THE OMNI SHOW

Rick Manelius: I wear many hats in the startup space, five startups over 16 years. I came from more of an operational technical background. With work, it's like, okay, well using things like Airtable, Jira, and internally for my personal to-dos, I'm very much a fan of always using the inbox as fast as I can, so when I have idea, I try to dump it in there. Personal pet projects or family, any open loops with my errands, chores, ideas, wishes, dreams, really lives an OmniFocus.

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 Rick Manelius uses OmniFocus. Welcome everybody to this episode of the Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and this is where we interview the people and stories surrounding the Omni award-winning products. Today we're excited to have Rick Manelius with us. He's the founder of Atomic Form. It's a company revolutionizing how we interact with digital art and media. Rick has a passion for bridging technology and creativity, bringing innovative solutions to the forefront of the digital landscape. His work focuses on redefining user experiences in a rapidly evolving digital world. Rick, we're honored to have you on here. Thanks for joining us.

Rick Manelius: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the time and opportunity.

Andrew J. Mason: And so grateful to be able to talk about Atomic Form because it is... I mean, we're talking bleeding edge, at the very forefront of what's happening here. I could foresee possibly that Atomic Form is one of those really difficult cocktail conversation. Like we're at a party with people who may or may not be in the space and somebody just comes up to you and says, "Rick, what do you do?" How do you even begin to package that and answer that for them?

Rick Manelius: Oh my gosh, I love that framing. When I was a track coach in college, I used to tell people, depending on the athlete's background, I might have four or five different instruction types because the same set of instructions and the same answer to all 10 would result in completely different results, but if I could tailor the answer... And so when my mom asks, I just say, "I work on computers," and she's like, "That's great, son." And like, awesome mom. But depending on someone's background, I'll say, "Well, first of all, we work in the digital art space with NFTs." And again, if they're like, "Oh, cool, I got that," it's like, great. The next sort of pass is like, "Look, art is not just the art itself, it's the history, it's the story, it's the context that makes things value." The Mona Lisa is not the most valuable painting in the world, and 10 million people don't visit it just because it's beautiful, right? They go there because it's famous. And if we're going to have on-chain digital art, permanent on chain digital art, the stories, history, and context should come along with it. So at the end of the day, what we do is we make it trivial for artists, collectors, and curators to package and connect that data so that the history, stories, and context lives alongside the art as well. Increases its value, but also increases its ability to connect with people, because as you know, it's so hard to follow everything on the internet. Things are coming and going, websites are crashing, going away, and we don't want people to lose their most valuable asset, which is not just the NFTs itself, but the stories and context that go along with it.

Andrew J. Mason: That's a really brilliant way to package that because you've heard the talk before about is it a monument or is it a conversation? And the internet that is Web 2.0 that we see is absolutely conversations so latest, loudest, always in the front of people's faces and what I see Atomic Lore as may be entering the conversation as saying, hey, let's pull out some of those significant pieces of the conversation and put them back into the space where it's more of a monument, more of something to be appreciated. And Atomic Lore enters the conversation, talk to us a little bit more about that.

Rick Manelius: Yeah, that's exactly it. One of the hardest parts about Web 3 entities and crypto, I mean obviously there's the whole, there's scams and there's money and people get very allergic to that, but once you get past that barrier, they're interested, they're curious. It's like, well, how do you get started, right? And it's very ephemeral social media, TikTok, X, if you're not very online and very much watching the pulse of it, you feel like you can never catch up. One of the most beautiful things that we've been able to do is create these time capsules, these communal memories by which you can kind of relive the experience. We kind of think of time hop. You could bring someone new and say like, "Hey, here was the 30 day period where this drop happened, where all these big artists and all these big brands were talking about this and all the hoopla, all the energy, all the conversation, and you have a permanent sort of capture of that experience, that moment, that energy." And a lot of these artists will drive people to our site because they're like, I want people to relive that same experience, I want people to be able to see what it was like to be there. And since it's permanent on chain and growing, you'll have multiple sort of time capsules as these pieces go around the world as they go to different shows, as different things occur, and you're able to bring newcomers who... Again, back to my mom who can't necessarily understand what digital art is, but like, "Go check this out. Just stream through this and just see what your reaction is." Like, oh, that's cool, I saw they're in Venice where I saw there's this experience of this big thing on the wall. It's big mural and all these people around it. And so it makes it more approachable and it makes it more long term because I like to think in decades, I like to think that when these artists are... It's not just how can I make money now? It's like, how do I inherit these assets to my kids? And if you think about in 10, 20 years when this becomes part of your IP, part of your property, you want to make sure not only the IP is not damaged, meaning that's on chain and it's permanently available, but all these stories and IP around it is captured such that they can use it if they're making income off of it or just to be proud of their parents and just being like, hey, this is part of our history, our legacy. And so I think that's what drives me. I've worked in a couple archival companies in the past large digital outside media systems that powered things like Bob Dylan archives, 30, 40 years of live footage and audio, like how to slice and dice that so that way it's preserved, but also every time there's an opportunity for a jingle or a movie or whatever to access a particular clip or a particular scene from a particular time and place, that information could be available. So we're trying to take that same pattern in the sort of Web 1, Web 2 space and really apply it to these new on-chain digital assets called NFTs.

