THE OMNI SHOW

Dr. Mark Carrigan: OmniFocus, particularly on a smartphone, was transformative. Because it gave that constant repository, where I knew that if I put it in the inbox in OmniFocus, I would come back to it in some form. Sometimes I might think about it and dismiss it. Other times it would be incorporated into an existing task or project. Sometimes I would blog about it, or write in a physical journal about it. Sometimes it would end up in a research paper. But just recording it was the thing that gave me the possibility of having agency later.

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 learned how Dr. Mark Carrigan uses OmniFocus. Well, hello and welcome to The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we get to hear from Dr. Mark Carrigan. He's the Associate Dean for Digital Education, the Faculty of Humanities, and the senior lecturer in education at Manchester Institute of Education. And he's the author of nearly 10 books from Social Media for Academics to his latest on generative AI in higher education. He's also a devoted OmniFocus user who says he uses it to, and I think I'm quoting here, "turn the hyperactive clutter within my mind to an order archive outside of it." Dr. Mark, we are so honored to have you with us today. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here. And that's an aspiration, rather than a reality, I think. That's how I hope I use it.

Andrew J. Mason: Fair enough, fair enough. Same. Same, as well. I'd love for you to tell us more about yourself. We mentioned University of Manchester, but also, where do you find yourself and what do you find yourself doing day-to-day in your various roles?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Yeah, I'm based in Manchester, in the UK. I've been here for five years. I mean, I initially grew up here, and I moved back when I got a new job after the pandemic. So my academic role involves teaching, writing, and leadership. And so, I use OmniFocus across all of those, really. But in my life outside of my work, I do a lot of sport, a distance runner, Pilates, swimmer, hiker. OmniFocus, I use less for those things, for obvious reasons. But I also watch a lot of films and read a lot of books, and that kind of cultural life, I think does touch upon what we'll be talking about today.

Andrew J. Mason: Fantastic. And talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned before we started this call, that you had been using OmniFocus for quite some time. Do you have any recollection of when you first came across the software itself or even more broadly, the Omni Group themselves? Or do you just remember over time just this growing awareness of, "Oh yeah, that's who they are"?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Well, that's a really interesting question, because when we started talking via email, I realized I had no idea when I started because it had been such a familiar habit. And then I tried to trace it back, and I realized that I only got it when I got a Mac, and I could locate when I got the Mac. And I think I got this soon afterwards, which would place it early on in my PhD, which I think would make sense. I was doing a part-time PhD while working full-time, and that was a real challenge, to balance the time commitments. I can remember the first time I did the Getting Things Done approach, of just getting everything out of my mind, putting it down on paper, and then I think I put it into OmniFocus soon after that. So I'm not certain, but I think I read Getting Things Done, and then I think I stumbled across OmniFocus while Googling about the GTD system, and I've been using it ever since. So I think that would be 2008, or 2009. I think I'm probably heading towards 20 years of use, which makes me feel terrifyingly old. It was also my birthday yesterday, so I already felt old, as a consequence of that. But the speed with which that time passes, I think is really striking, that something like this can just fade into the background infrastructure of your life and become a taken for granted part of how you organize yourself. From a research perspective, that's exactly what fascinates me about technology. And I realize how integral to my own experience OmniFocus has been for such a long time. And I don't really think about it very often, which makes me really interested to have this conversation, to be given a kind of invitation to reflect a bit more deeply about this software that permeates every aspect of my existence.

