omni software. Luc, we are so glad to have you on the show today.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Thank you. Andrew, it's really a pleasure to be with you.

Andrew J. Mason: Luc, we have so much to cover and I want to dive in and just turn back the clock a little bit. Talk to us about your intersection with Omni software and products. Just take us back through time, and talk to us about how you got to know them.

Luc. P Beaudoin: This goes back a long time, I think it was 2003 when I switched. I was originally in the Mac world, and then parallel with Mac I used Unix, then I used Windows and Linux because Apple was struggling. And then Apple came back with Mac OS, so I was in. And then of course you rapidly discover the best software development companies out there, and Omni Group I quickly realized was one of them. And I've always used an outliner, I think that's very important, using outliners is important. And by the way, the usefulness of the software, Omni Group's software and this framework that I've got, there's two sides to it. There's the information processing side, the input side, basically, and the production side. I guess you were referring to that. And the Omni Group software products are useful on both sides. So when you're reading something, it's useful to outline what you're reading, if it's something you want to learn deeply. And also if you're producing something, you should produce an outline before you actually write it up.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So I encountered, OmniOutliner was the first product of theirs that I encountered. And I got into that. I first used an outliner in the 1980s, more too, for people who are old time Mac users, they'll remember MORE and MORE 2, which was I think the first major outliner on a Mac. And it kind of disappeared somehow. And OmniOutliner was just great. And I really think, I use OmniOutliner and I have been using it since then, and I've always used outliners for thinking. But for a while there, I didn't have a proper tool. So when I went back to the Mac, there was OmniOutliner and ah, okay, I can do this again. And I've been doing most of my thinking, I would say in OmniOutliner since then. They call it a bicycle for the mind, and I think that's an apt analogy. Steve Jobs used that for Apple software, but it applies very well to OmniOutliner.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So I've been using that, and I was leading a... Well, essentially a cognitive productivity software development project at SFU, Simon Fraser university here in Canada, on the technical side, actually. So we needed diagramming software and wanted to use the best tools, so basically we bought a multiple licenses for the team for OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, and I've been diagramming in OmniGraffle ever since. I was turning to OmniGraffle to do my designs for Hook, for instance. Some of you may know that Hook is coming to iOS. I'm designing the UI in OmniGraffle.

Andrew J. Mason: Luc, talk to us about how you got into cognitive science.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Into cognitive science itself?

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah.

Luc. P Beaudoin: My track as a student was to become a clinical psychologist, but I took a course on death and dying, and that kind of pit me off. [inaudible 00:03:32] all of this could be pretty heavy if I try to do that. And I discovered cognitive science at the same time, and I fell in love with cognitive science. It's a study of the human mind, it's interdisciplinary, and it's inspired by a computational metaphor. And I had some great professors, and I just fell in love with it. And one of my professors said, "You know, Luc, you should really try to get yourself a Commonwealth Scholarship to study in Britain cognitive science. Sussex University was pretty much the top place in the world for cognitive science at the time. And I thought that was a great idea. So I dove into it. I really fell in love with it. And then actually my career path was rather varied after that, because I taught psychology for a while, but then I went into tech for various reasons.

Andrew J. Mason: Okay. So you're studying and growing in your knowledge of cognitive science, but then there's also this technology arc that just starts to emerge for you, this love of tech. How does that show up?

Luc. P Beaudoin: Well, basically I live and breathe cognitive science, so it affects how I do everything, from my ordinary life to how I approach software. So it's definitely given me a perspective on software. Developed it over many years [inaudible 00:04:41] was interested from a young age in cognitive performance and improving memory. But my PhD thesis was quite general. And then I looked at the mind as an autonomous agent, basically. So I got interested in researching motivation and emotions. When I think of using technology, it's about the end game, not just narrowly affecting some aspect of cognition, but helping us become more effective as individuals.

