THE OMNI SHOW

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: If you need to search for information repeatedly, search for information that you need, then you're basically extending the time it takes to find information. You might not even find the information you need, but if you've got ubiquitous linking, for instance in OmniFocus, you might not merely say that, "I need to write paragraph three or, whatever, section three of this document. That's my goal for the week." But you can have a link to that actual document. This unifies your task manager, OmniFocus, with the content that the tasks are about, whereas the expert that's been enhanced by technology can click on that link that brings them right to the location that they need in whatever application that that target information resides.

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 have the return of Dr. Luc Beaudoin. Welcome, everybody, to this episode of the Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we're excited to welcome back Dr. Luc Beaudoin, adjunct professor of education at Simon Fraser University, head of CogSci Apps, and creator of the Hookmark productivity app. Our last conversation with Luc was in 2020 in episode 66 where we discussed his research, importance of maintaining flow, iterating with technology, and the concept of contextual computing. Luc, thank you and welcome back to the Omni Show. Thanks for joining us.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, look, over the last few months, a couple of excellent reasons have emerged to have you back on, and not the least of which is that we are so honored to have been chosen as Hookmark's partner of the month. We've supported the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking since the beginning because we believe in empowering people to be their most productive selves and having that information that you need at your fingertips is a really great and empowering thing for people, but the second is to learn more about the current tech landscape that necessitates the creating of this manifesta to begin with. To kick us off, Luc, what is contextual computing to begin with? Why is that an important concept for people to know?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: The idea of contextual computing has a wider meaning in computer science and in academia, which is basically that the technology is aware of where you're at in the current context, your location, et cetera. David Sparks, MacSparky, started using the term to refer to something a little bit more specific which is more pertinent to our conversation today, which is basically that when you're interacting with your computer, your gadgets, the gadgets should present you with information that's relevant to your current objectives, your context that you're working in, and not distract you with other information. The not distracting you with other information is kind of the key to what contextual computing's about, and we can talk about why that's important.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we think about what happens, what things like by default when contextual computing is not present and everything just kind of vying for our attention, we're not being our best version of ourselves, but there is this concept of ubiquitous linking. What does ubiquitous linking mean for people?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: With ubiquitous linking, we want the... Those of us who endorse the manifesto and strive for ubiquitous linking, we'd like the operation of copying and using links to be ubiquitous, to be universal across apps and the gadgets that we use or the various operating systems, macOS, iOS. The idea is to take this copy link operation, make it as common as the copy and paste operation, so it should be in a standard location across different apps because right now one app might have the copy link function in a contextual menu, so you won't see it in the menu above, so the user doesn't know how to access this copy link function and often the function isn't even present. Now, of course, the copy link function makes most sense in applications that have data that you can copy links to. There's a different kind of way in which this function presents itself in document-based apps like, say, OmniOutliner or OmniGraffle, where we're dealing with a document that... Well, the linking has to do with the path of the information.

If you have this copy link function available to you in a consistent location and you've got automation for it too, that's important, then all kinds of magic is possible. It was obvious from the beginning of hypertext computing, but the notion got lost. Douglas Engelbart, who was a pioneer of hypertext, had this idea. He didn't call it ubiquitous linking, but he basically proposed that these links should be everywhere. Yeah. Magic is possible when copying links and using links to information are just about anywhere. App developers need to be made aware of this or some of them because not all app developers provide this copy link function, and users need to be made aware that this is important, that if you have this then all kinds of great things can happen. If you look back in the history of computing when copy and paste before was available, people didn't realize, "Hey, we need to be able to copy and paste. It should be in the edit menu in a consistent place." But now we've just come to expect this. The same kind of transition, we, the signatories of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, feel should be present for copying links.

Andrew J. Mason: That makes so much sense to me. For people that remember when the internet's first commercially available... For me we were relatively early in our household, '93, we started to get webpages and learning how different webpages can link together and you can use this one webpage that kind of brings everything that's associated with it that you're interested in into that one space and this idea of like, "Okay, everything that has to do with one thing becomes associative and you can have it based on your context." Is the idea here just to bring that idea, that concept, that functionality down to the operating system level and say, "Hey, get the files that you need close at hand wherever you are?"

