THE OMNI SHOW

David Sparks: It's funny, I mean, this is not the appropriate place for this, but I just recently had a dream where I felt like I was about to start trial, and my brain went into trial mode, and I was like get the witnesses on call, and I built the whole thing. And I woke up, and it just took me a minute to say, oh yeah, I don't do that anymore. It's okay, go back to sleep.

Andrew J. Mason: There's got to be a little disappointment too, like, man, I should have been billing for that, because it's gone.

David Sparks: No, no disappointment, zero disappointment.

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're joined by David Sparks, talking about OmniFocus. David Sparks is a podcaster, blogger and author who writes about finding the best tools, hardware and workflows for using Apple products to get work done. He regularly posts at MacSparky and has recently released the all-new OmniFocus 4 Field Guide. David, really, really good to see you again. Thanks for joining us.

David Sparks: It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed coming and the work you guys are doing over there.

Andrew J. Mason: It's an honor to have you, and love the work that you get to do, too. And my gosh, a little bit of time has passed since we've last talked, 2020, I think, was the last episode that we had you on. Dare I say, a few things are new since then?

David Sparks: Yeah, that was quite a year, right?

Andrew J. Mason: So talk to me a little bit about the transition. You were, at one time, a practicing lawyer and then kind of faded away from that. Talk to me about that transition, how the high-level view of that has been into full-time MacSparky stuff.

David Sparks: Yeah. I was a lawyer nearly 30 years. I did a combination of litigation and transactional practice. And I really feel like after about 30 years in something, you're ready to re-pot yourself, and I was lucky enough to have built enough of a business out of MacSparky that I knew I could make a living on it if I just did that. It's, of course, a big change when you've got a professional career. Just walking away from that income is never, it's an interesting conversation with your wife, let's just put it that way, but it was really the right time for me, and it's been just fantastic. I always tell the story about the goldfish. There's two goldfish in the water, and another fish swims by and says, "Hey, fellas, how's the water?" And they're like, "What is water?" And that is your experience with stress when you're a lawyer. So when you get away from it, you realize, oh yeah, that was kind of hard, but now it's really great. I'm focused on MacSparky, trying to make my best stuff and having a great time. That quote, by the way, is David Foster Wallace. I ripped that one off.

Andrew J. Mason: I think that experience of being around it all the time to where there probably was a period of a year or two or three, I'm sure for you, of decompression and transition, where it's like, okay, this is what it feels like without the water around me, with the pressure all the time.

David Sparks: Yeah, yeah. It really took longer to transition than I thought it would. I felt like in a month or two I'd be up and running, and it actually took a while.

Andrew J. Mason: There's a lot in the outer landscape that's changed as well, not the least of which is AI and large language models that's been coming out over the last 18 months or so. How has that influenced your workflow at all with MacSparky? Has it, and how has it not?

David Sparks: I'm trying, because one of the things I did when I left the practice, I started a thing called MacSparky Labs, which is kind of, it's what it sounds like, it's labs where I experiment on new technologies, and I've got a group of very kind supporters who like to see my initial experiments into these things. So AI has been an area of much interest to me in terms of where is it a tool and where isn't it? I mean, I think with AI, when it first started, everybody's like, "Oh, the sky is falling and we're all going to lose our jobs," or they were like, "Oh, this is nothing, and it's stupid and it doesn't work." I think it's in the middle. I think there's some real use for it. There is a great book by Ethan Mollick out now on AI called Co-Intelligence, which I would recommend reading if you're curious about this stuff. I read the book, did some work, and I'm finding that there are uses for it, but it's not writing for me. I wrote an essay recently about how I refuse to let it write for me. I would rather have what I call the Sparky language model, rather than an LLM, but there are uses for it. It's like just this morning, my daughter is a teacher, and she's an art history teacher, and she's got a blind student, so we need to get very detailed descriptions of paintings for the student to read in Braille. And I told ChatGPT, "Pretend you're an art expert. You need to describe it for a 17 year old who's blind, and be very descriptive," and it did a pretty good job. And then I said, "Okay, now convert that to Braille," and it did, and so you find these interesting uses for it, but it's not the end of the world either. You know, something funny I did, Andrew, was in this OmniFocus Field Guide, we did a webinar on automation and outside tools. And I took my OmniFocus main perspective, and I just copied it as text and dumped it in and said, "Here's my task list for today. Prioritize it for me," just out of curiosity, and I was shocked at how good it did, because one of the things in there was order medicine refills, and it put that on top. And then another one was prepare for a podcast, it said, "Well, that's probably something time sensitive. You should do that soon." It pretty much followed the priority I had personally picked for it. Now, do I need AI to prioritize my list for me every day? No, I don't, but my list is pretty small each day. I guess if you've got a really long one, maybe it could help, but if you have a long one, that's a different problem. But yeah, so it is an interesting technology, and I'm very curious to see how it evolves.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. I love getting to follow along with you on the journey, with the MacSparky Labs and everything, getting to see how your workflow has evolved over the last couple of years, and some of it a reflection, I'm sure, of your foray into just full-time MacSparky work. But can you give us a little bit of a preview as to how things have maybe shifted and changed over time?