Andrew J. Mason: It's a challenge in terms of the education component, I know, but it is a question worth asking. We haven't asked this question before. We have maybe in the physical space, but not when it comes to digital things and preserving those stories around the artifacts themselves I think is also what you were saying retains the value for that.

Rick Manelius: It's not just art too. I want to make this broader... For people who don't care about art, this is for everybody. There's this old lie that I was told when I first went to school, which was like everything on the internet is there forever. I went to college in '99, it's like, "Don't it put on the internet, it's going to be there forever." And the reality is 80% of all links die in 10 years. People are finding now their MySpace pages that 2008, 2009 that spent all this time to like, oh my god, this thing's going to be there, GeoCities, AOL, eventually X will change and Facebook will change, and all these places will change. And so people offload their digital identity to these platforms, which may or may not include them forever. Even YouTube, the prices went up recently and their Gmail's are starting to cull old accounts and old email threads, et cetera. So the more that we trust digital properties to store our memories and our milestones and those important memories that we have, including our pictures of our kids and everything else, we go back to look at them only to find out that they're not there anymore. Then all of a sudden we have gaps in our memory. I have photo albums from my parents that I've inherited, they're physical, I could store them in a vault and I could protect them. But when I left Facebook, I actually purged my account and I lost frankly a lot of photos of my kids that I uploaded there, but don't have a copy on my phone. That's memory loss, it's experience loss, it sucks. And so we're not trying to capture all things, but we're trying to say, what are the things that you want to keep forever? And so whether that's an art, we can expand this to beyond. This becomes more of a general purpose problem of how do you store your legacy in a way that can live longer than you.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the history component of it too. It actually provides a great transition for us as well into the Omni Group. You mention you use utilize OmniFocus to get things done day to day. Do you have any recollection or memories of when you first came across the Omni Group themselves or maybe more specifically OmniFocus, the software? Or was it just kind of like this, you know what, over time I just realized that's what it is and what the software does?

Rick Manelius: I actually looked back at my 1Password and I think I first signed into the Omni Group website around 2011, so it's now been, I guess 13 years. In college, so at MIT, I was an undergrad and grad student. Getting things done was one of many solutions that really made like MIT doable. I considered myself a smart kid but a hard worker. I wasn't the natural genius, but I was smart enough and worked hard enough that I could usually achieve most things. But high school never prepared me for what it really took to go sort of at an elite level. And when you go to a school like that, you need every possible trick, tip, hack you can get through the day. And so Getting Things Done with David Allen was one of those magic solutions that really helped me take that overwhelm and make it feel more manageable. So I started doing workshops. When I was a grad student, I would teach other undergrads like, "Hey, you may not have learned how to do productivity management or this type of workflow in the past," so run a class for five to 10 people. And then through Merlin Mann, and he was running 43 Folders and some other things. So OmniFocus became one of those tools, I think, that was how to apply the GTD system because early 2006-7, you could kind of make your own system, but there really wasn't a solution that said like, hey, let's sort of digitize this and it is really embrace the GTD workflow. There's some tools you can kind of force the GTD workflow into it, but I think OmniFocus is like, no, this is a Getting Things Done style app. And so that was key. And then I think the reason I stuck with OmniFocus and also I use OmniGraph, OmniOutliner, a couple other tools along the way, OmniFocus is the one that really stuck was because it had the multi-app sync. Obviously with Getting Things Done, you want to be able to capture things from all places, so multiple work and personal laptop, phone and/or tablet. And so that ability to synchronize my workflow across whatever device I was close to was very important, and I think OmniFocus early on really mastered that well such that I could trust it for all my personal to-dos. I answered beyond your question, but yeah, really where I met Omni Group was somewhere between Merlin Mann, 43 Folders, and 2011 was probably where I met you guys.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, no, I love the context surrounding it as well, because it was kind of... You talk about this moment in history where things are preserved. There was this movement where this idea of how to manage an enhanced workflow spread through more effectively, especially when we're encountered with all of this extra digital information. For somebody that maybe finds themselves in that space where their responsibilities are expanding maybe or they want to take on more, but they haven't really quite figured out the next step, hack, trick, whatever to do. It doesn't have to be GTD, doesn't have to be OmniFocus related, but do you have any kind of good first go-to like, hey, if you're really trying to take a next step in the direction of expanded responsibility or trying to apply yourself, but for somebody that is just looking for a good or multiple first steps, that biggest bang for your buck, lowest hanging fruit, what would you suggest for them?