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: We didn't go so far as to request that it be built into the operating system, although that would be a natural progression. We hope that Apple will take notice. With so many developers basically signing onto this, we might get a snowball effect and Apple would become aware of this and improve some of their own apps because Apple has not made it possible, for instance, to copy links to messages. Now, we know actually that they have this technology for using links behind the scenes because when you create a calendar entry from a message they set up this link, but they haven't opened up an application programming interface for developers and they haven't exposed this in the user interface for users.

You can imagine that it'd be very useful. Sometimes you're having a long text conversation with somebody dealing about, say, a work matter or family matter, it doesn't matter. If you realize, "You know what? I want to be able to come back to this." There might even be a contractual obligation that's come into play based on this conversation so you want to be able to keep that, but if you can't link to it then you'll just have more and more conversations and this will be lost. Can you imagine the situation that we're in right now? It's kind of ridiculous. You have to scroll back, and then it becomes impractical and people basically say, "Forget it." Or you end up maybe copying the message sequence and having to write the date, et cetera. You've lost the context of that conversation. Yeah. I mean, we would like Apple to take notice, but we're not dependent on Apple taking notice because if enough developers buy into this and if users become aware of this, then the snowball effect will continue such that an app that doesn't expose this copy link function, people are going to say, "Well, it's like you don't have the copy operation. What's this? This is 2024. Shouldn't you be exposing this functionality?"

Andrew J. Mason: I love the initiative that you've taken to affect change in a positive direction like that, which I guess brings us back to the idea of the manifesto. Why that approach? Who needs a manifesto in order to make this happen? Talk to us about that.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Well, okay. There's kind of the social aspect of having a manifesto, which is actually modeled on the Agile Manifesto. Some of our listeners will know about this Agile Manifesto. If not, you can Google it, find it in Wikipedia. It was a very, very momentous manifesto of developers who said, "You know what? The old-fashioned way of doing software development based on a long requirement specification and waterfall target milestones that are way out there where we just aim towards this big bang integration, that doesn't really work for developers, it's not good for any of the stakeholders, blah, blah, blah." They came up with this other way of doing development, which is the agile way, which is the way I think most companies work these days. The Agile Manifesto, it was very influential, so I looked at that and I said, "We need something like this for linking. Let's just follow the general structure that they have." If you look at the structure of the manifesto, you can just Google "Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking" and it'll come up first, I'm sure. You'll see that we've got the motivation for this, we've got the signatories, we've got various sections that map on, and even the way this is written is similar in structure and form to the Agile Manifesto except that we're obviously working with something different, which is ubiquitous thinking. That's kind of the social aspect where we think that by having this manifesto, people can coalesce around this, developers and users can coalesce around this, and we can have a snowball effect.

But then when you're asking about the rationale, "Why do we need ubiquitous linking in the first place?" This actually comes out of psychology. I'm professor of education at Simon Fraser University, as you mentioned, and a cognitive scientist. When I first got into this, I was actually in academia, which I still am, and I looked at and look at computing from a psychological/cognitive science perspective. There's actual mental reasons why ubiquitous linking makes a difference, and they have to do with the way the human mind works is that we've got this limited working memory or short-term memory that can only contain a little bit of information. If you don't have these links around, then in order to find the information that you're looking for, you have to do a search or you have to start navigating, et cetera, and that might seem like the easiest thing in the world is to do a Google search, for instance, or do a Spotlight search, "Wow, that's so easy."

But from a psychological perspective, milliseconds count. These distractions of having to conceive of a search expression, type the search expression and sift through search results, even if they're fairly good search results, clicking on them from a psychological perspective, that's actually... There's a lot happening there. The information in your working memory starts to... I mean, it starts to decline in activation as you're doing these seemingly very simple operations of searching and navigating, so that's kind of one aspect to it where having aptly placed hyperlinks... As we know from the internet, right clicking on a link that's just in the right place is a lot faster than searching. As we have these hyperlinks, we basically address these issues and basically we've got software that's more friendly to the human mind, so really user-friendly software.

Another aspect of this, because there's kind of a lot of dimensions when you start digging into this, is that we're very distractible. If you start searching for information, let's say that you need to find a mail message that's from your supervisor that outlines a task that you need to do, so, "Okay, go to my mail because I'm starting... This Monday morning, start this project." Well, your mail environment is one of the most distracting environments. You might go down... You could easily... We've all done it. We all do it. Go down this rabbit hole when you go into mail. Similarly for the internet, you go to your web browser, you want to Google something, oh, you're presented with a webpage that you were looking at on Friday before leaving that's very interesting. The next thing you know, it's half an hour later. We're distractible, working memory declines, et cetera.