Luc. P Beaudoin: And that means that you have to think of the entire person, because ultimately you will want to develop skills, but you also want to be able to apply them. You want to be able to recognize when you're useful. And if you read a book, say on marital relationships, how to become a better partner with your spouse, this isn't about memorizing stuff. This is about becoming a better person, right? So it's not about passing some tests for a professor, it's about changing yourself.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So yeah, I think it really permeates the way I think about technology, and I've always been interested in self-help, and that's why I want to go into clinical, is to help people on the practical side of things. So I bring the theoretical and the practical into it. And I'm kind of in love with tech, as a geek.

Andrew J. Mason: Now also through the lens of technology and your cognitive science, you also have this idea of what you call effectiveness, or meta-effectiveness. Talk to us a little bit about how that shapes you

Luc. P Beaudoin: The overarching concept of the cognitive productivity [inaudible 00:06:08] Hook, even the learning from fiction project, is this concept of meta- effectiveness. You know that Stephen Covey's book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. There's a reason why that book is so popular and so well-read. It's the concept of effectiveness, and he nailed it. That's a really important concept. And I gravitated towards that. Both my books refer to that. I thought deeply about it, and I thought, you know what, that's really the end game. What's the end game is to become a more effective person. And meta-effectiveness is about becoming better at becoming more effective. And to do that, you need to use knowledge as an input. Knowledge is actually not in our heads, really. We sometimes say it is, but it's out there. It's resources, PDFs, it's stories, it's whatever.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So that's the big idea, that we can go through this loop, we can improve how we go through this loop, and to do so we actually have to use technology. Cal Newport's come out and said, "Oh, well, let's be minimalists, and let's kind of take technology out." I'm not a digital minimalist, you just have to learn to use the tools better. Look at it from an evolutionary perspective, we're at the beginning of using tech here. So let's use it better. So meta-effectiveness is about using tech in a wise wat to process knowledge, to become more effective.

Luc. P Beaudoin: And if you look at Stephen Covey's seventh principle, what is it? It's sharpen the saw. And within sharpen the saw, he's got a subsection there which deals with how to... The importance of reading and reflecting on what you read, et cetera. So the meta-effectiveness stuff is, you can read it as it's an expansion of that. Sharpen the saw to become more effective, but modernizing it. Meta-effectiveness and cognitive productivity are about saying, okay, let's how do you adapt these ideas to the modern context where we can use technology, we must now use technology, and do it in a way that jives with integrative cognitive science. So that's the big idea. Meta-effectiveness.

Andrew J. Mason: That's so cool. I love how that's just a very specific life path that you've decided and just laser focused into. And you've also set out to do some cool work with cognitive science. It's about moving people from just knowledge, which there's a ton of these days, into that excellence and effectiveness strain. Talk to us about that.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Yeah. And that's a challenge, because you know we can get distracted by this cool piece of information that comes our way. So yeah, I decided to build a framework to help us benefit from the knowledge that we're processing. A lot of us are just drawn to knowledge. Not everybody is, but a lot of us are, right? So we're drawn to knowledge for whatever reasons. And we have, humans do have a built tendency towards self-actualization, towards becoming better people. So yeah, I decided to build a framework based on cognitive science that could help us get from knowledge to excellence with technology.

Andrew J. Mason: It's perfectly stated. From knowledge to excellence with technology. So, and this is what your two books are about as well.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Yep. So right, I've got two cognitive productivity books, and that's what they're about. The first one has a middle section that's very scientific, whereas the second one is all pretty much all practical. But the first one talks about the problems and the opportunities that we face. The problems that we face as people are interested in, processing knowledge and dealing with knowledge and becoming better. And there's lots of challenges, so I tried to look at those challenges through the lens of an integrative cognitive science.

Andrew J. Mason: Excellent. And I love how ambitious that is. Let's zoom it in a little bit, just to kind of give a specific instance for our listeners. You have something that's called the two second rule. I've heard people in productivity and David Allen talk about the two minute rule, but the two second rule you argue is what helps keep us in flow. Talk to us about that.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Yeah, the two second rule is basically, that's in one of the sub principles of the second principle, that's managing your attention. One of the ways in which we lose good flow, we lose our context because working memory, that precious part of the human mind, is very limited in our consciousness, if you will. So the two second rule is basically that about 80% of the information that you might want to access during the day, you should be able to get to it within two seconds, because if you can access that file that you need, the book that you need, the PDF you need, whatever, your task list for something, quickly, then you'll stay in the zone. But if it takes you five or 10 seconds and you're doing this repeatedly, you find basically flow is being broken up.

