THE OMNI SHOW

Trevor Foley: So that idea of OmniFocus and how it was introduced, it wasn't just a generic tool that I could adapt to GTT. It felt like it was the philosophy and the architecture of, this was a tool built for GTD. So the capture, the review, the projects, the context, it all spoke the same language, and I was super hooked.

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 Trevor Foley uses OmniFocus. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we're excited to have Trevor Foley to learn how he uses OmniFocus. Trevor's a fractional operator and into productions operation and happens to be a power user of OmniFocus. Trevor, thank you so much for joining us today.

Trevor Foley: Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Longtime listener, big, big OmniFocus and anything Omni Group, big fan.

Andrew J. Mason: I'm grateful. Thank you for that. Yeah, we're honored and grateful to have people that actually want to use the software and care about it. I appreciate that. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. Where do you find yourself? What do you find yourself doing these days? And just kind of orient us to your world a little bit.

Trevor Foley: So like you said, my name is Trevor Foley, third generation, Angelino. I'm a big Los Angeles fan in every sense of the word. I've lived all over Los Angeles. Right now, my wife and I and family, we've settled in the Pasadena area. And I kind of grew up in the San Gabriel Mountain area, but I've lived all over, went to college here. I can't believe how quickly it happened, but apparently I'm a guy who now has spent 20 plus years also figuring out why things are so chaotic and really trying to do something about it. That's really what operations is in a nutshell. I currently work as VP of Program Management and Operations, but honestly, the job title is really less interesting. I've had so many different job titles over the years as job titles have kind of come and gone and things have evolved. My very first job had the name, traffic, in it. I was a traffic coordinator. So I try to explain that to the younger folks in marketing and advertising what traffic is. And I go, "Well, pre-internet, we would physically move the paper around the building. We would get signatures from the creative team to make sure they were good. We would go to the account staff and we would actually either fax or in some cases print ads on foam core and deliver them to FedEx every day." That's how they got to... Newspapers was at the time. So this was in the late '90s. Literally, it was the end of the analog era. So the internet had been invented somewhat in use mid, late '90s, but it was kind of a slow growth. My first account was Sony Pictures, physically mounting ads. So think Charlie's Angels and the Patriot with Mel Gibson. Remember that?

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Foley: Those big blockbusters, it was still folks at that time opening up the newspaper, LA Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, seeing where their favorite movie was playing and the movie time. So it was a fun introduction to that analog time of... Newspaper was still king, newspaper broadcast, commercials were still the top channels where people went to get their information. You would get a physical newspaper. So it was a lot of fun. We worked with those physical things in the office. We had computers, we had Microsoft Office, we had emails, but it really was still that last little bit of the analog era. So I know I'm kind of waxing poetic here of a time of living with those tangible assets in the advertising marketing world. But it was so nice to know when something physically shipped. Throughout the entire digital transformation of media, like a lot of jobs, what happened is, is I actually started out as a designer and using a tool called Quirk that existed-

Andrew J. Mason: Yes.

Trevor Foley: ... using before Adobe Creative Suite. And it was a lot of fun to learn the basics. And we would have to use even another software tool called Adobe Distiller to even create a PDF. So you really learned how raster images and outline fonts and things like that worked between all the different tools, and it was such a great time. And then as my career progressed, like a lot of careers, what happens is you have to keep evolving. And I think this will lead us great into what we're going to talk about with OmniFocus. And when you keep evolving and you do something well enough, usually someone in leadership or someone at your company wants you to manage others that do that well. Yeah, as the digital world came in, I became a digital designer. And then from there, I became a digital producer. So one of the most amazing experiences I had as I was a somewhat early employee at Hulu when they were still private back in the very beginning of 2011 where it was still just Hulu on the browser. There was no Hulu Plus or any of those devices. So we would actually create advertisements within the Hulu player and the skin around the Hulu player. And we would get some raw materials from our sales team who would sell broadcast spots or print spots. And then we would take those materials and we would actually design and create custom ad placements and pretty much add tools. Yeah, it was a really cool thing. I can even remember some of the fun names we had like Ad Selector where you can choose a different ad. That was something that didn't exist. You were never able to interact with an ad in a newspaper, print, or broadcast until those early streaming days. So, learned a ton. It was a great experience. So, really the through line through my whole time has been how to make complex, creative, cross-functional work happen. So that question has never gotten old for me. And that's what has really led me to OmniFocus and has kept OmniFocus in my life.