Andrew J. Mason: I love hearing more about that. And actually, if you don't mind, even starting to juxtapose into some of your body of work as well. Generative AI in higher education, what are some of the things that are striking you right now? What are some of the things that are feeling like timely elements that you're coming across here, and just what's got your attention these days in that space?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Well, the question that I'm fascinated by is the relationship between what it is to use these tools in a kind of active, deliberative, purposeful way, versus what it is to use them as kind of outsourcing agents. So we pass a task on to an LLM because we want to go faster. And educationally, this is the big challenge for higher education, and education at all levels really. I think we have to respond to the fact that this software has diffused, is out there in the world, people are using it. But equally, there clearly is a risk that it becomes a way of short-circuiting our own judgment, our own thought processes. So we rely on the software to do something that we would have had to do, previously, ourselves. And the tension between the two sides of my work is between the kind of practical real world application now, and where I think things are going. So I'm originally trained as a philosopher and sociologist, and from that perspective, I find these developments really worrying. I do not think that LLMs are intrinsically harmful, but I think they are bound up in the model of commercialization, which is already generating a lot of social harm. But as someone who's also an educational technologist, who's interested in what we can do with technology in the here and now, I find them amazing. I love interacting with them. I find them incredibly... They stimulate creativity, because they're the constant interlocutor you can come to. So the kind of fringe thoughts, associations, ideas, you can throw them into an LLM like Claude, and it will feed back with interesting thoughts in response. And so, I'm trying to reconcile those two perspectives. Under the right conditions, engaged with in the right way, they can clearly be not just educationally beneficial, but intellectually, creatively, and I think even existentially beneficial. The problem is, those conditions I think are not widespread. And the design of the services, particularly as the economics changes over the next year or two, I think is going to render those conditions even more precarious. So I see a real promise in LLMs, and I've experienced that as a routine feature of my own experience of using them. But equally, I'm really worried about where this is heading.

Andrew J. Mason: Yes.

