THE OMNI SHOW

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 hear how Robby Burns uses Omni software to get things done. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and our guest today is Robby Burns. He's a music educator, freelance percussionist and technology specialist, residing in Ellicott City, Maryland. He's the author of Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, published by Oxford University Press, and he speaks about music and education and technology on his podcast, Music Ed Tech Talk. Robby, thank you so much for joining us today.

Robby Burns:
Thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to it and this is an awesome show that I listen to regularly and always learn new stuff from it, and I'm honored to be here.

Andrew J. Mason:
It's our honor to have you, Robby. Now, that intro was wide and varied, everything from podcast host to book writer to blogger, slash music teacher. Do you mind giving people a thumbnail sketch of what you're currently up to these days?

Robby Burns:
Sure. I definitely have my hands in a lot of different things, but I think the part of my professional responsibilities that are the things that most people relate to is that by day, I'm a full-time middle school public educator teaching band, here in Howard County, which is our district, Howard County, Maryland. I do teach some general music too, which is more of a performance and project based curriculum where we're juggling different instruments and some music theory and history and other things. But most of my tasks in that role involve running with a co-director who I work with, four different bands that perform numerous times throughout the year, working on a music team of four. In my spare time, I have a pretty big percussion private teaching studio here in my home, and I teach private students from elementary through high school, sometimes younger, sometimes older, but usually students who are in this same school district and looking to develop their skills on that. And then just for extra bonus fun, I do some presenting, writing, blogging, podcasting. I wouldn't say always, the combination of music, education and technology, sometimes one of those things, sometimes two of those three things sometimes is where they all meet for me, and the workflows and ideas that I've come up with by exploring technology in a deeper way.

Andrew J. Mason:
Robby, I am really glad that you've mentioned that and it's a little bit of a rabbit trail from where I'm headed, but I would love to hear some of the ways that you've been able to assist people in the broader scope of technology but also in the smaller slice of technology's interaction with music.

Robby Burns:
So, that's an interesting one. When I present at music education conferences, I'm typically presenting in areas of the spaces where other people are presenting on the same topic. And a lot of my colleagues who are presenting on this are really dealing with student facing technology, music technology as the vehicle for making music. We're a performing arts situation, so it's a lot different than doing project based work where you're making digital music using digital tools. That's not really the core of what I teach, but it is what a lot of people associate with music technology. They think of it as that's what the students are using. So there's definitely been more of that in my teaching life as our general music curriculum has put more of these tools in front of students, but my own personal journey starts really with just personal productivity and being a graduate student looking to try to deal with all of the things I'm being asked to do at once. I just remember doing research and writing papers that were far beyond the scope of my own comfort and just thinking to myself right around the time that the iPhone was starting to take off, just thinking to myself, how do I find things that gather all this information where I don't have to just be like, this is right around when Gmail started to become also more widespread, thinking how do I just stop emailing files to myself to have them whatever screen I'm in front of, and how do I get cloud-based apps that are really good at wrangling first information, but then later tasks. As the iPad entered into my life when I got my first teaching job and sort of became a digital piece of paper for sheet music amongst other things, I kind of more and more wanted all these devices to just be different windows into the same information. I mean, the second brain is what a lot of people like to call it these days.

Andrew J. Mason:
I just started that book. That's so crazy you said that. Looks really good. So is that the larger context within which you came across The Omni Group? Tell me more about how you did come across them and then maybe some of the things that you've been able to accomplish with the software.

Robby Burns:
How I came into it was just sort of looking for this software and finding out what people are rumbling about on the internet. And around 2008 maybe, is when I started using Evernote and Dropbox and some of these other web-based workflow kind of apps. And then I remember walking into an Apple store around that time, and you could still buy a lot of Box software back then. And yeah, they just had, I think it was maybe things or one of these other Native Mac apps that was in, and I remember trying some different task apps at the time and my To-Do list was one and a couple of others, and the reminders app couldn't do much at the time. But I just remember around that same time becoming aware of OmniFocus and getting things done and trying to explore, okay, what can I lift with this power tool, and then just going from there. I mean the further I went, the more I got connected to the places online where I could learn more about productivity software and workflows, and then the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper and I surround myself with the voices that hopefully challenge me to look at things differently but also affirm the things that I'm trying to do, and finding the software that best fits my goals.

Andrew J. Mason:
You mentioned OmniFocus at the roles level. What areas do you find yourself managing in OmniFocus? Is the students life a part of that doing school or coursework? How does that look for you?