Rick Manelius: I think that's a great question, and I've done this both personally and organization wide, which is the first trick is just to do a one-time brain dump of all your open loops that you ever have and that is usually a very shocking experience because I think most ambitious people, they don't realize how much mental RAM they're already committed to. And so if your roles and responsibilities are expanding, now all of a sudden you're about to embark on this new greater list of things. I'll tell a very quick story. At one of my organizations, we had grown from eight to 50 people at the time and we were having trouble delivering against 250 clients and things were getting a little stressful in the system. We kept saying, "Why are we having such stress getting things done here?" Because we have 50 people, the number to projects doesn't seem off. Well, then we said, well, we knew people were kind of doing some internal, we call them internal projects. We're like, we know people are doing these things, and one day we're like, how many of them are there? We literally handed out note cards and we said, "Everyone write down every sort of side project or internal tooling or cool idea or whatever it that's not client focused and let's put them on a wall." And we had 250 client projects and we had 350 internal project.

Andrew J. Mason: Holy cow.

Rick Manelius: And that moment, it was so clarifying when all of a sudden people are like, holy crap, the balance... It should have been maybe five to one client projects to internal projects, or I mean at the most extreme one-to-one or whatever. But when we found out 350 meant seven internal projects per employee, and we're like, "Guys, that's just insane, right? You're taking on too much." And so I think the first gut check for a lot of people is how much are you already committed to? And I think for me, whether you do Getting Things Done or use OmniFocus or whatever, the thing that's always a stark reminder every day is when I open up my OmniFocus and I see things past due, I'm like, damn, I already have a lot of open commitments. I'm already behind. So when someone's like, "Hey, this next due thing," I'm like, it's a forcing function. So I would say just the acknowledgement of what you already have open is I think the first step to make. It's the first step to identify a problem is just acknowledge a problem or just understand is it a problem. And I think that's, for most people, a good place to start. And if you are one of the lucky few that don't have too many open commitments, you've been pretty stringent or your responsibilities haven't pushed you to [inaudible 00:12:56], that's great, then you have more flexibility. But I think most people when they're seeking a solution like this already unconsciously acknowledge the overwhelm. They know they want to fix it, but they don't know how to get started, and I think the first one is just acknowledge what you got.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the term you just used, forcing function. To me, that means it's an iterative thing that makes you arrive more at accuracy. I think a lot of times, because our brain's the same tool that's using this thing that's also executing on this thing, we tend to have this optimism bias that says, you know I think I've got it. I understand what it is that I'm committed to, no big deal. And then when you actually see it in front of you externalized, you're like, okay, that's more than I thought there was. Do you mind placing maybe OmniFocus in an overall context for yourself? In terms of software flowing into it or the data gets exported out of it, or maybe not necessarily just from a technical standpoint, but how the workflow uses where OmniFocus sits in that overall space?

