Notes from Brad Gibson, P.Eng.

I have been moved to action by the stuff I have been reading at MacSparky, practically efficient, Macdrifter and Brett Terpstra’s blogs over the past few months. Of this bunch, a couple of them are strong on Omnifocus. David Sparks has been a long time Omnifocus advocat and bon vivant, while Eddie has been a recent convert.

I started with Omnifocus on the Mac in 2009, added the iPhone edition quickly, then completed the trifecta with the iPad version when it was released. In all of that, I often felt Omnifocus was more of a tonic than a tool. So I cruised the forums, finding tools and scripts, downloading everything. What I ended up building was a home handyman’s equivalent of the perfect workshop. All tools and no talent.

Once I purchased Creating Flow with Omnifocus by Kourosh Dini – a must read for any Omnifocus student – I finally realized how to make the base Omnifocus programs, the add-ons, the workflows and the philosophies work for me. (I ended up using a derivative of Dini’s start date based system and the flag based system.) I was already a secular devotee of GTD – relax I am not going there – so I had a pretty structured set of contexts for personal and career life set up. Being an engineering manager, stuff in my life was already one big list of projects. Most engineers understand GTD instinctively.

A Tip

Here’s something that I synthesized from all of the collected wisdom around Omnifocus; once you get projects set up in a way that works for you in Omnifocus, take a look at the file structure on your main work machine. I created a “Projects” folder – it’s essentially my new “Documents” folder. If you establish a file structure in that folder that matches your Omnifocus project folder structure you will have a system that will complement your workflow. It doesn’t take a lot of time, just go to the Nicola Vitacolonna modified scripts in this forum entry and you will be able to build the file structure as you need to (warning: geekiness level is above moderate on this). The scripts also provide a quick link between Omnifocus, Omnioutliner and the file system. Should that kind of functionality be baked into Omnifocus? Maybe, but the power user crowd that use Omnifocus also appreciate that it is highly customizable while not being full of feature bloat.

The Background

In September 2008, Janet Jackson started an arena scale tour in Vancouver with 14 transport trucks, 10 dancers and an unknown number of Versace filled trunks. The tour, dubbed “Rock Witchu” -- a rather weird morphing of Michael’s “Rock With You” -- never seemed to pick up steam. Twelve of 28 shows got cancelled, sell-outs were rare and, landing squarely in the middle of the big economic melt-down of 2008, while Janet claimed vertigo for the cancellations, it may be that the economics of the show never made sense. Jackson sold a mere 440,000-something of her “Discipline” record; poor numbers for one of the best known women in show biz. The record was scarcely noticed after appearing at number one on Billboard in the first week of release, demonstrating the sheer irrelevance of the “chart” and that publication in particular in the modern age of music.

And so... in late 2009 the JJ brain-trust released yet another greatest hits album and a “Number 1’s” tour hit the road in first part of 2011. This time Janet is in auditorium type venues (guaranteeing more frequent sell-outs), somewhat better physical condition and fronts a promotional line that evokes a savvier, more Vegas oriented return in the style of Elvis or Cher.

I was at the Vancouver show in 2008 and never published the review I wrote at the time. After the tour crashed and burned, I put the review aside and figured it would join my vast collection of unpublished observations, especially after Michael’s death in 2009. Janet’s latest re-invention of her star persona caused me to take a look again at what we saw a few years ago. Reviews are just as much snapshots of where we the audience were at the time as they are about the artist. Janet’s celebrity and its transformation is more interesting than ever.

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Sitting in the Stands of the Sports Arena...

By 8:30 PM we begin to get the real sense that this whole "LL Cool J is opening the show" stuff is just a bunch of BS. A few minutes later the lights go out and a couple of big "J's" start sliding around the stage. There are the dancers. And we're off.