Robby Burns:
Yeah, it's not so much research. I kind of wish I could be a student full time and have all of this software that I have now. It was just the tail end of my studies that I really started to use computers to do the lifting more for me. So now it's just really split up into lots of domains. I mean my OmniFocus is a little nuts right now. I know some people don't believe in having this many concurrent projects, but I try to keep them really small. I interpret projects as things just with a couple of tasks. It can be a project and I'd say the main domains have got some personal things, some family and financial, housework related things going on. My Howard County public school system involvement is obviously my role at Ellicott Mills Middle School, but I also co-direct our middle school GT honor band with another director, and that's something that I think of as how many people look at a project more traditionally. It's a little bit more sequential, there are things that happen at certain times in the year. There are things that happen in certain contexts, at certain locations that depend on other people. Then my private studio and then a handful of other things that really fit more into that more linear model are producing podcast episodes, preparing presentations and traveling to give them all fit under that. But a lot of my OmniFocus projects are actually just single item action lists, areas of interest or focus. There's kind of always a rotation of tasks that are due, but I can do them whenever I want to.

Andrew J. Mason:
So, the goal of the list isn't necessarily to get the things in the list done, it's just the items flow in and out of that?

Robby Burns:
Yeah, I would say so. And I think what OmniFocus is great at doing because of how much you can customize what you're looking at and in the order you're looking at it, I try to design my system around how do I just always have the thing in front of me that I'm supposed to be focusing on. It's usually based on what time of the day it is, when I need to have it done. So I'm in the forecast quite a lot in OmniFocus, but also sometimes I'm using some sort of contextual tag. One little small but helpful thing for me, is if I've got a bunch of different things to photocopy and they're not necessarily related to, if one of them is an honor band thing and one of them is just my school band, I can tag them both photocopier and then I save myself all these extra trips to the photocopier, because I forgot I really just needed to hang out there once.

Andrew J. Mason:
Whenever somebody mentions that they're doing more than one type of software, I like to do a high level just to hear more about what they can accomplish with each, you mentioned OmniOutliner is a part of your process as well. What are you able to do with that and how does that look for you?

Robby Burns:
OmniOutliner is awesome for just thinking about things because my brain does not think in a straight line. A lot of my ideas, particularly when I present them, they have to meet the public at some point and have a logic to the way they're structured, which usually is obvious to me, but I don't think all of it out into being in that way. So I'll typically start with something a little bit less linear, like MindNode is a tool that I've used quite a bit and that can actually export its map into a file that OmniOutliner can open. And that's really great to drag around things and reorder them in actual sequence that a person would most benefit from the information. And I didn't actually say what I do with it, so anything from lesson plans to curriculum development to presentation. My whole book started as an OmniOutliner file and then I exported it to Scrivener where I've kind of fleshed out the text.

Andrew J. Mason:
That is so cool. And you mentioned OmniGraffle as well. How do you utilize that software?

Robby Burns:
The type of document that I spend a lot of time with in the band and actually in the general music environment too, is a seating chart. We have some web-based tools that are designed to be like you're one place to go, but education software is pretty sad, it's pretty sad out there. And so in the classroom I need to collect a lot of really fast informal data and almost as fast as someone just realizing they need to print an extra copy of some music for a student and writing it on a sticky note, that level of speed without necessarily taking my mind or my eyes off of what I'm currently doing. And so I needed a way to have a seating chart that wasn't going to make me think about the computer. So I designed one that looks the way that I read a seating chart the fastest, with really nice shapes and a layout that's color coded by instrument. And whenever I edit it, I export it as a PDF into GoodNotes app on iPad and half of my screen is the seating chart for annotating and taking notes on the day, taking notes over top of students' names on the chart. And then usually the right side of the iPad screen is an app called ForScore, where I manage my sheet music library, I read my music from it. And then in Slide Over I change up what I'm actually reading my plan in. Right now, it's a text file for reasons we can talk about. But what I have done in the past is OmniOutliner is sometimes itself the sequence of what I'm going to say, what I'm going to rehearse, things I want to stop and work on in the music. And what makes OmniOutliner especially good at that, this is on a music stand fairly far from my eyes, and because of the customizable styles, I can just make the text really big and I can have every level of outline be really vibrant and contrasting color from one another, and just make it this thing that I can read from really far away, even though it's a small window.