David Sparks: Not as much as you'd think. I still use a lot of the same tools. I've been using OmniFocus since it was in beta, so that's over 15 years now. And so a lot of the same tools I'm using, but I'm trying to be more mindful about them. And one of the big pushes I'm trying to make, because I'm trying to help people with what I'm doing, is I think it's very easy with these productivity apps, like OmniFocus, to let them become the boss of you. And I know that I'm guilty of that. You build out the perfect system, and you wake up and it tells you you've got to do these 10 things no matter what, and you feel like you're in chains as you wake up. And you think you've built this productivity system, but you built a prison for yourself. And I think it's easy to get caught up in that and then not realize the opportunities you're missing, and also, it's just not fun, right, to wake up every day and be enslaved to your software? So I do think there's a whole new way to look at this productivity stuff, and I'm trying to do that. So that's really evolved. I've been kind of peddling it as kind of what I would call a softer approach to productivity. And it's something that we've been experimenting in the labs with people who not are only stay-at-home nerds like me, but people who have actual jobs, and I think there's something to that.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. If you don't mind, I'd love to double click into that just a little bit and ask, what are you finding yourself leaning more into, and what are you finding yourself leaning less away from?

David Sparks: All of this productivity stuff really boils down to figure out what's important and do that. It's really that simple. If you read all these books, you have to kind of do less, and you've got to do the stuff that matters. And I think in the modern world, it's very easy to get distracted, and there's plenty of distractions that are available to you when it comes time to do the hard work. As a human, sometimes, you don't want to, and right now we've got a million ways to avoid doing the hard work. It could be spending two hours developing the perfect OmniFocus perspective or it could be whatever. So what I've been trying to think about is, okay, well what's important and how do you do it? So block scheduling, I think, is key, but also for me, it's been kind of a different philosophy about task management. I kind of go back, now you're doing video, you guys can see my gray hair, but I started in the Seven Habits, Stephen Covey, Hyrum Smith, Franklin Planner world. And I learned back then that they're not to-do's, they're tasks, and that always stuck with me. And then I went through the David Allen stuff, and I've really kind of fallen from faith from GTD as well, because I feel like a lot of that is arranging deck chairs. But now, I've tried to change my thinking about task management, instead of being a source of obligations, that it's a source of opportunities. And what I try to think of it is, is this list. I've just kind of gone back to the basics. In my OmniFocus, I've got a list of things related to different stuff I do. I make a newsletter, as MacSparky, and then I've got a lists. I've got some lists of administrative stuff I want to improve, a list of changes I'd like to make to the content, a list of potential topic ideas, but they're just lists, they're not tasks. And I know that sounds stupid, but it kind of works for me. And so, and then over time, I've realized that for me to produce a weekly newsletter, it takes about two hours a week, so I need to have a block of time adding up to two hours, maybe. And for me, actually the way it works, is it's about an hour on Monday and about an hour on Thursday, and then it publishes on Friday. So I just regularly put on my calendar, "One hour. Newsletter." And with OmniFocus, it's very easy to get a link back to a project, so if I want to be fancy, I can put that in the calendar item, but then it just goes to this list of opportunities related to the newsletter. And I might say, "Well, I'm kind of behind this week. I'm going to really focus on just getting this damn thing written so I can publish it," or I'll be like, "Wow, I'm really ahead this week. Maybe I'm going to spend part of my time fixing something about the newsletter that's always bugged me. I want to put a link at the bottom that says 'see this on the web'" or whatever, things that I know will take some time. And I do as much as I can in that block of time, and when it's done, I'm done with it, and then I've got another block of time related to something else I'm working on. And the key has been to be paying attention that you're getting the right stuff shipped and you're giving the blocks long enough, but once you kind of get a rhythm to it, then suddenly the OmniFocus doesn't become this thing holding a whip over you, it just becomes this great list of opportunities that you have to make something better. The trick then, is to make sure you have the right blocks. What's important in your life? Is it creating art, is it spending time with your kids, is it getting a promotion at work? We all know what's important, or we hope we do, but then if you can align those blocks, it's a lot easier just to align a couple blocks than it is your whole task system, is what I'm saying. So, OmniFocus has become more of a tool to serve the blocks, and that's my preaching on OmniFocus for the Omni Group.