Luc. P Beaudoin: And I realized that this is a major problem that we face, is accessing information. Mac OS has tools built into it, there's third-party tools that we could use, and ultimately I developed Hook to help with part of that. So you've got Spotlight, you've got launchers like LaunchBar and Alfred, and there's strategies as well. So yeah, I've been thinking for many years about how can we get to this? How can we implement this two second rule? So the books talk about that.

Andrew J. Mason: Nice. And so I get this idea that there might be an extra step or two or three up front, but then you're building these guard rails around your processes that ensure that you don't get distracted later on. What about when it actually comes to finding the right information? I remember somewhere in your framework, you mentioned the idea of, you call it CUPA, but it's actually C-U-P-A, not anything to do with Mario Brothers. But do you mind walking through that? It's your way of kind of figuring out whether or not information is good quality information?

Luc. P Beaudoin: Basically the mindset is to assess the caliber of the information. So that's, is it the truth? The usefulness of the information to your projects, so that means that you need to have a system for managing your projects, something like Getting Things Done and OmniFocus, they help you become much more explicit about your projects, so you can relate the information to your projects. So thinking of information in relation to your projects, because it's so easy to get distracted.

Luc. P Beaudoin: The potency of the information, and that is the extent to which the information that you're presented with might reshape your thinking if you were to delve it deeply. The issue here, getting back to attention, is appeal. So there's a fourth criteria in this framework, and that's the appeal of information. And it turns out that information can be very appealing, very seductive, but quite irrelevant. So that's something we actually have to watch out for. In many ways, partly in terms of what gains our attention, that's the most. And designers of information, they're in the business analytically using lean methods, very smart people, designing headlines and images to grab your attention. So it's a battle.

Luc. P Beaudoin: But once you get over that and say, okay, this information actually is high caliber, it's useful, it's maybe potent, maybe you need potency at that point. And then there's this appeal criteria that you have to contend with. Okay, let's assume that it's appealing, but for good reason. And then you start reading this document. We tend to find appealing ideas that match what we already know. So that's all the cognitive biases come in. And it turns out from a scientific perspective, from a rationalist perspective, you have to watch out for that. You have to be aware that information that fits with your current beliefs is more subjectively appealing. And that's a dangerous thing.

Andrew J. Mason: That's actually a perfect segue over to OmniOutliner, because you talk about the power of templating, but within OmniOutliner. Can you walk us through your process for that? And maybe how somebody would go about it.

Luc. P Beaudoin: When you're starting a new project, typically there's planning information that you want, and if you're creating something there's certain content elements that you want to have in mind as you're writing. What's your thesis? What's your argument? The major proposition, some reference materials, et cetera. And of course, you may want it to have an outline. You might also just want a scratch pad of information. So there's some templates, I provide some in my book that are OmniOutliner templates. You want to make sure that your workflow makes it very easy for you to create these ancillary documents that will help you get to a better end result. So you can just have a template folder somewhere, where you have your various OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle figure documents that you can just copy over rapidly. This can be automated. But yeah, the key idea is to have a structure for your projects, with folders, et cetera, so that you can knock them off more rapidly, because you've thought about the meta stuff behind your projects.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So that's one thing. Then there's another aspect of templates, which I think is very important, and that is note-taking. So if you're reading something that's, as I was saying, is deep, you'd probably want to take some notes about it. You can take notes within a good PDF reader, but then your notes are trapped and the PDF readers are not really set up for taking notes. So I recommend actually creating a separate outline document. So with Hook, you can do on a PDF file or a webpage, you can you Hook to New, and then you can populate that template information for what you're reading, basically. So you can, you don't have to fill out the template as such, but at least having it there, having the information there about what are evaluation criteria for what you're reading, an outline section where you might want to outline what you're reading, what it's thesis is, et cetera.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So having that in mind while you're reading helps scaffold or bootstrap your processing of the information, so that if something's worth reading, if something's really worth reading, it's worth reading carefully and systematically. And this is a way that helps you do it. So people sometimes say, well, where am I going to find the time for that? Well, I often say the time can come from other readings. Read a bit less, but read more deeply.

