THE OMNI SHOW

offlinemark: On a practical level, if you have a system for unquote productivity, it's just about managing and getting things done that matter to you in your life, but avoiding stress from getting overwhelmed, which actively takes away from your happiness. Staying mindful about how you spend your time so you can be confident that when you do spend your time on things, you're not secretly wondering if you should be doing other things instead, but you have more of a sense of calm and control over that.

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 learned how Mark Mossberg uses Omni Focus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of the Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason and today we're super excited to hang out with Mark Mossberg to chat about how he uses OmniFocus. He's an artist and engineer in Berlin, Germany and he gets to work on digital music instruments at Ableton. Mark, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

offlinemark: Yeah, Andrew, thanks so much. Great to be here.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, I'd love it if you would just take a couple of seconds and level set, talk to us about yourself. Talk to us about where you find yourself geographically in Berlin, what life is like, and then also maybe dive in a little bit to, if possible, some of the work that you get to do.

offlinemark: So I am an artist and an engineer living in Berlin, Germany, and I'm up to a couple of different things in life right now. In my professional life, I work at Ableton, which is an music technology company. We make digital musical instruments and we have a nice portfolio of products that can run on your desktop computer or we make hardware instruments that go along with those as well. We also make an iOS app that also integrates with all of this stuff very well and our flagship product, Ableton Live is the most well known and it's an industry standard tool for making music. It's used also for live performance. It's used in film, podcasting, other industries too. Personally, I'm a software engineer on the hardware team. I'm also a writer and a content creator, and so I actively blog on my blog, offlinemark.com. I write about life, creativity and computer science, and I also enjoy making computer science educational content in video format. So I make YouTube videos and lately have been live-streaming myself actually.

Andrew J. Mason: That's incredible. A lot of people say, Hey, I'm either an engineer or I'm a musician, or I do some creative writing and stuff. There's a lot of different things going to happen in there for you. Can you speak a little bit to maybe why that is for you? What happens? There's a little bit of left brain right brain action happening at the same time there. What's going on for you for that?

offlinemark: Yeah, absolutely. It's just as I've kind of gone through life, I've just realized it makes sense to identify as both sides of this. I do feel both sides very strongly. Even going back to when I was a teenager, I got really into music and I learned how to record music and I released a bunch of heavy metal albums on the internet. Then I moved on to kind of the next phase of my life where I went strongly into computers, programming, very technical pursuits. Then now as I've kind of continued into the next stages, I've founded ways to combine the two. And at the end of the day, it's really a 50 50 split on both sides. I love technical craft. I also love very creative artistic thinking and doing art.

Andrew J. Mason: That's so cool. To me it seems like that's required for the type of work you do even professionally at Ableton, but also any other spaces you happen to find yourself in, there's always a benefit of having that other side kind of working for you as well. So it's not just the technical, it's not just the creative, but you're really kind of working in tandem. I think there's a better result that achieves there.

offlinemark: I think it can be helpful for anybody to be able to play a little bit on both fields because let's say you're a totally technical person. Well, at some point if you want everyone to innovate in your industry, what does that involve? It involves creative thinking, it involves brainstorming. And if you have the ability to or maybe are used to doing that kind of thinking, you'll benefit in those areas where it's important to think out of the box and creatively. And conversely, if you're in a very artistic field and very creative industry, it can also be very helpful to have a bit of the technical skills or more structured and organized thinking to compliment you and maybe make you stand out too.

Andrew J. Mason: Do you have any recollection as to either an event or just over time you just became more aware of who the Omni Group was or even more specifically OmniFocus as software? Do you remember where that entered your story?