A positive way to look at this because those are kind of the negative things, but a positive way to look at this is to look at the expertise research, which is chess masters. There's a domain of cognitive science which is research on expertise and we study or they study how chess masters do their thing, how they become the experts that they are, and what it's like to be a chess master. You may have heard of these experiments where you ask a regular person... You present them with eight different configurations of chessboards and you ask that regular person to have a quick look at each of these chessboard configurations or games in play and then to just try to memorize them within 20 seconds or whatever it is. Then you can write down these chess configurations. Well, obviously a muggle will not be able to do this. You've got to be a chess expert. The chess expert can do this, could look... Or she could look at eight different configs and quickly spot and quickly recognize and memorize these chess configurations. They're able to rapidly encode and decode information. That is actually a characteristic of expertise that you find in... I mean, it's studied in chess especially, but available, it's present in all kinds of areas of expertise. Knowledge work is a little bit more fluid, so it's been more difficult to get a handle on what expertise is in knowledge work because it's so general, but you can imagine technology can help. What's technology supposed to do? It's supposed to extend and enhance the human mind, right?

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: You can probably see where I'm getting at is that if you need to search for information repeatedly, search for information that you need, then you're basically extending the time it takes to find information. You might not even find the information you need, but if you've got ubiquitous linking, if you've got links that are placed where you need them in your workflow, for instance in OmniFocus, you can have a link to... You might not merely say that, "I need to write paragraph three or, whatever, section three of this document. That's my goal for the week." But you can have a link to that actual document so that you don't have to search for the document. This unifies your task manager, OmniFocus, with the content that the tasks are about. This starts to look a little bit like chess expertise where an amateur would take three or four minutes to find a document or however long it takes, it might even be just 60 seconds but it's time, and whereas the expert who's been enhanced by technology can click on that link that brings them right to the location that they need in whatever application that target information resides. We're looking at it from a psychological perspective. I've mentioned quite a few things here, and I don't know how much the audience wants to know about the psychology of this, but it goes even further.

Andrew J. Mason: I get so excited about the possibilities of this because there are two different levels that I think we're all thinking of. I say two. There's so many more than two, but at least two that we're thinking on when we're trying to get something done using technology like a computer or a phone or whatever. You have the longer term intent. "Hey," like in your example. "My boss wants me to write a report." The longer term intent's there, and then the shorter term, "Okay, what's the small next thing that I need to do to get there?" And how easy it is to off ramp when you said opening an email and it derails you from what your original intent happened to be, and the context... I mean, it's so much all about context of having... I think about a car. Can you imagine having the cognitive load of trying to figure out how to... I've got to turn all my headlights every couple of miles because I keep only getting so far in the night while I'm driving, and every time I come to a decision point I have to turn my headlights back on again. I mean, I think that's kind of the cognitive fatigue that we're talking about with the Google search that's happening there.

Can you imagine if that whole tunnel of information, like you mentioned with the grand chess master, is laid out for you or your original intent, "Oh, okay. You want to do a report with your supervisor? That's awesome. Here are the files that we think that you'll need. Here's the path that you can take." Then instead of being presented with infinity options of distractibility, you now have some preferred paths that you can take. When you start thinking about that, you're like, "Man, that could really get us somewhere good." I love the why, but before we off ramp from that, talk to me about the who. Who is actually signing onto this manifesto? Who's actually saying, "Hey, this is a good idea. We should go ahead and do this?"

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Okay. The original manifesto had 24 signatories. There were many software developers, including Ken Case, signed onto it, the CEO of DEVONthink signed onto it, Brett Terpstra, well-known blogger developer signed onto it. We had many developers, we had at least one product manager, we had a number of professors, we had influencers, including David Sparks, stakeholders in the business basically. After that, we opened up the signing after the original manifesto was published. We've opened up the signing, and it's still open to people who believe in this so if anyone listening feels that this resonates with them, they can see the value of this, they can go on and click a button on the manifesto page and request to sign it.