Andrew J. Mason: This idea of having everything close at hand really does parlay well into your software that you've created called Hook. Talk to us about the backstory about Hook. And I know it plays really nicely with Omni software and products, but maybe give us a little bit of the background of how you came to develop it.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Sure. Thanks for asking, because it's a bit of a long story. We set out to develop, in time from 2002 onwards, 2002 to 2009 at Simon Fraser University, in probably the largest self-regulated learning research project, well, definitely in Canada, maybe in the world, with professor Phil Winnie, who's the world's top expert on self-regulated learning. So we set out to build software that would be used for multiple purposes. I'm an ambitious person, and so is Phil, so we were a great fit. So we wanted to build a software that would help learners, but would also be a research tool so we can study learners as they're learning. And also a content development tool, et cetera.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So one of the first insights that I got as I was building essentially a personal learning environment that was also a research tool, one of the first big insights I had going back 2002, 2003 was, okay, everything has to be linkable. You need to be able to link everything to everything. So we set out doing that in the system that we call G Study, for General Study environment. And later we did N Study, which was New Study environment, where we brought it to the web. That was basically the big idea of that system, was people need to be able to develop concept maps and notes and browse the web and read stuff, et cetera, but everything has to be linkable, because the user needs to be able to stay in flow, needs to be able to not just take in information, but interact with it.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So you're reading a document, actually reading is mostly about writing. If you're dealing with something complex and you do it well, you'll actually spend more time producing than you will just raw consuming. You need to be working with the information. And I'm talking about stuff that's potent, that can really stretch your mind. And that's ultimately what good education is about. We did that.

Luc. P Beaudoin: And then I realized at one point, you know what, this needs to be in Mac OS. And so I thought, no, I'm going to give this up because only Apple can do this well. When we heard that the iPad was coming out, I was interacting with SharpBrains at the time, I was kind of affiliated with them, their cognitive fitness, brain fitness marketing company. I was going to write for them. And I pitched them an idea. I said, look, why don't I write an article before this tablet is announced by Apple specifying the requirements. This is what we should do, coming at it from a cognitive science perspective. And then once Steve Jobs announced this thing, because they said they'd be announcing this thing, we all knew it was a tablet, I'll assess it in relation to the previous article that I wrote.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So I did that. And of course linking was one of the big things, I talked about productive practice, whole bunch of things that ended up being in the book. So that's the history. So the linking idea went through there. And then actually what I did was I was really impressed by the iPad and other people had panned it. A lot of people were very critical about it. I watched that video, frame by frame practically, slowly over and over again, analyzing this new magnificent device. I thought it fared very well, but I thought it could be improved in certain ways, because I'd already written the requirements for the thing. So I actually wrote to Steve Jobs, and I said, "I loved your product announcements. It looks great. I could maybe approve it in certain ways, would you like to... I could fly over, give you a talk or whatever."

Luc. P Beaudoin: And he basically said, "Well, write me a white paper." Steve Jobs said, "Hey, write in your white paper." A friend of mine who was older, he's deceased now, he was 90 at the time, he thought I was manic. But I couldn't tell him why, because I wasn't going to go and say I'm writing a white paper for Steve Jobs. Like he saw me the next day, I was kind of over the moon. He told my wife, "I think Luc's having a manic episode." Anyway, so within a week, I wrote him this white paper, which was way too long. I wrote him like a 35 pager, just here's how you should do the ecosystem. That's the story of how this all developed. But what I realized after that, well, Steve Jobs of course got sick, I didn't end up doing what I had offered to do for Apple, but I thought to myself, okay, I need to write this in a book.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So I wrote the book, two books in the end. I realized actually, you know what, the tools are in the OS for us to do this ourselves. We can actually produce a product that does some of this core stuff. So we started working on a productive practice app, and then we kind of paused that and said, let's do Hook instead. Or let's do the linking tool. We realized, Oh my God, the tools are there. So let's just do it. And we iterated over years, actually, we've been working on this for a long time, because there's different ways you can do this. So Hook is an app that helps you link practically anything to anything on your Mac. That's the idea. So you can get to, you're reading a PDF, you can link it to your notes. You can link it to an OmniFocus project, or whatever.