Andrew J. Mason: I appreciate your distilling it in that way, because it really is that simple. We've all seen the internet image with the bell curve, where somebody's really struggling on one side, and then they're the everyday man in the middle, and then they're the Zen Jedi on the other side, and it's the exact same thing on both sides. I feel like there's an element of that, where it's like, I'm not here to serve the system. Just because I put it in the system doesn't mean I'm committed to the thing that's on the list. All of those ring true to me. But I also think about what you're saying about, is just it's what's most important to me in this moment at this time? There's an element of momentum there. If I can stack enough blocks, then I can make the system, and the system can eventually make me, and give me enough momentum to be able to tackle really big projects.

David Sparks: Yeah, it's true. You're right on point there.

Andrew J. Mason: Your latest field guide, when you talk about a big, that is a big project. That is something that you've had to stack a lot of blocks through in order to see it through to the final portion. There's so much video, there's so much research, there's so much writing that goes behind creating a quality knowledge product like that. So do you mind dipping into what that process was of, okay, I'm doing a new version of this thing. How am I planning this and when is it enough? Because there's also a plus, and plus is like, well, let's add a little bit of extra that just didn't quite make it into the field guide themselves. Just maybe speak to that a little bit.

David Sparks: Yeah. This is the fourth edition of the field guide. Yeah, I made the first one a long time ago, but as I knew they were making a version four, I knew that I couldn't just do, I mean, my usual kind of process for field guides is I make it and then I do free updates as there's iterative changes, like if they add a new little feature, I'll add a video. I don't want to go back and ask people for money every five months, so I just go and do updates, but whenever there's a new edition and everything looks different, I've got to go back from scratch and remake the whole thing. And also, my thinking usually changes. This is an app I've got a lot of experience with. So I kind of think big picture, what is it, like this whole thing I've been talking about, this kind of softer system, that wasn't at all covered in the first version of this field guide because I hadn't really arrived to that place yet. So I started thinking about it in terms of what is the big message, what is the technical knowledge I need to instill? Over the years, the tools to build it have changed. I've now got a guy, J.F., who does a lot of the post editing for me, and he's much better at it than I am. And I do the rough edit, and then he goes through and makes it nice, and he adds little flourishes. And so we share a Notion database that I build out, and it's by chapter and verse, and in each one I create an outline for. And you're right, it's blocks. It's like, usually for me, I try to do most of my work Monday through Wednesday, and then I keep Thursday and Friday to record field guides. And it just, I think the final, I honestly forgot how long, I think it was in the seven- or eight-hour range was the final video, and there's over 100 videos, and I try to break it up in the bite-sized pieces. So there's the standard version of OmniFocus 4 Field Guide and there's the plus version, and the plus version is a series of webinars we did over eight weeks, I think. And that was really fun, because getting to talk to people about how they're using it and where they're hitting stumbling blocks, to me, that's kind of like the PhD stuff for OmniFocus, when you start actually working with people and talking about it and getting deeper into the concepts I was sharing with you. I mean, OmniFocus is a powerful tool, but it's also subject to abuse. I think a lot of people who get into productivity with technology get caught by it, because it's very easy to want to change tools every week, and this thing isn't quite fast enough, I needed to do this thing five seconds faster each day, and it is really a way to avoid doing the hard stuff. And I think that all of us that get kind of caught by that, and I'm in the group too, it's happened to me, I think it is a way we use to distract ourselves from what's important in life and memento mori, baby.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