Rick Manelius: I wear many hats in the startup space, five startups over 16 years. I came from more of an operational technical background, now the CEO role, but very familiar with Jira, and Trello, all the project management systems, and I think OmniFocus is not the appropriate tool for a team solution. It's really, I think, more of an individualized one. So at the end of the day, I try to follow the David Allen philosophy. It's like you want to keep the number of systems you use to as minimum as you can tolerate. And so for me with work, it's like, okay, well using things like Airtable, Jira, and internally for my personal to do's and personal pet projects or family, any open loops with my errands, chores, ideas, wishes, dreams, really lives an OmniFocus. So I'm very much a fan of always using the inbox as fast as I can. So when I have an idea, I try to dump it in there. I will have some other note documents that I keep as reference because OmniFocus really isn't a place you want to keep long-term reference materials. So my overall workflow is generally I use the inbox very liberally. I have five or six main top level categories, just one personal, one work, one just general crypto because I'm learning stuff in just the general space. I have an AI one because I'm also learning stuff in the AI space right now and a couple others. And so if I have a consulting client or any sort of mentorship I do, I'll usually have a global bucket, and then I have subfolders and then sort of projects within that. Really, I think the two main drivers for me is I like to use the due date one because obviously I don't want to miss certain deadlines. So the due date is like [inaudible 00:15:15] hold to be accountable. The weekly review is also a great Sunday night steering method where it's okay, all of these things I sort of thought I could handle, do I still believe that? Do I still want to... Or sometimes my enthusiasm for something's waned. I put an idea for funsies, let's go try this, and then all of a sudden I find out, well, life got busy, not as important. I thought it was a good idea. And so my big three I think is inbox capture, due date driven, always that it's much better than a calendar. My calendars, you get distracted is all the other stuff going around it, but it's like this is literally the things in the order that have to be done by certain dates. The folders and stuff are obviously very helpful when you do your weekly review and kind of see how are you balanced work, personal. And I try not to keep too much work [inaudible 00:15:56] OmniFocus, because again, that keeps it in my bucket, but not the team's bucket. But if there are certain individual tasks that I know are in Jira, but I need to track against my own sort of commitments, I'll bring in a copy of it into the tracker with the Jira ticket number and maybe the title because that way when I'm sort of in my internal mode, I can sort of keep it all with me. And then only when I need to bridge information over do I jump into Jira and do it over there. I don't force my employees or anyone I work with use a GTD type system for their own stuff because I think the team wise, we have to use team tools, but everyone is sort of allowed to use whatever personal workflow things they needed to sort of track their stuff and that's fine. But I find that without OmniFocus, I would definitely miss a lot of things.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. For stuff that isn't necessarily carving out new territory for you, it's not necessarily a brand new thought every single time, do you have anything that fits the space of routines, habits, and how does that look, how does that play out for you? Yeah, it's not necessarily where the context will remind me like, oh yeah, I should put on pants because I just woke up this morning, that's context, versus it is something I do want to make sure I do, I do want to make sure that this happens once every month, every quarter. How does that look for you?

Rick Manelius: Oh, absolutely. No, I have a lot of recurring tasks. Repeat again, especially if I'm trying to do new habit formation, I'll put a do every day or do upon last completion, and I'll use other apps too. I have one that's more of a dedicated habit formation app that I'll use. Again, it's not OmniFocus because that one's very much driven about repeatable patterns to develop a new skill or have that experience. So I try to keep my number of repeatables in OmniFocus to a minimum, usually to new stuff I'm trying to develop, only because I want to continue to balance the overwhelm. I don't want to have... You don't want to put brush your teeth in OmniFocus because you just do that, right? So things that are just already baked in routines, you just kind of ignore out. But anytime you're trying to seed yourself, you know you're committed to this, you want to keep going to this thing every day, so I'll fit in right project folder, whether it's health, whether it's get in shape, whether it's some sort of new health regimen or a new skill I'm trying to learn. And if I'm really adamant about it, I'll usually have it in a repeat pattern for 30 to 45 days or so. And once I feel like I've actually internalized it, then I'll sort of kick it off an autopilot-

Andrew J. Mason: It's in there?

Rick Manelius: But yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: Is there anything that you would consider to be a mistake or a misstep along the way that, hey, I thought this was a great idea for my system, tried it out, executed on, it worked for other people, might still work for other people, but for me, it just didn't pan out the way that I was picturing it would?