Andrew J. Mason:
I really do appreciate how your brain moves from the analytical to the sequential back and forth pretty effortlessly. And there's also a zoom in and a zoom out of the context factor there. That's really cool to be able to see you travel through all the different areas of knowledge work and just figure out, okay, what software best speaks to the way that I want to present information right now. Move over to OmniFocus for me. Talk to me about what do you have as a first bit of advice for anybody that's just getting started with task management. Maybe they're overwhelmed by their commitments, maybe they're not yet sure how to best present information to other people. Just tell me a little bit about that.

Robby Burns:
So music teachers in particular, are already overwhelmed by a lot of different kinds of responsibilities. It's not just this glorious inspiring thing where we're on the podium and making connections with students. That's what we're working towards, most for that to be the biggest part of the pie, which is actually my core philosophy about personal productivity technology is that when it works in my favor, when I get it set up just right, it can fade out the way and get to that core thing, it's like why I do what I do. When I am sharing these tools with other people, I mean, typically people learn things slowly. Not everyone is as committed to staying afloat on these things as I am. So I'll try something for notes, something for tasks. I mean most people can relate to the idea of this task slipped through the cracks. It's not just the inspirational teaching, it's the lesson planning, it's the financial planning, the field trip planning. Sometimes you're composing and arranging, sometimes you're a data clerk, sometimes you're just juggling all these different musical and educational skills and logistic skills that have to happen concurrently. And everyone knows that feeling and teaching where you missed a deadline. And there's no software that can make you be perfect at catching your deadlines. But I feel like when you think about things in an out-of- sight, out-of-mind kind of attitude, you're not looking at the task until it's actually something you're responsible for. Then that just frees up your mind to be focused on so many other things, and then ensures that you don't actually miss the task. And there's a lot of task apps that will do that. I mean, OmniFocus really scales very well. I know actually some colleagues of mine who will just say, Give me one To-Do app, one Note app and I'm good. And if OmniFocus is something that resonates with someone, like I know people who use it closer to how I do, and then I know people who just leave everything in the inbox. They just give dates or drag around and reorder things and tag things, and occasionally go into a tagged view or will not get into, here's a bunch of projects with sub projects and all that. So, some of the things that are most powerful about it are actually, I think, some of the easiest things to do with it. For example, I can't think of another tool where making and working with a project template is as easy to do. OmniFocus has the task paper syntax and every time we do a concert I just have a draft action that will run on, I've got a little drafts folder or kind of separated by tags in the draft application, but I have all these pre-built templates that I run and I just tell a couple of parameters, but one of which is the date of the concert. And then every single thing I need to do for that concert, it just doesn't show up in the forecast until first, the date I should start working on it, and then later the date that things go bad if I don't do it. And that's pretty helpful. Most teachers can relate to that. I think any task system that's going to help you at the least juggle things in a time oriented way. And then for notes, this is another great thing because OmniFocus, the notes field takes rich texts. A lot of people I know don't really want to have this distinction. I personally do want to have a note thing and a calendar thing and a task thing, but some people will actually just have the entirety of their information just be in the note associated with the task.

Andrew J. Mason:
For our audience, I'm nodding my head vigorously here. That's me, I dump it all into OmniFocus.

Robby Burns:
And I get that.

Andrew J. Mason:
So definitely, tell me about the other slices of the workflow. Some people have it all kind of in one spot, other people have it as just, this is one link in a much larger chain that helps me kind of get it all done.

Robby Burns:
Sure. Yeah, I mean I'm using a lot of applications that are natively designed for iOS and the Mac. And a lot of these applications have a feature where you can somehow generate a deep link into some sort of bit of data. There's not as consistent an implementation, like Apple does not, to my knowledge, other than maybe Siri, can remind you to do something that you're looking at on your phone. Other than that, I don't know that there's a really consistent way that applications can or should do this. But all I know is that everything from Apple Mail to Fantastical to DEVONthink, Craft, a lot of these tools can have a keyboard shortcut that says whatever I'm looking at, give me a link to that. And then OmniFocus ends up having lots of attached notes that are just links out to other things. One great app is called Hook, which can take nearly anything you're looking at on a Mac and just give you, if there's no link to it, it'll make one. I'd say Mail is the communication tool. Safari for web browsing, Fantastical really great for calendar management. DEVONthink is good for storing, it's kind of replaced Evernote for me. It can take anything I throw into it from web to files. Lately, Obsidian and Craft are things I'm using a lot of. I haven't 100% nailed down which is for which or if I need both, but just I use them both very similarly in that I really like this idea of having a note that's associated with the day. And then a lot of the stuff that was making my OmniFocus list really heavy, stuff that didn't really need to be on my to-do list, but in the moment it felt like, oh I don't want to forget this so I've got to write it down, might as well put it there. Some of that will just get worked out in the Daily Note and then the Daily Note can have links out to other notes that are in the same system but that are related to projects I may have worked on that day. Craft is the interesting one because what it's good at it is sharing the data on the web and it's also a very collaborative. I've convinced my whole team, this is probably outside of the scope of this conversation, but my whole team is now we're all using Craft. We've basically created a bespoke, an assessment tool, that is a sequence of songs for every instrument that the students work through at their own pace. So no one is being graded or judged on the same criteria. Everyone is moving at this independent level where they're doing just the next thing that's right for them. And then we have these special notes that we've shared with them where they can actually have qualitative feedback from us about how they did on each performance that they've done, and how to improve the next one. And because this whole system is built in Craft, which is this PKM app with all these back linking features, everything is really easy for them to get. So if they see that I played song five on this date and got these points on the criteria, well now all they need to do is just hover their finger over the song title and then it'll just launch them straight into that song title's entry in the system, which has sheet music and ...