Andrew J. Mason: So we have the who, who these people are. We have the why, kind of the vision behind it. Talk to me more about what it specifically is. Are we talking about a technical specification of some sort, just kind of a laid out vision? Get into a little bit more of the details of it for us.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: The manifesto itself is quite simple. If you look at the homepage, the way it's structured, there's a simple statement to the effect that we believe that the ability to copy and utilize links to manifold information should be present across software. It's really simple, and it briefly states that this would be... That and why this would be useful to people. There's a motivation page which outlines the psychological rationale that I was talking about earlier, in addition to which there's extending consciousness. It really goes pretty deep into psychology. If you've got this ubiquitous linking, essentially you extend consciousness. I liked your example about driving a car because what you were getting at I guess is that some actions can become automatic and really fast, and that's what we're looking to achieve with aptly placed hyperlinks.

We've got a motivation page. There's also a technical specification page, which I should point out the manifesto is not a highly technical document. It doesn't specify a specific API, it just talks about the... Well, on the technical page it talks about the capabilities that need to be present in software, basically what it means to be able to return a link to something and that these links should be robust. When a software developer provides a link, then they've got the extra responsibility of ensuring that that link remains useful over the lifecycle of the object that the link pertains to. We didn't want to specify an application programming interface, an API, because we felt that this should be present across different platforms, so although we're in the Apple world here, this would also apply to Windows and to Google operating systems.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, it's bigger than that of course.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Yeah. Yeah. It's bigger than that. The manifesto doesn't say, "Hey, it should be in the edit menu." But that's the obvious place for it, certainly not buried in a contextual menu where the user has to click, which is anathema to keyboard users and productivity enthusiasts.

Andrew J. Mason: The manifesto has been out and adopted by the originators. Other people have signed on. What impact have you seen this manifesto having so far?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: So we ourselves at CogSci Apps have had people write to us, well, thanking us for participating and launching this initiative. They often come to us and say, "Hey, I'm using this app but it doesn't have the required automation for linking." I should point out that the Omni Group apps had them from day one. We didn't need to contact them and say, "Hey, we'd like to have this functionality, this functionality." This was already anticipated by the Omni Group, so they got there first to a certain extent, but there's a lot of developers that didn't have it yet. For instance, Agenda had some linking functionality but they didn't have it all, so we got in touch with them on behalf of our customers and we explained the situation, we linked to the manifesto, and they were very quick to say, "Yeah, we're on board. We're going to do that." Whenever it was, I can't remember. Sometime after the manifesto.

Same deal with capacities. Basically on Mimestream, a number of developers were influenced by the manifesto. Oftentimes, developers got on board without us having to actually talk to us specifically. Like I said, I've lost track of the number of signatories, but it's had an impact on a number of people and thousands of people were made aware of it so it's had quite an impact, and it's enabled our app, the Hookmark app, to be able to serve users better because Hookmark serves these links to end users.

Andrew J. Mason: I feel like this may seem like a rabbit hole question but very quickly will seem obvious as to I think where we're headed with this, but I have heard also that you're a fan and respect Cal Newport's work, especially the book, the concept of Deep Work. Is there a particular slice of that that you really resonate with and you think, "Man, this is so applicable. This matches so well with kind of where we're headed and what we're about?"

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Cal Newport has published a number of books. He's just an amazingly prolific author. He's basically proof that his ideas work because he is extremely productive. His latest book is called Slow Productivity, and it basically aims to highlight the fact that productivity is a concept that's not technically defined in knowledge work. People may speak about being productive, but if you were to ask them what does it mean generally speaking across domains as a knowledge worker to be productive, they would be... I've written two cognitive productivity books so I know that people generally are stumped by that question. He sought to address that.

I think the key concept of Cal Newport's work, even in his latest book, remains the concept of deep work, which is highly focused work where while you're focused and you're not being distracted by all kinds of notifications, et cetera, you're really on task. It's demanding work. It's hard work, but it's at least the kind of work that people used to do before the advent of the internet with all these constant notifications and requests coming at us. The manifesto makes possible a slice of what Cal Newport is promoting, which is this concept of deep work. If you have aptly placed links and don't need to search and navigate, you're in a better position to be able to do your deep work, whatever that may be. One angle on answering your question.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. I mean, there seems to be a commonality of the theme here. You yourself, as an author of the cognitive productivity books, are there other points of agreement or relationship between the books that you've written and what you find in Cal's material?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Cal's books overlap with part of what the cognitive productivity books are about, and cognitive productivity is a bit of a... It's just a ballpark concept. The big idea of my books is actually in the subtitles. One of the cognitive productivity books is Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective and the other one is Seven Principles for Getting Smarter With Knowledge. These books are really posed the question of, "Okay, how can I utilize knowledge to become a more effective person? How can I develop products and solutions with knowledge?" Part of that has to do with managing your time and managing your attention. That has to do with principle two of my seven principle book. You can say that Cal Newport's focus on time management and attention management overlap with the second principle. Manage your cognitive life mindfully is what that second principle is all about.