Andrew J. Mason: What a cool picture that you painted there, too, that idea of a through line. And the question that doesn't necessarily have a once and for all answer, but invites a discussion over time each time you ask it, which is cool, too. Talk to me a little bit about your journey in coming across OmniFocus or even the Omni Group a little bit more broadly. Do you have a memory of a first interaction with them or just kind of over time there's this growing awareness of like, "Oh yeah, that's software, I remember coming across that," and it just becomes a part of your tool set.

Trevor Foley: I have a really great memory, and it didn't start with Omni Focus. It started with, I think like many others, it started with David Allen's, Getting Things Done, GTD. Reading that really solidified what I'd been obsessing for and doing already in my life. And then from Getting Things Done, that led me into OmniFocus 1 at that time, which was 2008. It was really this idea of trying different softwares and tools and paper to do lists and things like that. But after reading David Allen's, GTD, I really want to give credit where credit was due. It was David Allen and it was Merlin Mann with Inbox Zero. Do you remember Merlin Mann?

Andrew J. Mason: I do indeed. Yeah, I do indeed.

Trevor Foley: They were the two that really gave me a framework and a real actionable, not just theoretical, way of implementing GTD and with that part of it, Inbox Zero. And I took Merlin Mann's, Inbox Zero, not just as just how you manage your inbox, but also this idea of, "Your inbox is kind of a place where people want things from you." So how much of that is, "Do I ignore some of it? Do I listen to some of it? How do I reprioritize it?" Because an inbox is just coming in the order it comes in. There's no priority settings and things like that. So with the combination of GTD and OmniFocus, I was really able to come up with a real implementation of these ideas. And being a longtime Apple Mac user, like I said, I was a designer back in the early days when it was pre-Adobe Creative Suite. So, I was using an old Mac then and I've never used a PC. In fact, I don't even know how would I turn one on. So that idea of OmniFocus and how I was introduced, it wasn't just a generic tool that I could adapt to GTD. It felt like it was the philosophy and the architecture of this was a tool built for GTD. So the capture, the review, the projects, the context, it all spoke the same language, and I was super hooked. And I started building and building. And then in the later years, I would say the last, whatever it's been, five years, James Clear's, Atomic Habits has really come in to recalibrate how I think about habits and rituals. And that too has really shaped my relationship with OmniFocus.

Andrew J. Mason: When we think about that concept of what is it like to have a clear mind, there's so many people out there I think that are... Either if they're finding themselves in a space where they're in their job and they have more responsibility put on them, or maybe their roles are starting to transform, these types of software or these types of frameworks or mental models show up for folks probably in the inflection points where if you're on autopilot, you don't need it. But for somebody who has this feeling of like, "Ah, I really do need to be doing more to keep track of my ideas," or, "There's stuff that's just kind of leaking out the other side. I put four things in my brain, one pops out the other side," what advice... It doesn't have to be necessarily OmniFocus specific, but what advice do you have for somebody that's in that space where they're like, "My responsibility's growing. Yikes, what do I do?"

Trevor Foley: It's actually not starting with OmniFocus. I think it's really starting with and reading, Getting Things Done, first. Don't download OmniFocus, don't watch any YouTube setup tutorials, because then you'll get in too early where you're going to be tweaking the settings and playing around with it, and it might turn you off because it could be a lot to digest. So read the book. Because also, a big part of the book is how you can do GTD in the real world with having a physical inbox is a big thing. I have a box next to me right now that has anything and everything physical that is what I process as well. So just giving that idea a true shot. And I know it makes sense to everyone when we tell them, "Your brain isn't meant to store. It's meant to kind of process." It's something I've been trying to teach my kids forever, but it's a habit we're used to. I think it starts in school where you start learning and everything's about memorizing, memorizing, memorizing. But the smartest, most successful people I know are ones that use their brain to figure stuff out. And your brain has like a cache where if you're trying to memorize so much, you're going to tire yourself out, and you're not going to have that extra processing speed. So read, Getting Things Done. Understand that you're not trying to remember everything. Instead, you're trying to use your brain to think. So that'll teach you the process of not only OmniFocus, but it's embarrassingly simple. You have one inbox, everything goes in it. Don't worry about building the perfect system, just start capturing. And then, you're going to see how much more creative, let's say, brain power you're going to have to solve problems. And you start doing this constantly and it becomes second nature. A few things will happen. First, you'll never start the day from scratch again. That's another amazing thing I really learned. You'll have a plan. You'll jump in, you won't have to figure out what you're going to do, or you're going to open your email inbox or open up your cell phone. And the loudest noise is going to be your priorities for the day. No. Second, this is what no one talks about. You're going to sleep better. If you plan your day the night before and you use these tools to get started, you're not going to wake up at 3:00 in the morning with a to-do list running through your head because that anxiety of not having everything captured is gone, because your brain has already handed off the storage to OmniFocus using the GTD principles. Your quality of life upgrade then goes way beyond productivity.