I saw Michael in Buffalo in 1981 with his brothers. I know what it is like to see Jackson royalty at their peak. Not yet having seen Janet Jackson perform live and knowing it's been a while since Control, Rhythm Nation, janet. Let's just say... well, it's not that her best years are behind her; it's something else. Music is different. This larger than life millionaire, superstar, goddess thing seems so utterly from another era. That's it! Janet is one of the last in a run of pop monster stars. Hers and the nearby orbiting supernova of Madonna and Mariah are peculiar oddities from the halcyon days of the musical tycoons. We might as well be watching "Casablanca" or the moon landing or the Berlin Wall falling. Janet Jackson may still be recording, and yes in a few seconds she will be there pumping and jumping, but she is more history than news.

In the 2/3's full GM Place I feel a twinge of remorse. Is this a last big show “Hurrah” for one of the greatest female performers of an era? Is this the last stop before the inevitable extended run in Vegas? This is the artist with 100 million in record sales with her latest recording hovering at the 400,000 unit mark. If you don't think music marketing and distribution has changed then take a look at Janet's change of fortune, despite some pretty good releases... Well, okay, 20 Y.O. was not very good.

And no; I don't long for the old days. They were what they were. Teenagers in the '70's had the music and radio monoliths. We had the recording hierarchy and we fed the star-making machine. For all it's weaknesses it created some extraordinarily popular, and lucrative, music. No one could imagine something like a Rumors or an Aja or a Songs in the Key of Life being made, let alone prospering in the musical world of today. There use to be big budgets for the big stars and they could take a year or two to hone, record, over-dub and over-produce. That's how Janet became what she became with the literal taking "Control" of her career in the '80's to the crafting of a genre in Rhythm Nation. She and Jam/Lewis created one of the last great album arcs of our recorded music era.

And yes I am here for the memories; the nostalgia. Just 17 years ago we missed Janet in Toronto due to her illness and cancellation. Tonight, JFB, has taken care that we will close the loop. We are here to make our own family history. High in the back of GM Place we sit just a few seats away from a couple of girls who get picked to be upgraded to floors, their story videoed and posted the next day on the janetjacskon.com web site. Around us is mostly... empty space. In '89, '92, '98, Ms Jackson would have packed stadia. Tonight, a perfect, sunny September night, there isn't a scalper in site and there are still spaces on the floor. The lower bowl is largely full and there will still be plenty of noise.

Jackson's stage set-up is closer to "Rent" than it is to the Stones. There is no band front and center, for that you have to look right and up a bit. There, in the seats, are 3 platforms for a drummer and a couple of keyboard players. There are no back-up singers. Layers of vocals emanate from a rack of servers in the back of the house. The stage space and the now de rigeur cat-walk-encompassing-an-inner-set-of-floor-seats layout is for dancers and the Star.

Super Nova or Red Dwarf?

Your first view of the Lady is disarming. Janet with a mass of curls thrown up in a Sassoon-style Mohawk and an over-size microphone slung around her neck and face. She wears a corset-like breastplate atop a one-piece jumpsuit type of thing and she looks... She looks out of shape. It is then that my Elvis fears escalate. I am not afraid for me or JFB, I worry about the Star and the no doubt sycophantic bunch of staffers that ego boost her everyday. Maybe she just shouldn't be doing this now. But like the little engine that could she begins to shimmy and the whole thing starts in motion. The dancers swirl -- video-style -- around her and 4 songs zip by in rapid progression, merging into a kind of frenetic mix tape of incompletedness.

Oh my God. It's going to be medley night.

Things get better though. Much better. What I am really there to see is the power of one of the uncontested greats. To watch charm droplets from 300 feet and feel the effect of being totally immersed in them. It's been like that watching Diana Ross live and I had that experience in 2007 with Lucinda Williams. Jackson does not disappoint in that department. You cannot separate the legend from the woman as you watch her. When she strikes a pose she is both a cliche and an icon. In this performance there is a charm in it's "Let's put on a show" air. Jackson is ever the professional but she seems like she is somewhat out of practice, like the pitching great who arrives at training camp expecting to play himself back into shape. This was the first show of the tour and it played like a rehearsal. I expect that by LA, Chicago, Toronto and New York the flat spots will be edited out, the playlist will be pared and this thing will be pumping but what a thrill to see this quirky first show.