Andrew J. Mason: So I'm sure folks are getting an idea of what it's all about, but maybe they've used other keyboard shortcut tools before. How is this really different?

Luc. P Beaudoin: Yeah, there's different ways in which it can be used, but a lot of us are creatives. We do presentations, podcasts, we write code. Whatever you're creating, there's different ways of creating, different things you can create. But typically when you're creating, there's a collection of documents that you create and you do this over and over again. So that's where the templates come in. And one of the things that you always need to do with a project is basically have a task list or a nest of task lists. So OmniFocus is an obvious use case there. So you can create a project in OmniFocus and link that entire project to the corresponding folder, whatever you're working in. I mean, you might be working in Ulysses and have a bunch of [inaudible 00:22:08] there. You might be on the Finder, and Hook can link them all together.

Luc. P Beaudoin: The core operation of Hook is actually copy link. So you bring up this window, which is a bit like the Spotlight window, or LaunchBar or Alfred, if you use them. But whereas those tools are blind to your context, they don't care about your context, hook is context sensitive. So if you bring up Hook in OmniFocus, and you've selected a project, then when you do copy link or something else, it will interpret that command in relation to what you're doing. So you can take that link and then you can apply it or paste it or Hook it as we say to something else. So a folder, for instance. When you Hook two things together, what you're doing actually is you're creating a bi-directional link with Hook. So it's often a two-step process, copy link, either paste the link in a document where you need it, or you can actually bi-directionally Hook it.

Luc. P Beaudoin: And when you do this bi-directionally Hooking, the information goes in Hook's local database, which stays on your computer with this... I mean, you can sync it with iCloud if you want, but that's your business. And it maintains the bi-directional link. What we've done, because we've been in this for so many years, we've just covered all the different angles, because there's different things you might want to do. You might want to create something like an alias instead pasting the link somewhere in a document or whatever.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So Hook has this Hook files, which are like aliases or web locations, but they're more general, and they follow the markdown philosophy. So you can actually grab an OmniFocus project, and if you want a pointer to that or an alias, if you will, to that somewhere in your file system, you bring up Hook in the context of your project and say, make new Hook fil,. And then that Hook file will be created. And it's a plain text file, that's the markdown philosophy. And in it, you will find a markdown link to your OmniFocus project. And then that's it. I mean, you double click on that file, it will take you to that project.

Andrew J. Mason: I wanted to give you the chance to share, because Hook's not the only thing that you're involved in. What else do you have going on these days?

Luc. P Beaudoin: There are multiple Hook projects underway right now. So we talked about the Hook for iOS, and there's other Hook related things. We have Hook 2.0 freely available to anybody who's currently, you get these one year free updates with Hook. Actually, I'll go out and say that we're writing a manifesto for hyperlinking. So if there's developers out there who are interested, you remember the Agile Manifesto? We're going to do the Hyperlink Manifesto. I've actually written a chapter for a book called The Future of Text, which will be published in November. And that's saying Mac OS app developers need to be kind to their users, and they need to ensure that the objects or documents in their apps are linkable. You need to be able to copy link to anything. Information needs to be referenceable. It has to be in the user interface, and there needs to be automation for it.

Luc. P Beaudoin: It was delightful when we went to do Hook, because the first apps we did were the Omni Group's apps, because they'd got the Apple script for this, they knew this. OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, we then added support for OmniPlan, it's baked in. A good Mac app does that. So we'd like all the app developers to step up to the plate and understand this important need, to be able to stay in his own, basically, and to get back into projects and immediately be in context.