David Sparks: You've got to get the hard stuff done. So that course in the plus session, we kind of got a little hippie in there, but I think it really helped people.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. I have you to thank for the last episode. You mentioned the whole concept of dispensers of sugar, I think, is the phrase that you used for habit tracking. And had you not said that phrase, I think I would've been off. And there's an entire tangent, I think, of a couple of months, that you might've saved me some grief on, so I appreciate that. Thank you.

David Sparks: You know, that is a funny thing, the habit tracking apps and building custom bullet journal pages, and it's like come on, man, can you just do the work?

Andrew J. Mason: I mean, yeah, it's so easy. It's so easy to fall into that trap. For me personally, the black hole of capture is the trap. It's just that I can free my mind by filling out everything that I happen to think about, and then two days later you open up the inbox to see 350 items on there, and they are everything from I want to buy Tostitos to why am I on the planet, you know?

David Sparks: You know the trick to that, Andrew?

Andrew J. Mason: Please.

David Sparks: You just have to be a cold-blooded killer in your inbox and don't even think twice about hitting that delete button.

Andrew J. Mason: That's it.

David Sparks: Just don't think twice. And same thing with the review, it's like be brutal in review. The first question should be, can I delete this, can I get rid of this? And the whole thing you're fighting for, and again, I guess I keep coming back to this, I made another field guide that released in January called Productivity Field Guide, and this one is the most important one I've ever made because it's talking about the big question of what are the big things to you? But if you figure those things out, it makes it a lot easier in your review of OmniFocus to say, oh, yeah, you know what? This doesn't serve the bigger goal. If you figure that stuff out, it makes it a lot easier to kill that stuff, but yeah, you've just got to be brutal, because I'm the same way. I'll capture on a whim, but I will also kill on a whim. Was it Stephen King that said, "Kill your babies," or something like that? Yeah, I'll do that with my tasks and projects.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, I think of the whole GTD five workflow phases, and the first question is, what is it? Is it actionable? And maybe just popping in, "Can I kill it?" first, I think, would be a really, really helpful thing for me to do, so I love that. What has currently been inspiring you in the world at large? So you're in labs and you're kind of doing fresh new stuff. What is it that's catching your attention that you're like, oh, there might be something to this for me?

David Sparks: The stuff I was talking about feels important to me, because I feel like I am a victim of this as well, because I'm in my mid-50's now. I got out of law school and then I worked for 15, 20 years, and I just was trying to keep up with everything every day. I knew that I needed to figure out what the big questions were and the most important stuff, but I wasn't willing to do it because it just sounded like misery and difficult to me. I mean, that's a tough conversation to sit there and say-

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, it is.

David Sparks: Okay, if I'm going to get hit by a bus tomorrow, what is the thing that I need to finish today? What is the thing that I need to do with my life that matters, as opposed to watching all the episodes of some TV show or something? So what matters? And it's like, that's a hard question to ask yourself. And then you're like, yeah, but I'm just trying to pay the rent here, so I don't have time for that question. So I finally got around to asking myself that, and that's what I covered how to do in the Productivity Field Guide. That's what I'm excited about, because I feel like there's some stuff I want to get out there now, there's some options I want to give people. I'd like people to get better at this. I'd like people to be less caught up in their technology and more, you know, I'm not anti-technology, I'm much in favor of it, but I feel like there's a good way to use it and there's a way to use it that takes you away from the big goal. And honestly, Silicon Valley, they've let us down. Those guys don't care. Ken, in the group at Omni Group, cares, I mean, I'll say that, I've met those guys, but a lot of these people at these big software companies are just looking to monetize your attention, and they don't care that you get the important things done before you die. I mean, in fact, they would just rather you watch puppy videos, honestly. So yeah, so you figure out what's important to you, and then that's exciting to figure out how to make it happen to see results. And so that's what I'm excited about, but I'm excited about version four of OmniFocus. I went on a little, I almost tried to quit the app, because I've been using it so long, and there's part of me that's like, "Why would you use an app that long? There might be something better." And Lab's members are telling me, "Oh, Reminders is great now." And I tried Reminders, and it's okay, but it's almost like one hand tied behind your back. And then there's all these new tools that are coming out, these AI-based web tools where they want to manage your task and your calendar for you, and I just feel like they're really not that helpful. I mean, I tried a bunch of them and they're not that smart yet, maybe they'll get smarter. The problem for me is not that my tasks aren't organizing themselves fast enough, the problem is I'm not spending enough time doing the important stuff. So I don't really know that I need AI to solve that problem for me, but so it's been kind of fun testing out a bunch of apps and then landing back at OmniFocus, and version four just rocks, it's great.