Rick Manelius: Flags and context, I was pretty hardcore about that in the beginning. I love the idea of it, but especially as we're more remote, context is less useful or tends to be more work to keep track of the context than I actually find myself saying, let me find what actions I can do within this context. So I would say I was more successful until my responsibilities grew, and then as they grew, adding that layer or managing that layer stopped adding value to me. But there is value in doing the weekly review of going project by project. I stopped doing it for a while, honestly I kept thinking maybe I don't need it, and then one day about a year and a half ago, I started to go through the weekly review function, like, oh crap, there's a lot of things that kind of filed here without due dates. And I'm like, [inaudible 00:19:00] it was similar to that moment of re-putting the index cards in the wall was like, oh crap, there's a lot of stuff here that just got tucked into corners and whatever. And I had to take a four hour period to like, okay, let's either re-engage or delete it. Either it's not important and I need to get rid of it or really recommit and get this commitment done. So one thing is context doesn't seem as valuable to me anymore, but weekly reviews, I thought I was passed, but really when I started re-added back into my life, I was like, the weekly review is very important, I need to force myself to go through those buckets again.

Andrew J. Mason: Kudos to you for forcing that clarity. I mean, it's so easy just to let the clarity go by and just not finish the thinking and just let it be out there or whatever. Last question, we'll let you go because I know you're super busy, want to respect your time. But I would love to know, and this is so open-ended, feel free to take it any direction you'd like to, but what would you say makes you passionate about being as productive as you possibly can in your life? There's so many options for productivity enhancement. What is it about being as productive as you possibly can that drives you and says, you know what, I want to make sure I have that edge in order to be the best person I can be?

Rick Manelius: I don't think I had that drive growing up, but I think when I got to MIT and I saw what's possible, I think everyone's born with gifts or opportunities to achieve, whether it's your personal skills that you have or talents, et cetera, and it's like I just find the world so beautiful and fascinating and fun and interesting. I'm never bored. My Amazon books, man, I buy stuff. I just have so many interests. And the reality is, look, I'm a responsible parent, I have two young kids, I want to make sure I have a good life for them. I want to both ensure that I meet my obligations as provider, but also that I get to go have these experiences as a person, the things I want to learn, the things I want to do, the things I want to experience. And a lot of that is being able to achieve things, being able to learn new topics so that way if I go scuba diving, I can do it well, or if I want to start learning a new hobby or explore new interests. There's just so much interesting things in this world and we get one life to experience it. So I want to be productive so I can get the things done I need to get done so I can get to the fun stuff that I want to do.

Andrew J. Mason: Speaking of artifacts that are preserving moments in time, I'm so grateful for this one. So thank you, Rick, I really do appreciate that. And honestly, well thought out, answer and conversation. If folks are interested in finding out more about Atomic Form, what you're involved with, what you're up to, and they just kind of want to orbit in your space, how can they do that?

Rick Manelius: Yeah, the best place for me is I live and breathe on X. so X.com/RickManelius for me personally, and then X.com/AtomicForm, all one word. We are very prolific. We engaged a lot with the art collector, curator community. And then you can obviously go to our website, AtomicForm.com.

Andrew J. Mason: And you also, one more thing, we don't want to forget too, is you wrote a book as well. Is that true?

Rick Manelius: Absolutely. It's called Saver Startup, I just published it last year. The inspiration is I've been a mentor for various accelerators, specifically tech starters. I've done like four or five cohorts, been a mentor and advisor to a lot of other startup founders. Just like I did at MIT, like I ran those training courses using Getting Things Done and other things, like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, et cetera, to really equip these students who were already bright and brilliant, but they sometimes just needed a little bit of guidance on frameworks and flows in order to again, achieve and graduate and excel at all the things that they were doing. Startups are the same way. You have a lot of energy, finite time, finite money, and you got to do a lot with a little, right? And so having gone through and learned a lot of hard lessons in life, some successes, some failures, I wanted to sort of compile a lot of the best of the best I've learned, compile it into a sort of playbook. It's no David Allen, Getting Things Done, but it's certainly a way... It's like a book that I would've loved to have read on my first journey. It would've helped me so much to know certain patterns, best practices and mindset to attack first time founder stuff. So I now sort of in a Getting Things Done methodology, I can't mentor everybody because running my own startup. So whenever people ask, I'm like, "Hey, here's a book. Here's a lot of playbooks of all these different facts and ideas and frameworks that I've used. Please read it and if you have any more questions, I'd be happy to set up calls." But it really helps force multiply my own efforts to help other founders who are trying to achieve big dreams and goals like I am.

Andrew J. Mason: That's fantastic. Rick, thank you so much for joining us.

Rick Manelius: Awesome. Appreciate it, Andrew.

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