offlinemark: Yeah, I actually remember very specifically, and this happened when I had started working at Ableton. I remember I was very new at the company. This was about three years ago. I also just was in the process of doing this international relocation of my life over to Germany from the US. It was also during the pandemic, which added a lot of challenges and complexity to the whole process. I remember being kind of frazzled just overall in my life, and I didn't have strong systems for this, but I remember reading an internal blog post we have at work from the head of the hardware division at Ableton. His name is Jesse Terry. I work in his group, and he is a very busy guy. He's the head of the hardware division. He's interacting with engineers, with designers, with the marketing teams, with finance, with executives. He has a family, he has an active music practice. He is also an expat in Germany. So I was looking at this guy and I was reading his blog post and I was like, well, if he can do this with this tool, maybe I can make it work too. I don't have quite as complicated of a life, but maybe I can also apply it myself. So I remember kind of getting a bit of an entry point into OmniFocus through that, and I've been using it ever since with varying levels of success, but lately a lot of success. So yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome. That's awesome. Talk to me about anybody that finds themselves in that position that you were in where it's like, I know I need to be doing something. I know I see there are successful people that are doing a lot of stuff with their life. They seem to have it all together. What advice would you give them for maybe a first entry point on how to get started? It doesn't even necessarily need to do with OmniFocus itself, but just productivity in general. How do you handle that first step?

offlinemark: I think actually asking for help from other people is a massive step that I personally didn't take soon enough. I was aware of this, but in retrospect, I could have done way more to ask my colleagues, my parents, my friends, how are you actually handling this stuff? If you are alive on earth in 2024, you probably need to be doing things and getting things done. So it's a common thing that we all need to deal with, but I probably don't really talk about it very much. At least I don't have conversations like this. So I would just recommend also first off, trying to find some community around this locally or maybe even on the internet about people solve these problems because you'll find that there's a lot of different ways of going about this, and so people will have different opinions. But yeah, if you were to ask me though, I've had great success with the classic GTD methodologies as probably everyone on this podcast eventually says at one point or another. So I won't belabor that point too much. But other than that, I would just recommend recognizing that it's okay to feel overwhelmed and that the journey of making progress on this is one that you can do. It won't be a quick one necessarily, but I kind of think of it like fitness. Getting started with a personal fitness habit is not easy, but it's healthy and it's good for you in the long term. I think of it in a similar way, try to find ways to make it fun for yourself if you can. The mindset of playing around with different tools appeals to you, think of it kind of like that way or toys even. Download some apps and just see how they work for you, but also don't take too long playing around and getting distracted from just with playing around. Also, just kind of commit to one because none of them are perfect either.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me a little bit about the live development aspect of what you've been doing because what for you is live dev, I don't want to say accomplishing, like what could this do, but accomplishing in the sense of what's your why behind that? Because I can definitely see somebody saying from the outside looking in, are you crazy? You're sitting there developing live. Aren't you going to make mistakes? There's so much that goes into that. Just speak to that a little bit.

offlinemark: Absolutely. Yeah. I've been doing live coding for about four months now, and I do it every week on Sunday afternoons, and I'll go into more of that in a second, but I'll just say how I got into it. There's a lot of concerns like, okay, well, you look stupid a lot of the time. I would say I'm quite introverted. So that also seems in conflict with literally putting yourself on the internet live. But I'll just start with my influences. I had the idea from two people that I really respect a lot. So their names are Adam Wavin and Andreas Kling. So Adam Wavin is an online entrepreneur and he talks a lot about how he got started with his online products for developers by simply doing live streams and live coding. Then eventually people started to ask him questions about the little tools he had built for himself, those little tools that he thought had no value turned out to be a really profitable business for him that changed his life. That just kind of got me thinking, wow, who knows what could happen if you just kind of start doing this? Andreas Kling is an operating systems developer, one of my role models basically. He live-streamed himself working on his operating system and stuff like this too. So I had some precedent and inspirations for it, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense because I have this very niche interest in operating systems, which is this weird ultra-technical thing, and I've never really allowed myself to pursue it very time-consuming. Also the idea of just spending more time alone in my room struggling through this stuff didn't sound super appealing. But when I thought about live coding, it actually started to make sense because with live coding, I get so much more out of it. I build an audience and a community through it with people that join my streams. I build skill and I learn in real time. I tried not to get discouraged by the fact that I might look stupid live because there's no perfection really. Even the most skilled and expert people in whatever craft you are interested in, they make mistakes too. I find that making mistakes live is endearing in a way too. People support me when I'm like, man, I'm so embarrassed that I thought the number four was bigger than the number 15 or whatever. Oh Man, and the people support me in this situation. So I find that I get a lot back out of it, and it also helps build my own public credibility and proof of work that I'm doing things. I've just found that I've just been getting so many good things out of doing this simple activity of live-streaming for two hours a week that at this point, it's a big source of positivity in my life and happy to keep it up.