Andrew J. Mason: It's funny, somebody once asked me, "Andrew, how do you know what questions to ask a guest if you're on a show doing an interview or whatever?" And I didn't really know the answer until it came to me in that moment. And I said, "I kind of look for this seed of enthusiasm in the guest. So we could have an entire different script or whatever, but somewhere in there, there's this seed of enthusiasm, like I feel some energy around what they're talking about, and they're excited about it." And when you were talking about the why I'm on the planet stuff, the big questions that I've answered here, and kind of making some progress, you definitely don't have to go any deeper than you want to, but I am curious, do you feel like you've made some progress in that direction, in really finding and realizing what that is for you?

David Sparks: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I always had been kind of on track, but I do feel like I had a 15-year gap where I was unwilling to ask the question, and I regret that. And as you get older, I mean, this is really a weird episode for your show, but it's like I've had friends die in the last few years. And it's like some of them, they get to the end and they're miserable, and some of them get to the end and they're ready. And the difference is the ones that are ready are the ones that did the work.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

David Sparks: And it really just makes me think about that. I'm not trying to be morbid, but it's true, and I want to use this technology to help me get there. And so I'm thinking about tasks a lot softer and trying to think more about spending my time on the stuff that's important, and then using the technology to feed that without making me feel like it's a mandatory list of things I have to do.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely.

David Sparks: Another weird thing I'm doing is I have gone analog for the last five yards of my productivity. Ugmonk makes these expensive index cards, and they, here, I've got one here. Here's today's card. I haven't checked everything off yet, but so I go through OmniFocus the night before and I pull out the few things, and the beauty of the card is only 10 things fit on a card. And I just write down with a pencil the stuff that I really want to get done. And the weird bit is, I check it off in OmniFocus, when I put it on the card, so it's like Cortez burning his ships in the New World. So it's like, okay, I checked it off, I better do it, and it is kind of fun, and then but the nice thing is it just sits on your desk in front of you all day and then you just reach in. So I capture in OmniFocus throughout the day, but I don't really work in it until the evening when I do the shutdown routine and fill out a card for the next day. If I have a shameful failure, then I will go ahead and put the task in OmniFocus and uncheck it or copy it to tomorrow's card, but largely, it's kind of a fun little experiment. I started it two years ago just as a goof for the labs, and it stuck.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, speaking of MacSparky, is there anything that you have that's coming down the pipeline that you're working on, that you're excited about, fascinated with? Talk to us about what's the latest and greatest over there.

David Sparks: Just the usual. I'm really enjoying the labs, and I make one or two field guides a year, and that keeps me busy. So we've been talking about this OmniFocus 4 Field Guide, which I hope there's stuff in there for power. I really try to make it accessible to people who've never used the app, but I also try to put stuff in there for people who are pro users.

Andrew J. Mason: Dave.