Andrew J. Mason:
That is awesome.

Robby Burns:
Yeah, it's really cool. We're trying to demystify it and have zero friction between them and playing their instrument. Because sometimes taking it out of the case is the biggest step for them. Even for me as someone who knows how to approach their instrument and practice it, I mean, transitioning into doing a task is sometimes the hardest thing. So if we can take away steps, like one of the steps they said was, well we don't always a hundred percent know what we're supposed to be working on. Oh, well, we can just give you a special place on the internet where we tell you that. And then because Craft can also take different types of media, I can put resources in there, I can drag a YouTube video with maybe a demonstration on their instrument straight into that. And that just all publishes to their note. And this is of course, these deep links into the Craft content can be referenced inside of tasks that I might have to do in relationship to them. If I need to update, maybe, like the other day I had the play along track for one of these songs was in the wrong key. So I really quickly generated a link into that song because each song is sort of its own document, and then I linked that to an OmniFocus task and then categorized it as necessary.

Andrew J. Mason:
That is a really cool workflow. Being able to build this assessment and feedback loop and then just have elements of it just dump into, or elements from OmniFocus, be able to inform those elements is really neat. Tell me more about the perspectives that you use in OmniFocus. You mentioned Forecast and living by that because information's coming so fast. Are there any other ways of looking at the data that you find super useful?

Robby Burns:
Yeah, I do. I have a few. So the first one that I have that I use fairly often is called Priority. I think most OmniFocus users who get into perspectives have something like this. The Today List is looking nuts, but I don't have time to review in the way I need to. This is the, I'm behind, or this is a week one. And I use defer dates a little differently than, I mean fortunately OmniFocus is very flexible, but I think getting things done methodology to some people, like the idea of a defer date is a little different. For me, it's like this is something I can be working on. For some, I think this is when it becomes available. Whereas for me, I intend to be working on it today. That's why I want it to show up in the forecast. So I'm pretty generous with giving the defer date. When the Today List in the forecast gets a little long, I have another perspective, this is the priority one and it just basically says, is it due soon or is it flagged and tagged today? If so, show it to me all in one place. There's usually never more than four or five tasks there, and that's on a crazy day. So that's a good one. I built in another layer of this, which unfortunately I don't have to use this much lately. Sometimes the application informs the process and adds a reflective element, because OmniFocus in some ways is really flexible, but I think it's opinionated in others. And some of the opinions of OmniFocus that come through really challenge me to think about, okay, if I'm creating a priority list, do I have a way of better managing how evenly spread my tasks are throughout the week? Does that make sense? I try to not really be in the priority even though I made it with the tools that are offered to me. So this next one is an iteration of that, where if I'm like, Okay, I only have the bandwidth to think about two or three things today, it's called Top Three. And I give it a tag and then that's it. I just have one perspective where I don't allow myself to put more than three tasks in that perspective, and that's for when I just absolutely can't deal mentally with the amount of little circles showing up in the list for the day. So I'm getting a little better at managing that. One good one I have is called Teaching, which is really simple. It just looks at all remaining tasks inside of the folder I have, which is a folder of all of my projects for the Howard County Public School system.

Andrew J. Mason:
So curious about the priority perspective and the top three perspective. If this were a Venn diagram, is there always crossover between those two perspectives, or are sometimes the top three things that you're working on not necessarily even your priority, but it's just, I got to get them done?