Dr. Mark Carrigan: And I think the LLMs we're using now are not the ones we'll be using a year from now, or two years, not just in terms of capability but in terms of reliability. What Cory Doctorow famously describes as a enshittification, the process we've seen through social media. I think clearly we're going to see some kind of process like that with LLMs, and it could be just as destructive as the transformation of social media has been. So I worry about it, but I'm also really excited about them, which is a strange position to find myself in.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, and I think there is space for both feelings to show up in this conversation. I think a buddy of mine who is a senior software developer says that, "Yes, no doubt that you're able to go faster cycles, but the faster you drive, the more easier it is to hit something as small as a pebble and be thrown completely off course." That sense of, it gives you the flow state, but then at the same time you're also giving up that level of trust. And at what level are we okay with that, and showing up in there. Let me shift into for the person that is maybe experiencing some of the uh-oh, but as well as relief of expanded responsibilities in their workspace, and their work-life balance. And things that they're maybe finding themselves, as you mentioned studying for the doctorate, to be able to have more and more responsibility thrust upon you. What do you give as a great first step for somebody that's saying, "I do know my attention is flowing in multiple directions, used to be just kind of flow state, whatever showed up. I worked on it, or looked at it, and then it went away. And there was this sense of next, next, next. But now, maybe I do need to be doing a bit more to keep track of the outcomes and ideas that I'm attached to." What advice would you have for somebody that finds themselves into that growing expanded responsibility state?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Well, two pieces of advice. One positive, one negative. The first, which I think I got from GTD initially, was just getting into the habit of writing everything down. And for a few years, this was incredibly onerous, that I used to have to force myself to do it. I would miss stuff. But after a decade of writing every idea you have down, it becomes a habitual thing that you don't have to make an effort for. And I really think that's been transformative, my experience has been that the more I write my ideas down, the more ideas I have. And OmniFocus, particularly on a smartphone, was transformative. Because it gave that constant repository, where I knew that if I put it in the inbox in OmniFocus, I would come back to it in some form. Sometimes I might think about it and dismiss it. Other times it would be incorporated into an existing task or project. Sometimes I would blog about it, or write in a physical journal about it. Sometimes it would end up in a research paper. But just recording it was the thing that gave me the possibility of having agency later. It would allow me to decide what I would do with it later. And that sense, which I used to have, of feeling that I was having these ideas and they were kind of floating away from me, it gave me a sense of ownership over my own creativity. And looking back, I think that's one of the most important habits I've ever tried to cultivate, if not the most important. But the risk is then that your work becomes limitless, because it can become overwhelming, and you can be pulled in a million directions. I think that's something we can talk more about, because that's been part of the downside of OmniFocus for me, where the capacity to capture everything means that I am not always as willing to let go of things that I don't have capacity for as I should be. But the other bit of advice that in the contemporary context I give, just limit your digital access. I was looking to see if I could reach the time lock safe I have, and I think it would kind of disrupt things if I did. But I've got a cheap time lock safe by my desk, and I just control access to my email. So I've got a physical dongle to log into my work email and when I finish work, I lock it in the time lock safe, and then I physically can't access my email until the safe unlocks. It's a slightly extreme solution, and I'm sure I could just break into the safe if I really needed to. But that's the thing, in the last 10 years, that has had the biggest impacts on me. Particularly when the weekend comes, it becomes ritualistic.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Dr. Mark Carrigan: I lock the dongle in the safe, the safe works, and I know that I'm away from email until Monday morning. And it feels really good.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, extreme in some sense, but also I think incredibly wise to have the level of self-awareness to know what is needed in order to fully unhook. And I think I had so many thoughts coming through the 2015 edition of Getting Things Done where David talks about, digital tools truly can become a black hole, where just ideas get dumped and the margins to the canvas infinitely expand. So how do you even get started painting when your canvas just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger? And we do have a sense of ownership sometimes. "Hey, my attention is on this idea for a reason. There's got to be something to do with that, and I'm not quite comfortable yet throwing it off into the someday maybe pile. There's something here for this." You mentioned maybe digging back into that a little bit. How do you juggle having whether or not, number one, "This is an idea whose time has come"? Or, "Hey, that was 3:00 AM, and I was just coming out of a sleep state and it just needs to go away," and let that go? Talk to me a little bit more about how you decide what enters your true life's flow of work versus, "I have my attention on it, we can put it into a different bucket for now"?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Partly, I've learned to recognize the patterns over time. So there are things that are not immediately actionable, and don't lend themselves to a concrete long-term project. I mean, books are like this. There are books that I'm planning to write in 10 years time, when the project is so concrete that it's easy to just define it as something that I'm clear I want to do, but I'm not in a position to do it yet. And so when it can be projectified like that, it's easier. When it's a kind of insight, or a strand, or an association, it's much harder to know what to do with it. And over time I've started to realize that sometimes those things return repeatedly, and they might seem different, they might seem different ideas, but I noticed that actually different aspects of what is essentially the same idea is returning. So I dismiss it, but then if it comes back, it's like something in my psyche kind of clamoring for attention. And if the same kind of idea is repeatedly coming up, then I try and sit down and give it some time and care and think, "Well, what is this? What could this be? How could I develop it?" So my generative AI handbook for academics started that way. The book I'm writing at the moment with my friend, the philosopher Milan Stürmer about the psychoanalysis in LLMs, that started that way as well. And these were just kind of loose threads that eventually I kind of kept coming across them, and then I started to purposefully pull on them. And so I think you can trust that if you have an idea and you don't act on it, and you never think of it again, it probably wasn't something that was worth attending to. But if you have an idea, and then a similar idea comes up again a week later, and then a month later, there's something there that is worthy of your care and attention, I think. At least that's my experience.