Andrew J. Mason: The building in public nature of it is really cool. It helps build the authenticity. Anybody I know that sees the internet more as a conversation rather than a snapshot, here's the thing I built and I spent 40 hours in a cave and built it versus build this with me. Talk to me a little bit more about your OmniFocus setup itself. How do you use it in general? Do you have any kind of workflows going on? Just kind of speak to what we would actually find in there.

offlinemark: Yeah, absolutely. I think before I get into that, I also want to give credit where it's due. A lot of my inspirations from this are actually from this podcast from a very specific episode, the episode with Stephen Dolan at Tuple. Yeah, that was really impactful for me and I'm implementing a lot of the things I learned in that episode, so just wanted to get that out of the way. But yeah, that changed a lot of how I used OmniFocus. I would say I'm in my third generation of trying to figure out how to use it, and I had kind of two medium levels of success with it, but now I'm kind of using it a third way, which I think is much more the intended way, and it's also much simpler than I didn't think I've tried before. I think the key points there are I am a heavy user of the forecast view, and that's my main view every single day I'm operating out of that view most of the time. That's kind of where I have my list of four to six things that I will try to do today. I try to make it pretty realistic too. I try not to have it cluttered with this very unrealistic thing of 20 things basically. So I try to keep it pretty tuned. I have my projects database, which is kind of this large hierarchical view of everything in my life basically, and that is extremely overwhelming to look at, but it represents reality pretty well too. It's accurate. I think one of the things I like most about OmniFocus is that you can have this incredible database of everything that can be overwhelming, but you can also filter things away very easily. Simply clicking on a folder or clicking on a project or clicking on today in the forecast view filters away 95% of the noise that's not relevant for what you need to see right now. I think that's a massive benefit of OmniFocus. So yeah, so I have my big project database. We're kind of like everything lives. Things enter the inbox and I process them every week and filter them into the big database. Then I kind of slowly elect things into the forecast view, which I'm actually going to work on. I do that via flags or this kind of custom estimation system that I have, which I can talk about in more detail. But otherwise, I would say it's a pretty simple workflow, not that many perspectives. I don't have any of these hooks or automations really, which I know are very powerful, but I haven't felt the need to reach for them yet.

Andrew J. Mason: I would love to hear today or ... I was going to assume that it was a today view, but the flags and the custom setup that you have happening there, do you mind speaking a little bit more to that?

offlinemark: Yeah, so my forecast view has the things that appear in there are the things that are concretely due, like hard due dates, which are somewhat rare for me. I don't use them too much. Things that are deferred to appear on a particular day, and I use deferred dates very extensively to just get things out of the way or defer things into specific kind of slots. For example, every Friday is my taking care of admin stuff day. So if there's an admin type category in my thing, I'll just defer it to next Friday as a general bucket. I know there'll be stuff there to do usually, and so I don't need to make a lot of decisions about that. So I just defer things heavily. If I have tasks that I know I want to work on literally today, I will flag it and that appears in the forecast view. Then I have this estimation system, which is a little bit non standard and may be a bit interesting. So I know OmniFocus supports time estimations of tasks out of the box, but my problem with that is it's too granular because it's measured in minutes. So you can say, I think this task will take 17 minutes, or I think this task will take 34 minutes or something like that. For me, that's a bit more mental overhead than I would like because in actuality I basically just want to group things into these course buckets of trivial, kind of small, a bit larger, and that's pretty much it. It's just ultra course. I just want to have a sense of how big is this thing because otherwise if you are just looking at a list of tasks in your OmniFocus, they all kind of visually appear kind of similar. They all look the same, but they might represent pretty tremendous differences in the amount of work and effort it could take to do the task. You might argue, well then you should be breaking down your tasks even more, I think. Yeah, sure. But even still, not all tasks are equivalently sized and I find it helpful to kind of have some visual indicator of this. So in lieu of using the actual estimation feature, I add equal signs to the start of the text in the action name. So I'll say it'll be like one equal sign, space and then the name of the action or two equal signs, space, and then the actual text. These equal signs are kind of nice because zero equal signs is trivial, one is kind of small, two is a bit larger, and then I kind of stopped there. But from that I can more visually see the relative sizes of these things, which otherwise that effort is not represented. I find that helpful. Then once I've estimated it like that, I have a custom perspective that is very simple. It just searches and filters for tasks that have the text space or equals space. When I do that, it will find everything that I have labeled in this way, everything that I have estimated like this, because if I estimate it as kind of small space, equals, it'll find that or space, space, equals, it'll find that too. And the things that are trivial with no equal sign, I just do it today immediately basically. But basically this represents a set of tasks that are actually a little bit more opted in from the main database, but I haven't decided that I'll do it today or on a particular day yet. But it's a more curated list of things that are a bit more hot topics for me. So that's a bit of a custom workflow thing. I've never heard of someone doing that before, but it works for me pretty well.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, also, this is a first for me, and I love the concept of how well that translates to anybody that's heard the story about big rocks in a jar trying to decide how to fit it in.