Andrew J. Mason: Luc, you've been so gracious to us and your time spent. Thank you for that. Maybe one final question before we let you go here. How do the Omni Groups apps figure in with the Cognitive Productivity books? Can Omni apps help people become smarter with knowledge, as you say?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Yeah. Well, first of all, the background to this is I've been an Omni Group software user since 2003, starting with the OmniOutliner, which I live and breathe in, and OmniGraffle, which I do my diagrams. In the cognitive productivity books, if you search for Omni you'll see there are several references to this. For managing your cognitive life in a focused manner, you've got OmniFocus, basically put all your projects and tasks in there. It supports ubiquitous linking, and you can copy and paste links within the notes field of OmniFocus tasks and projects, so that's obviously quite handy.

One of the principles that I was alluding to, managing your cognitive life mindfully, a subset of that is managing your information resources so I talk about that in cognitive productivity books. When you start a project, often there's a number of information items that you need. You need a plan which might go in OmniFocus, you need... If it's a writing or composition or any creative project, you need your outline so obviously OmniOutliner comes in handy there. I've provided actually some OmniOutliner templates in my books for the rhetorical elements and all these things that I was alluding to that go into creative projects. OmniOutliner's a great place to keep information about, "Okay, what's the goal of this project? What are the constraints? What's the thesis that I'm aiming for, the outline, et cetera?" OmniOutliner, I think it's a bicycle for the mind, so it's a bicycle definitely for creating knowledge-intense projects.

Then you've got OmniGraffle, which when I start a project, I've got... Actually, we actually built this into Hookmark. You have this concept of hook to new, which creates a folder with a whole bunch of project files that you might need. We've got a template for it that contains all kinds of Omni Group objects, so OmniOutliner files and your OmniGraffle files so that when you start your project, you don't have to create these files manually. It's all created for you and you can just dive in there and get to your deep knowledge work. That would be one thing. Another aspect is there's a principle of cognitive productivity which is called delve deeply, which is basically when there's certain information resources, as knowledge workers, and students are knowledge workers of a certain type, we need to delve into them and we need to kind of master these documents. I've provided a template for... It's an OmniOutliner template for systematic note-taking about a document because from an education perspective, there's a collection of questions that you need to ask of any documents and they can be a handy place to record them and to ensure that you capture the information that needs to be captured for a document or a YouTube video or even a podcast. Somebody listening to this podcast might want to take a few ideas out. You can create what I call a meta document or a notes document about it. Again, OmniOutliner is a great place to be taking those notes. Those are a few of the places where the Omni Group apps figure in cognitive productivity suggestions.

Andrew J. Mason: Luc, I also want to point people back to episode 66 because we do delve a little bit deeper into the cognitive productivity books. There's some great concepts there, so if what you heard you like and you're like, "Oh, I want to hear more of that." Check out that episode. Obviously too I want to say that, first of all, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I know that we respect your work, but you are a Renaissance man all over the internet. Where are some places that people can go to find out more about what you're up to, connect with you, and just engage with what you're doing?

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Thank you. It's definitely a reciprocal respect. The company name is CogSci Apps, but we've got the... Hook Productivity is where the Hookmark app lives and it supports ubiquitous linking. We have an app called mySleepButton, which basically uses the same general approach, which is cognitive science, but applies it to something totally different, which is helping people fall asleep. That's actually where I'm probably most known for. Then the cognitive productivity books, if you Google them you should come up with Lean... Well, they're available on Amazon and on the Apple Bookstore. I recommend getting them from Leanpub, which is another Canadian company, because then you get the PDFs and you get it in all formats and you can get the extras, which are the Omni Group and other template files that are built into that. Those are some of the places where I live. I've got a sole proprietorship called CogZest where I blog about all kinds of things, cognitive science and productivity.

Andrew J. Mason: Well, Luc, thank you for pushing the way forward for all of us. It's an honor to be able to have this conversation, super stimulating, and I know that people that listen to this are going to love this, so thank you again for spending this time with us.

Dr. Luc Beaudoin: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's been a slice.

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