Andrew J. Mason: You're talking about OmniFocus. Do you mind placing it in that overall context? Is there software or information that flows into it or out of it? Can you just level set? Where does this sit in your workflow? And then how do you manage the flow of information and out of it?

Trevor Foley: No, it's a great question. It's definitely that next level of really being organized and focused and feeling like you're working on the highest priorities and the most important things. OmniFocus is the hub and everything else, think of it like the center spoke of a wheel. Everything else orbits it. I want to be specific about the why because I think the framing matters. OmniFocus is really my decision-making layer. It's where I go to figure out what to work on, but it's not where I go to do the work. It's really what that center spoke... You check in, but you're not living in it. It's not like Microsoft Word where you're writing a paper and you're in the app. If you're really doing it right, you're in and out. You're using it as that center spoke to keep the wheel running. So I feel like that's a really important distinction. There's some preferences that I, through trial and error, feel like are really helpful for organizing it. The big one I use with OmniFocus for particularly, not so much perspectives, but the tags, is I'll use the Eisenhower Matrix. And the Eisenhower Matrix is really those quadrants where something is urgent and important, urgent, not important, not important, non-urgent, so on and so forth. So you have the four quadrants. Those tags and perspectives in OmniFocus really help me only see what I need to do, and when I need to do it, how I need to do it, but it's not in OmniFocus, where I need to do it. It's such a great way where you sit down in the morning, I'm not staring at 200 tasks and wondering where to start. I look at a filtered view depending on, like I said, my physical location, if I'm at my house or if I'm at the office or I'm traveling, that plays a big part of it. If it's the weekday or if it's the weekend, that plays a big part of it as well. I don't want to do work, work during the weekend and vice versa. So that really helps me focus, and it's in a trusted system. The rest of the stack really flows. And I think there's two other key categories from the OmniFocus hub. Everyone needs some sort of knowledge repository. I think that's a big one that people miss. We get caught up in just having a to-do list. That's how we're all raised. A piece of paper, check, check, check, check, check. But knowledge repository, for example, can mirror your tasks. So for example, let's say I'm a homeowner. Lucky enough, like I said, growing up in Los Angeles, we have our home in Pasadena. So I could easily come up with a task list for the projects and things that I need to take care of the house, but I need somewhere to reference. For example, what brand air conditioning unit do I have? Where's the link to the instructions? What's the code to access the safe on and on and on. So this Notes Repository, I have tried a bunch of different tools and it's really not so much finding the perfect tool, but for me, what's the most important is what's the least amount of friction.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Trevor Foley: So I try to live within the Apple infrastructure as much as possible. So I'll just use Apple Notes. Because the way I use Apple Notes is I can now mirror my OmniFocus projects with my Apple Notes folders. So then that way, like I said, house to house. So I have projects in OmniFocus, and then the knowledge repository information in notes. And then you can link them together. So then there's a corresponding note with all the context, the background ideas, the decisions. And then this way, you can then share Apple Notes with your family where you can't do that with OmniFocus. So then that way they can see the information that they also might need, whether it's a code to the safe, like I said, or any instructions on how to restart the air conditioning if it breaks or something like that. But that is a big, big, big key of this process. That's a big spoke that comes out of that center hub that is OmniFocus. The other big one is a calendar. Having a separate calendar. So I'll just use the Apple calendar. It's always been enough. There's one key feature that I know Apple's going to come up with shortly here. So I want to plug... I'm a big fan of this other software. So with the calendar, the belief is tasks are like what you need to get done, but a calendar is where your attention needs to be, or you physically need to be somewhere. I have a dentist appointment. I have to take my car into the shop. There are different things that should live in different places. So what's been really successful is having... I believe everyone should have at least two calendars. If you have a partner, if you have kids, I recommend three. That's what we have. So I have a personal calendar for personal things I might need to do, like this phone call. My wife doesn't need to be aware of this phone call middle, during the day. And then I have a separate calendar that's just my wife and I. And what's amazing about this, and we've been doing this for, God, close to 15 years, if she has an appointment, let's say on the weekend and she knows that that interrupts our time together, or that might be a perfect time for if I see that she has an appointment or she has a work lunch or a friend group meetup on a Saturday night, she puts that on the calendar, we don't even have to have the conversation. So then I know, "Okay, that's great." Maybe then I go see my folks or I take care of a house project around the house. So that idea of preparing each other. And then our third list actually includes our kids. So I have a son and I have a daughter. We've been training them on this process because of course they had iPhones once they hit high school to enter stuff in "the family calendar." So then we could see when they had soccer games, school events, anything like that. It's gotten so seamless that our daughter actually lives out of state. And when she comes into town, she just adds her flight information to the calendar, and we don't even have a discussion on who's going to pick her up and when, because I can check the flight in the calendar, I know when she's going in. It has been so seamless to understand those different levels of calendar. And like I said, the only thing Apple is missing is, I'm going to plug this new software I found, which is amazing, which is scheduling. So now, especially with Zoom and video calls, we need to be able to see each other's availabilities. So this tool, Cal.com, C-A-L.com, big fan. It's one of the only scheduling tools that works natively with Apple Calendars and various Apple calendars. So you can pick which one it'll look at to see where you have time available. It's an amazing app. Big fan of this group. I know they're a relatively new, smaller team, but I think there's a lot of advantages using that versus one of the other popular scheduling tools. And that alone can become a shortcut to track whether it's your friends or families or colleagues to see when you have availabilities. But on the Omni side, it's really been about OmniFocus. I still am a big fan of OmniGraffle for doing... I've done God knows how many org charts and process workflows. It's just a nice muscle memory way of sketching out what I think a process should be, which is a big deal for operation and production folks, particularly in ad agencies. OmniPlan, they've had a really great scheduling software. The problem with some of these tools is they're really meant to be one-off, individual users. So when you work for these big companies, they tend to have a set tech stack that their IT governance sort of approves and manages with security. So that's where you're going to hear some of these other tools like Smartsheet and things that come into play. And you're going to have some team project tools. So I've used all of them out there, the Monday.coms, the Trellos, Jira. I'm still a big fan of Jira. That was one of the tools we used back at Hulu back in 2010, 2011. Jason Kyler, I got to give him a shout-out. He was the original CEO and pretty much the brain. Hulu was his brain child. He obviously had some partners at the time, but he really ran that place and he was so deliberate. He's still one of the best operational minds I've ever worked with. He was all about creating intentionality, which tool, which team, which purpose. It wasn't a lot of what we see today, which is I think we've kind of over collaborated where, "Hey, everyone, use Slack, use Teams, use emails, use Team Chats, use Jira, use Monday.com." They think collaboration is really the key. And collaboration is really more about feelings. It's making people feel heard and having transparency, but it's really not the best way to get things done efficiently. That philosophy, and it started with Jason back then, has really shaped how I think about my toolkit, where it's really deliberate and trying to not have friction.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the word you said, intentionality. And my next question was going to be, "Hey, do you use any automation at all?" And already I hear a resounding yes in the amount of things that you're solving with environment, this idea of a shared family calendar, multiple family calendar spaces that remove all the future conversations that have to come up about... And if you need to have them, you have them, but it's done by default. And some people are like, "Well, that makes your life so transactional." I think, "No, it makes it frictionless." That's awesome. Then you can actually spend your energy talking about important stuff in your families and that's what we all want. And I hear your mentioning of James Clear's, Atomic Habits as well, and the idea of routinizing specific parts of your life. And so, I guess when I say do you have any automation in your system, it can be as simple as, "Hey, there's a repeating task that handles these style of things or these elements of work for me." But it can be as advanced as plugins or on the automation stuff, anything that kind of fits in that space where it's like you do it once and then you don't have to think about it as much anymore.