offlinemark: Yeah, totally.

Andrew J. Mason: That totally makes sense to me.

offlinemark: Right. It's also a thing from Scrum. Anyone that's used Scrum before will recognize this idea of estimating in of coarser increments, not necessarily in time basically. So it's inspired by that too.

Andrew J. Mason: Very cool. There might be a little bit of crossover in what you just said, but you do have so much kind of working in parallel in all the different areas of your life. You've got the streaming, you've got music, you've got just any kind of leisure stuff that you do, content creation, your actual work at Ableton. How do you handle personally working with all of these things in parallel? Because you did mention when you first take a look at the database and you look at the overall project view, yeah, it is overwhelming, but it's accurate as well. So I don't want to pretend it isn't there. It is there, but how do you approach that?

offlinemark: I think first off, filtering is huge. So I consider my work and the work separate from the rest of my life. So at the very top level, I have a work folder and then everything work related is under there. Then on my work machine, pretty much a hundred percent of the time that's just focused to that work folder. So I never see personal stuff in my work environment. Then conversely, on my personal machines, I'm focused 100% of the time with the focus feature on my life folder. So that already helps filter out a lot of the noise. Then within my life folder, I have everything related to my personal life, but also my projects and stuff. Again, I'm very careful about not viewing the whole thing at any one point, but always filtering things away to only see what's relevant. But also a key point is that I don't focus on every project with the same intensity at all times. So some projects are a higher priority to me than others. So I don't try to do everything all at once. I just try to do things to the extent possible, but given their priorities. So music is less lower priority for me right now than streaming and stuff. So I don't schedule as many tasks in every week for that kind of stuff. When I do my prioritization every week, I kind of have a smaller budget for that kind of stuff.

Andrew J. Mason: That's really helpful I think for people not to be overwhelmed to realize, yeah, this is a slice of my life, but in a weighted view, if there's a way to view it in a weighted way, it's not necessarily meaning that I have to spend this amount of time for or that it's just as you had said, needs that much focus. I think that's a great way to look at it.

offlinemark: Yeah, and one other thought is also making, separating the someday maybe kind of category from things you were actually planning to do and liberally putting things into the someday maybe bucket, because if they're in that bucket, it lightens the load and you don't have to feel like it contributes to your whole to-do list.