Luc. P Beaudoin: But I'm also working on... I do sleep research, so I've got projects happening there which I'm very excited about. I developed a theory of sleep onset insomnia, published a technique called the cognitive shuffle, shuffle your thoughts to sleep. We built mySleepButton around it. Here's a proof that you can take very complex cognitive science and build a very simple product, which is basically the same thing as Hook does. So that's what we're about, it's called [Syapse 00:25:56]. So there's a paper in the works about that.

Luc. P Beaudoin: I've been extending the cognitive productivity framework to deal with art and fiction in particular. I was challenged by a friend and colleague, she said to me, she said, "Okay, Luc, you pretty much seemed to have covered expository knowledge, practical knowledge. But what about art?" And she floored me when she said this. It was 2013. And I said, "What do you mean, art?" Because I wasn't reading much fiction didn't have time for films or art in general.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So I then immersed myself. I met fine artists, and I built a network. I've got a network now of so many artists in various fields. I've got the first installment of this project, which is an edited book so there's several contributors and artists, it's called Discontinuities: Love Heart, Mind. It's kind of an oblique entry into this, because it's art, but one of the underlying themes, and there's many themes, is learning from fiction. So I got this idea that actually we can get way more, and should get way more out of fiction than we are getting. I think fiction evolved, and I'm not the only person to say this, if you ask the experts in the field in evolutionary psychology, why do we do fiction? Why do we do stories? There's got to be a reason, because it's very expensive and natural selection is not into wasting.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So there's a purpose there, but I think we face the same problem with fiction as we do with nonfiction. It's just so much more obvious with nonfiction. With nonfiction it's a glut, it's the fire hose. So we know, Hey, we're not learning from this. It's just too much information. We're bombarding, we're flitting. Well, guess what, we're doing the same thing with stories and film. You got Netflix on demand so you watch a film, then you're onto the next, you're onto the next. If there is evolutionary and adaptive value, and I think there is, to the stories that these fabulous creators are creating, we should be able to benefit from them.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Take Romeo and Juliet. There's some really big lessons in that. So how can we learn from that and still make it fun? I've had people say, well, my wife in particular, she says, "Luc, you're going to take the fun out of this. You can't do that." No, no, no. My challenge is to make it fun. Discontinuities, which is almost done, is going to come out next year with my coauthor. So those are some of the things that I'm working on.

Andrew J. Mason: And before we go, I didn't want to forget that you had made a really generous coupon offer available for users of Hook and also your books. Talk to us about that.

Luc. P Beaudoin: So yeah, we're, I'm pleased to be able to provide 40% off coupons for the cognitive productivity books, they're coupon URLs. So when you click on the link, it brings you to discounted version of the book purchase page. And there's two of these books on the Leanpub website, that's the great Canadian website for books, for people who are technical or geeks. And also a discount for our software, Hook productivity software. That's a coupon code, and it's Omni-show, Omni dash show. You can just use that coupon on your checkout. We'll specify the dates maybe in the show notes. Yeah. I'd love you to try out Hook. And if you do take this in, please come to the forum and let us know what you think, whether you agree, disagree, or have some ideas for how this could be better, how it works with your life.

Andrew J. Mason: Awesome. And how can folks get in touch with you if they're interested?

Luc. P Beaudoin: I'm very easy to find on the web if you can spell my name, I'm on Twitter. I'm LucCogZest. L-U-C-C-O-G-Z-E-S-T. So they can do that. They can also send me an email, and I'm very easy to find. My email address is lucb@cogzest.com, but I've got others. So you can easily find me, you'll see if you Google my name.

Andrew J. Mason: Luc, such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for your time.

Luc. P Beaudoin: Well, thank you very much, I appreciate. It's an honor and privilege to be able to do this kind of work and talk about it with you.

Andrew J. Mason: Thank all of you, too, for listening and being a part of this episode. We're so grateful to be able to share the story of how people get things done with Omni software and products. I just am so grateful to share this time with you all. If you find this episode helpful and want to help us out, absolutely leave a review or rating on iTunes. If you want to keep up with us and what we're up to check out the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog, or head to a@theomnishow on Twitter.