Trevor Foley: That's another great one. My philosophy on automation is pretty simple. I really try to focus on reducing real friction, not imaginary friction, and it's a hard one. There's a version of automation enthusiasm that is really you're just tinkering. You're just having fun in disguise. You can spend eight hours automating something that saves you four minutes a month, and you can call it productivity. And I get it. I've used the Zapiers of the world and come up with really complicated workflows and things to kind of save myself. So I know the feeling, but I really try to force myself to not automate for automation's sake. For the most part, I try to live in the Apple ecosystem, like I said, to not also spend tons of money on software, but also to have things sync and hand off and integrate and just handle itself, and it doesn't need a lot of maintaining. That to me is the best kind of automation, the kind where you forget it's happening. Beyond that, I really want to focus on these two tools that have been with me again for a very long time. And those are Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander. Keyboard Maestro is all about living in the keyboard. I really try to minimize how much I hit my mouse because it slows you down. The keyboard shortcuts become second nature. So that really goes really far, or when certain applications get turned on or turned off. And then TextExpander, it's really been a game changer where I've been able to set shortcuts in different tools to be the same thing. So to go back to Merlin Mann and his theories around maintaining your inbox, Merlin Mann was big on, "Just have an archive folder. Just have an inbox. You don't need to create all these millions folders because you're going to spend all this time dragging and dropping files when you could just search for it." So now, I always customize TextExpander so my shortcuts are the same no matter what tool I'm in for archiving something. In operations, so much of it is repetitive communication. So it's status updates, onboarding instructions, follow-up templates or form requests. So TextExpander is really great. You can build some more complicated forms. So then when you're sending the email, you're not copying and pasting. So pretty much my trigger is if I'm finding myself copying and pasting something, that usually can become a TextExpander snippet where then, as I've progressed throughout my career and I have managed larger and larger teams, what's also super valuable is the "Teams aspect" of Text Expander. So now as new employees come in or freelancers come in, we can share with them all our TextExpander shortcuts and forms. So there's no error in the back and forth confusion. That happens all the time. Someone's like, "Hey, Trevor, we're doing a new Super Bowl ad for client X. What are the type of things we need to ask our production partners?" Where if you don't get everything right, there's three or four emails that go back and forth. "Well, they asked this, they asked this." Well, now with TextExpander, we can have a snippet that is all the information that's needed and then there's consistency coming from the team. So that's really been an automation power move where you're able to really automate beyond just a text shortcut where it's really a form that then someone else is filling out in the backend.