Andrew J. Mason: It seems very much like the movie Inception, where you're having the dream within the dream within the dream, where sometimes I think we give ourselves a little bit too much credit for our intentions, either toward the future or what we would have done in the past. And just this eternality of being right here in the moment right now and saying, "Oh, I'll remember to do that thing." Or, "Oh wow, this is the first time this idea came across." I would love to argue that perhaps even the act of capturing is tuning our awareness to see the idea actually when it shows up, and we have attention on it. And, "Oh man, this isn't the first, but probably the fourth or fifth time this has come across my psyche. Maybe it is something that is worth my awareness, but from a different angle than where I first saw it." I really love that you pointed that out. I'd love to maybe dive a little bit more into the nuts and bolts of your day-to-day. How do you currently have the system set up? Are there any perspectives or tags that you find yourself using more often than not, that's outside of what maybe some would consider to be the standard setup? Or even just a rhythm, for how it shows up in your day?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Yeah. So preparing for this, it did occur to me that I feel I don't use it properly, and I thought that was an interesting judgment to arise in myself. That there's a proper way of using it, and an improper way of using it. Intellectually, I don't think that, but I do feel it a little bit. So I use it in a really light touch way. I have two contexts, life and work, and I have about 15 projects defined within them. And for me, that works, because the problem I found of trying to be much more comprehensive, was that my maintenance of the system became a drag in its own right. And particularly when I was going through a phase when my career was changing a lot, and I had a lot of different responsibilities, there wasn't enough stability in that context to make the system itself stable. So when I went to get a new role, I then had to change things again. And I think now I'm in a very stable position, professionally. I might over time start to elaborate my OmniFocus system a bit, but I am nervous about my own capacity to procrastinate by fiddling with the system. The key thing for me is the basic GTD insight as I understand it, which is at any given moment, you should know what tasks are available and relevant to you. And the way I've set this up allows me to do that. I use it purely on laptop and desktop. I've got it on my smartphone, but I just use that for entering in the inbox. I don't really do anything else with it. And I don't tend to consult it very dynamically through the day, I probably use it two or three times a day, just to see what I'm doing. And then I look at what tasks have come up. If I really don't want to do those, I look at surrounding days or elsewhere in the context, because I find that really helpful. That you've got the list of all the things that you could be doing, and if you're really struggling to focus on the thing you should be doing, doing something else can be very alluring. And I sometimes find that I can get through 10 tasks in an afternoon, if they are an escape from the thing I'm trying to avoid. So I think part of how I've learned to use it over time is kind of harnessing it to my own psychological quirks. I know where I struggle, I know how my procrastination works, and I use it to help me with that. And I avoid using OmniFocus in a way that would embed those problems, because I really did, in the first five or six years of it, spend a lot of time fiddling with the system in a way that I think was not ultimately helpful. And I also think, psychoanalytically, it offers an illusion of control. You feel that if you have the system perfect, then uncertainty in life is being mitigated, and it really isn't.

Andrew J. Mason: No, no. Thank you, first of all, for diving into that. Because I think so many of us, myself included, get the sense that things work better when we use it in a way that it works with us. And it's so tempting to have this gold standard, to say that this is the way the system would be set up, "And if I can just reach that point, then things will be optimal for me." Or the reverse of that. "If the system were just set up in a certain way, then I'd be..." It's so funny, kind of the mental framework or crutch that shows up for us to be able to say, "It's my excuse for why things aren't," or, "It's my escape for why things aren't." Talk to me a little bit more about that process of becoming, where you're building a system, you're building a cup with which the flow of your life's work is kind of flowing through, or pouring through. Was there a point where you said, "I think this is the basic shape it needs to take?" Or, "Maybe things that I've tried in the past weren't necessarily mistakes, or steps along this journey, but I feel like they weren't necessarily the direction I should have had, and now I'm heading here." Do you have that kind of mental inflection point that shows up for you when you think about, there was a time where it wasn't working as well, and now it is. What shifted for you in that space?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: There wasn't a single point, I think it was gradual simplification, and that still cuts both ways. I mean, I'm having the process at the moment where, I had a fellowship last year. And that led to me cutting down a lot of the stuff that I was doing in order to focus on a couple of big things. And now I'm back into a more normal working routine. So I find it interesting to look at how many tasks there are in the database, and last year was the only time in the entire time I've used it, where I think I had less than a hundred tasks in total. And since I restarted a normal work routine in the last month or so, that's more than doubled. And so, some simplification, and becoming more complex you can't really control. It's circumstantial. But I find as well that every couple of years I have a phase of thinking, "I feel that my attention is too split. I feel like I'm not giving the things that really matter to me the care I deserve." And I do think about, "What have I committed to that I don't want to be committed to?" And last time I did this, I did it very radically, and I did realize that there were things I committed to at work that I was doing because they were vaguely interesting, or I didn't want to let someone down, or I liked the people I was working with. And I began to realize that past a certain point, your commitments if those are the criteria become so sprawling, it becomes unmanageable. And I tried to set a kind of stricter threshold about, I will only commit to something if I'm genuinely passionate about it. It really matters to me. I feel I would regret it in a kind of ongoing way if I removed it. OmniFocus was really useful for that. And the longer I've used it, the more struck I am by how powerful it is to have a representation of your commitments that you can manipulate, using an interface. And that capacity to take a very interior reflective process, but conduct it through the software, I think is really, really helpful. To be able to visualize what you're committed to, and then to go through things one by one and then think about, "Well, why did I do this? How did I end up in a situation where I have this meeting twice a week? When will it end? Do I want to end it prematurely?" So it does give the kind of control, and I think that control is very psychologically potent. It can often turn into a fantasy if you're not careful. But it is there, and this has let me simplify over time, just because I have this record of the things that I have committed to. And so that's the trajectory, to answer your question, simplification over time. But I do have these periods where it becomes more sprawling again.