David Sparks: I'm going to put a discount code up for you for that product before we hang up. I don't know, how about HOORAYOMNI? HOORAYOMNI will get you 20% off, but I'm also going to use the code for the Productivity Field Guide, because I feel like those two products really kind of work in tandem, kind of getting the big stuff figured out and then implementing it. One of the big things I argue for in the Productivity Field Guide is this idea of picking goals is, to me, kind of nonsense, because it's hard. And what happens when you hit the goal, does that mean you don't have to work anymore? So I have a big focus on roles of my life, role as a husband, a father, as a MacSparky. So OmniFocus really works nicely with a roles-based system, because you just create a folder for each role and then you create projects in the role. As a husband, my wife says, "Hey, can you go take care of this thing for me?" That's enough to justify an OmniFocus project. I put it in the husband role, and then I'm like, well, what am I doing as a good husband? Well, there's one thing I'm working on. And then when someone asks you to do something that doesn't fit in one of those folders, because you've chosen the roles of your life, then you're like, well, wait a second, is this something I even want to do? Because it doesn't fit in the roles I've chosen for myself. Am I going to pick up a new role or am I going to tell them no? And so it's just kind of an interesting combination of using OmniFocus with that system. It's just so flexible. And it's just kind of interesting to me that this silly productivity system I put together, based on a bunch of ancient writers, is completely compatible with OmniFocus 4.

Andrew J. Mason: I love the lens. So now I have two extra barriers to having something land in my system now. Number one, is it a role, because I do roles based as well, and then number two, can I delete it? I think both of those are fantastic for me.

David Sparks: Yeah. Yeah, man. The delete key is the most important one. I once talked to Ken and Sal Soghoian, and I said, "Could we make an automation that says if I defer a task five times, it just deletes it?" And they're laughing at me. They're like, "Oh, that's so silly." And I'm thinking, "I'm kind of serious about this."

Andrew J. Mason: Now, granted, there's probably a lot of anniversary presents or birthday presents that don't get purchased or things that get deferred a couple of times, but I think that would be-

David Sparks: But five times?

Andrew J. Mason: It's probably extra justification to do the actual task though, too, because you know you're at number four. If I defer, it goes away.

David Sparks: Yeah. And I don't know if they have metadata to show how many times you've deferred it, but it didn't go anywhere beyond just me saying that, but I could kind of see that working. I hear that because I talk about OmniFocus a lot and do these courses. I get a weekly email from somebody who says, "Oh, man, this OmniFocus isn't working for me." And they're like, "And it's because I have 10,000 tasks in there and it's just completely overwhelming." And I'm like, "Well, it's not an OmniFocus problem, it's a you problem. You put too much in there." And the computer will gobble up as many tasks as you put in, and something like OmniFocus that uses automation, it can even generate them while you're asleep, but the question is, what are you going to do? I don't feel like the stuff in OmniFocus is all going to be done by the time I'm dead, right? I don't care.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, that's not even the point. Yeah.

David Sparks: Using perspectives and things, I find what's important, and I do that stuff, but at the same time, I'm also just really ruthless about deleting projects. And if I defer too many times or if I put it on hold, and I notice it's been on hold for a year, I'm just like, well, you know what? If I'm going to actually do this someday, I'll recreate it, but in the meantime. That's one of the things, like the Someday Maybe List in Canon GTD, I've never really bought into that. It's like, no, I'm going to do it or I'm going to kill it. And then someday is like, if I have the idea again in a year and I want to recreate it, I'll do it then, but I don't need to keep all that noise in there of stuff that I'm not actually going to do.

Andrew J. Mason: Ladies and gentlemen, a four year later, possibly much more Zen, David Sparks.

David Sparks: Yeah, quit your job. You feel very Zen. There you go.

Andrew J. Mason: I really loved this conversation though, because it does speak to a lot of the reason why behind what we're doing. So yeah, there is tactical, practical, for sure, but if we're spinning our wheels, what for? You've got to ask those questions. It makes sense. I appreciate you hanging out with us. This was awesome. I know people can find you at macsparky.com. Is there anywhere else that you'd like them to hang out with you?

David Sparks: If you go there, you'll find everything. If you specifically want the field guides, go to learn.macsparky.com. And just so I don't, I'm going to write it down, HOORAYOMNI, there we go. So I'll get that up. So if anybody wants the Productivity or OmniFocus Field Guides, I'll get you 20% off with that, but that'll be for a month after the show drops. But I appreciate your support, but yeah, I gave you the good stuff here in the interview. Think about those blocks in the lists and maybe consider softening your approach to this stuff with something like that. And do the work to figure out what's important, and then all of a sudden, good stuff happens.

Andrew J. Mason: Well said. Well said, David. Thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome.

David Sparks: Thanks, Andrew, take care.

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.