Andrew J. Mason: I am a self-proclaimed visionary crazy maker where there's millions of ideas every single day and you really have to just pair down to do list someday. Maybe it's broken down in categories for me just because there's someday maybe professional life, someday maybe personal life, but it's guilt free. It's like, Hey, I might do it. I might solve world hunger. Probably not, but I just want to put it in there. Well talk to me a little bit more about, and this is more conceptual and it's personal to you, but I'd love to hear your why behind it. What makes you passionate about being as productive as you possibly can be? Because somebody doesn't go into this length of really kind of making sure that they have the commitments in their life taken care of. I think there's a slice of integrity, but just speak a little bit more to why is that important to you?

offlinemark: I think for me, I'm passionate about this topic because I view it as an important piece of finding happiness actually and being a happy person. That's not to say that productivity equals happiness, or if you are productive, you will be happy. I'm just saying in practical terms, modern lives can have a lot of stuff required of us. We have a lot of asks, a lot of people in our lives, commitments meaning to do. So on a practical level, if you have a system for quote-unquote productivity, it's just about managing and getting things done that matter to you in your life, but avoiding stress from getting overwhelmed, which actively takes away from your happiness and staying mindful about how you spend your time so you can be confident that when you do spend your time on things, you're not secretly wondering if you should be doing other things instead, but you have more of a sense of calm and control over that. I also just want to comment on, I think the term productivity is interesting because I think it comes with a lot of baggage and connotations, which are not necessarily positive and also not everyone resonates with the term productivity or identifying as a productive person, but I'd view it just more as the simple aspiration to do the things that matter for you basically. I think ultimately, it comes down to being happy for me.

Andrew J. Mason: So good. That's so good, Mark. I love hearing the heart behind that because there's a lot of technicality to it. I don't know if it's a fair comparison, left brain, right brain thing, but it goes back to the passion behind the technical, which is really cool. I am really interested in, is there anything that you've experienced in your journey over the last few years where, hey, I've taken on this new system, I've gotten a lot of wins out of it, but if I were to give advice to somebody who maybe was just getting started, for me, I thought this was a great idea, maybe skip that for you because it really bear fruit the way that I was hoping it would bear fruit. It didn't really turn out to be what I was hoping it would be. Any advice that you would give in that space?

offlinemark: I've tried and failed several times with using OmniFocus and other tools. I'm not sure I would say to skip those though, because I think you always learn something and, even if you try all the different tools and "waste a bunch of time," you get a sense of what's out there now. Yeah, that comes to mind, but I wouldn't really say that's a waste of time to totally skip. I think one thing that does come to mind though was I had a period where I was trying to really capture everything, but then I didn't have any follow through after that. So I was kind of logging up these massive piles of things and I didn't have the knowledge or habits or rituals to do anything with that. That kind of made things worse actually. It just made it clear how much I had to do. But it's not helpful if you're not in a position to do anything with it. I think that really changed for me when I started to learn some of these essential principles of GTD, of actually clarifying amorphous things in your life. I kind of call them topics or situations because that's the only thing that comes to mind when it enters my life, such as I have no more hot water today, for some reason. It's like a situation. It's like, okay, I guess the outcome is I want it to have hot water again, but what do I need to do. It takes some work to actually think about those things. And so until you do, they're kind of amorphous. There is really this kind of art and skill that I have learned of taking something amorphous and rigorously removing the unclarity and figuring out, okay, what is the actual outcome? Then furthermore, what do I actually need to do? So I think that is actually a pretty essential skill in my opinion. I learned that much later than I think I could have. I think I would've avoided a lot of stress and pain if I kind of learned how to manage this big piling list, which I was just kind of letting it let linger and just getting overwhelmed every day.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the phrase you used rigorously removing the unclarity. To me, it's it, because you have to be ruthless about it, otherwise it's just going to just sit there. It reminds me of the old movies or something where everything's going great and then somebody comes in and says, we have a situation. That is a situation. I've got to do something with this thing. So what do I do with it? I don't know. Mark, I really have enjoyed this conversation. If folks are interested in connecting with you, finding out more about what you're up to or maybe hanging out for some of the streaming sessions and stuff, how can they do that?

offlinemark: Go to my website, offlinemark.com. All the information is there. You can learn more about me, you can check out some of my writing. You can find out ... my stream is just at YouTube @Offlinemark. I'm pretty active on Twitter @Offlinemark too. Also feel free to email me if want, if this resonated with you, mark@offlinemark. Yeah, that's it.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome, Mark. I so appreciate this. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been great.

offlinemark: Appreciate it, Andrew.

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