Andrew J. Mason: That's wonderful. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you. With 20 years of experience in this direction, roughly two decades, give or take a few years. Any words of wisdom that you would have for somebody that... I guess maybe sometimes I like to frame it like, you have a magic wand, and suddenly everybody understands X about productivity, or about getting their life's work done, or thinking in a certain way about being productive. Is there anything that, "Man, if I could just have everybody be on the same page about this, all of us would just be operating at such a higher level here"? Anything that hits that space for you?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Yeah, so two things come to mind. Firstly, that you can't skip the inbox. There have been occasions where I've been tempted to skip the kind of mechanics of the inbox, and it just doesn't work. So there was a period of my working life where I was traveling, maybe two thirds of the time, and the inbox could become completely unmanageable under those situations. I'd get home and finally have a chance to sit down and really think about what I've been doing, and there were like a hundred items, and the temptation to just bulk delete them was huge. But whenever I did it, the whole system began to break down. Unless you trust that your inbox is completely sacrosanct and that everything in there will be dealt with, you trust in the system breaks down, in my experience. The other thing that I think is particularly for academics, but I think might be true for other forms of writer, is that I don't find that scheduling writing projects works. I've tried doing chapter by chapter. I've tried doing section by section. I've tried breaking down research tasks into individual entries, and it just messes up the flow state. And I love the idea that you could kind of disaggregate a complex creative task into these steps, and then go with them when you need to. But my experience has been that I need to have process time, and so I calendar my writing, and that's from years of trying to get writing into OmniFocus. And it just doesn't work for me. I think it might for some people, but I think if someone is finding it difficult to manage their writing through OmniFocus, I'd encourage them to try not doing that and that it's okay. I mean, I set myself a daily writing goal, but I also put writing on my calendar, and I find just blocking out time for it is effective. Because there's such a thick sense of process to what you're writing, you don't need to know the next step because you can feel the next step through the process of immersion in it, at least much of the time. And so that's kind of figuring out over time what OmniFocus isn't for, at least for me. And that took a lot of reflection, but I'm glad that I got there.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow. Yes, that's just as important too as what does show up, that's right. The unnecessary pressure, sometimes. We love setting goals, but being able to say, "This is where I'm dedicating space for that work to flow, or for that work to show up," is great. Versus saying, "If I'm not at chapter seven by tomorrow..." I mean, I understand publishing deadlines, but outside of that, giving space for that work to flow in that way. Dr. Mark, I love this conversation. Honestly, I didn't know what would show up here, but I love how free-flowing it's been, and just the gems that have shown up along the way. For folks that really want to dig in more, into your study and research, how can they orbit your world and see what it is you're up to?

Dr. Mark Carrigan: The best way would be my blog at www.markcarrigan.net. So I blog very frequently, usually multiple times a day, and that's the other side of my OmniFocus habit. A lot of the inbox items become blog posts, eventually. And so yeah, I blog about a lot of my technology use on there, but I rarely blog about OmniFocus, so thank you for this conversation. And you've got me thinking how strange it is that I've never really reflected very much on this, which I think is sign of the success of the software, that it just fades into the background a lot of the time. And that's why I love it, and also why I think I probably couldn't cope without it at this stage.

Andrew J. Mason: I love hearing what you're working on, and hearing what you're about, and also hearing how OmniFocus has been a part of the journey for you. Grateful for this conversation. Thanks for joining us today.

Dr. Mark Carrigan: Yeah, thanks very much.

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.