Andrew J. Mason: That's so cool. And I think it's accessible for anybody because it's like today's date, account numbers. There's so much that you want to type that in the right way the first time, but it's also great that you don't have to sit there and remember what those actual numbers or things are. So I think that's a fantastic life hack or way to speed things up on data entry. I think one thing I'm really interested about before we let you go is, is there anything that showed up in your life, your career as it pertains to productivity that, I wouldn't say it's a regret or something that's a failure, but something that as you started implementing it... And I heard inklings of it in the tinkering conversation that we were having a little bit earlier, but that you would say, "Hey, it's not a mistake, but had I had to do that over again, I thought I was going to go in one direction that didn't necessarily pan out. If I were you and you're behind me in your career path or your life path or your productivity path, maybe just skip that space of it and you'll find yourself the better off for it."

Trevor Foley: Yeah. Boy, I've fallen victim to this too many times. And yeah, I alluded to it earlier. It's that productive procrastination, I call it. It's really easy to fall for it hard where you're reorganizing your to-do list, or you're redoing your tags or redoing your perspectives in OmniFocus instead of getting the task done. It's a very seductive trap, particularly for repetitive, boring items that you go, "How can I automate this or how can I make this run a little faster?" And you'll spend hours and hours and hours? I'd probably want to skip that. So I guess my advice to the audience would be spend less time designing your system and more working it. And then, make incremental changes as they come up. So retagging everything from scratch is really not going to solve a lot of things. Or rebuilding your project hierarchy. Just sort of my metaphor in my mind is sometimes when some people cook and they just make a giant mess with all the dishes? Where I try to give the advice, "As you're cooking, you have little moments between you making your food, wash a couple dishes." So then they kind of evolve together. But if you just make a big old mess and then spend all this time cleaning it, it can kill kind of your motivation. But then what happens is, it's a way to procrastinate doing the thing you need to do. So I wish I could go back to myself and those versions of myself just to shake myself by the shoulder and just go, "You know what? This is good enough." Keep going and it'll evolve organically as your work evolves as well. But it's so easy to avoid doing the work to just reorganize your priorities or your task list.

Andrew J. Mason: Especially when you're in the moment of creating that new life hack or that new thing and you're like, "Yeah, but I'm going to be so much more... I'll be able to slice into..." And there's this nirvana of productivity that I think shows up in our brain. It just is only existing in our brain and not in reality, because we forget how fast and furious and quickly things can change. One final question, how can folks stay in your orbit if they're interested in either catching up with you, keeping up with you or learning more about the fractional operations roles that you're a part of?

Trevor Foley: You can go to my website, TrevorFoley.com. You can also find me at LinkedIn. My LinkedIn name is just TrevorFoley, one word. Yeah, come say hi. I'd love to connect with any fellow OmniFocus lifers, anyone who wants to talk further, particularly agency leaders. I talk to a lot when... It's this new world of software and technology is kind of driving the business more than ever. So feel free to reach out in those two areas. You can find all my contact information, like I said at TrevorFoley.com, my phone number, my direct email. We'd love to talk.

Andrew J. Mason: Trevor, this has been awesome. I so appreciate your time. Don't take it lightly. Very honored you were able to hang out with us for a little bit. Thanks so much.

Trevor Foley: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.

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.