Robby Burns:
Sometimes. And there used to be a website, which I wish I could remember the name, and it was just this really simple web app with three empty lines, and you could just type into it just Three Things. A long time ago I would just close my task app and then just type in Three Things and then have that all be out of my way. But I figured it was like, all right, I don't need to have this many tools do this in OmniFocus. So, that was the idea of having the perspective.

Andrew J. Mason:
You know Robby, as you're sharing this information about your journey, I know that there's people who maybe aren't as far along in their journey as you are, and you've had some great first tips for advice for maybe where to get started. What about the reverse of that? Is there anything that in your journey as you look back, you'd say, I don't know if it's a mistake or a misstep, but doing it over, I don't know that I would do it over again the same way that I've done it, and you can avoid some maybe potential heartache or whatever by not doing it this way?

Robby Burns:
That's a really good question. Yeah, I mean, I'm guilty of what a lot of people who listen to this program will identify with, which is the fiddling, tweaking the system. And I'm getting better at that because I'm actually, now that I have a kid and I've got all these different responsibilities, I'm really starting to value, I wouldn't say sticking with things just because they're the things I've always done, because I still am itching to always learn new things and stay on top of what's out there. But I am learning how important routines are for me to function at a more consistent level. And sometimes that means just having sort of a baseline of what are the things I can expect of myself every day? What eventually happens is when that bar of what I can do gets higher than my bad days, become eventually better than my good days. 10 years ago I read the Atomic Habits book over the summer. It's funny, you said you were reading Second Brain. I read that over the summer. I just bulked up on productivity books I had been sleeping on over the summer. And the ones I really liked were, Atomic Habits probably resonated the most. And then the other one I read was Dan Charnas has a book called Clean Work, which is applying the principles of mise-en place in the culinary world to everyday personal and work life. And this idea of just everything having a place has been sort of instructive to me. But the Atomic Habits thing, it kind of just gives you some ideas and just some really interesting ideas about how to sequence, slowly change what your default behaviors are over time. So I'm just trying to put enough of those things in place where I'm reasonably happy with the things that my body will just go into just by repetition. And so that more of those things are just of, comes down to, there's lots of ways that can manifest itself. In my band classroom I really want to be focused more on giving positive, really good behaviors in a way that orients my students towards what I want from them while de-emphasizing every negative thing. There's two ways to say what is good posture when you're playing an instrument. I can tell you your posture is bad right now, or I can praise seven kids who have really good posture. I stole this from our orchestra teacher. He also uses OmniGraffle for his seating charts. And we now actually print a copy of the seating chart every day. And one different kid in the class every day has a green sharpie and a copy of the seating chart, and they're basically putting dots on positive instances. So that aspect of, okay, I want to be someone who my students feel being in band feels good. So I have to make a habit even on my worst day where I feel I got no sleep and I feel so terrible, most of the comments out of my mouth are somehow positive to them.

Andrew J. Mason:
That's so good, because I feel like I've had this epiphany here where we are always doing something. Like people say I can't build a habit. Well, there already is a habit. Inconsistency in and of itself is a habit. And so in that sense there's always, there's already momentum.

Robby Burns:
Sure. People think of habits as you have to, this was kind of in the book, I don't know, I'm maybe paraphrasing, but you have to form them. Let's say you have a bad habit, like you don't floss your teeth, or something. It just seems like so much work to form a habit of doing something like that, and so you think about it's, Well actually I've already formed the habit of not doing it. If I can just actually flip it, then I've used my body's natural rhythm and I guess aptitude for routine, but to do something that's healthier for myself rather than to not.

Andrew J. Mason:
Robby, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for spending time with us. How can people connect with you if they're interested?

Robby Burns:
Sure. My website has a lot of things on it. RobbyBurns.com. It has where people can learn about me as a musician and a teacher. On that same site is a link to the blog and the podcast, which you can actually get straight to through going to musicedtechtalk.com, which will take you to my blog, which is where I also publish the podcast episodes. It's available in any podcast player of choice as well, where people can go listen if they want to hear more of my voice for some reason, and other people too. A lot of times the episodes or interview are conversational in tone. And my book is out there, but I'm also, I'm doing the social media. I'm not a super poster, but I'm there for the conversation. So Twitter is a place that I'm spending some time. I am on Instagram and Facebook and Twitch and all these things. And I would love to connect with anyone who wants to do more of this. Like I said, I could talk about this stuff all day long. And the internet gives us this connection here, like this channel to each other.

Andrew J. Mason:
That's right. And I'm grateful for that. Robby, thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Robby Burns:
Yeah, my pleasure.

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