For a music show attendee of the old school who expects the singer to sing, it is somewhat unnerving to never know which part of the vocal line Janet is singing. In the midst of multiple part harmonies one hears a "Wheee" or a "Woooo" and you realize that is her, live. She does sing but there is also an awful lot of digital Janet in the mix.

Crescendo

On the slow song set of the night, Jackson wore a slinky red dress and ditched the headset for a handheld microphone. At first her mic technique was an awful mess of blowing and sucking that made Madonna sound like an opera singer. How could this be? She's a Jackson. Marvin Gaye probably gave her mic technique lessons while she was a baby being bounced on uncle Barry Gordy's knee. It just didn't make sense. By the second and third song of the set however things were right again and Janet was there singing with passion and remembering that, for her, it's just like riding a bicycle. "Let's Wait Awhile" was brilliantly phrased and ended to soon. The slow numbers were the first highlight of the night.

Like so many great artists Janet has the innate ability to take "pretty good" CD tracks and elevate them to live classics. "All Nite (Don't Stop)" really gets "sick" in this show and if a live recording from this tour ever surfaces find a place for that tune on your iPod, it just pumps. Sequenced with that was "Rock With U", from the latest CD and they fit very well together. After that the music popped to "Together Again" and perfection reigned. As the last bars of Together Again faded the sound in the arena became deafening and everything else just stopped. It was a perfectly scripted crescendo but even Janet seemed taken aback as the ovation grew and persisted for about 2 minutes. There was one of those "it's good to be back" looks on her face and she seemed more at ease for the rest of the show despite some costuming problems -- see how I avoided the word "malfunction" -- later on. For old folks like me she did some old songs, Young Love and Say You Do which was a staple of my radio and club mixes back in 1982.

Song after song, the show just builds and builds but it also goes crash from time to time. Part of the problem is the sheer weight of tunes, there were 37 songs on the set list and, while the die hard fans wanted to hear all of them, it's just too many songs. Imagine U2 coming out and running through New Years Day, Pride, Where the Streets Have No Name and She Moves in Mysterious Ways in a 2 minute medley. It just wouldn't happen and Janet Jackson should not be participating in the devaluation of her own hits. Another problem is what I call "this Jackson interlude thing". What's with the Star War-sy, Planet Xylon goofy video bits between costume changes? And there's a very strange screaming closing before the ovation that's just completely wrong. A pick-the-guy-out-of-the-audience-and-humiliate-him routine with cartoon sado-masochism ran way too long and just got boring. Hopefully this gets tightened up when they review the show and hit a few more cities.

And the Kitchen Sink

Janet throws everything and the kitchen sink into the show. The excess, curiously, exposes a humanity through all the high-techery and MTV-style dancing because it's not a perfect show. We left scratching our heads but talked more and more about it that night and the next day. Certain songs and moments from the night keep looping back and that's what you want; a new memory and a family moment we'll remember for the rest of our lives.

Use Case 1: Mr. Good Note
The model for a good laptop device or a great arm's length device is the book. It contains knowledge, it's portable and a single book in-hand fills its role innocuously. (A pack full of them is a back-breaking pain.) Likewise the paper notebook or notepad is the universally accepted portable device for knowledge retention in the both the board and class rooms. While you can walk into most class rooms with a laptop computer these days, most meeting rooms are still hostile to the presence of computers. But take a tablet notebook into a meeting and the objections disappear. For me me the lesson has been clear; the tools of engagement, and the way they are perceived, are important in determining the success of a meeting.

The iPad has the opportunity to displace both the book and the notepad. The immediate use case for professionals is as an information storage and capture device. My experiments with the TC4400 tablet computer have persuaded me that there is no real resistance to a computer being in a meeting, just certain types of computers and form-factors. The trouble with my existing tablet? It's heavy, dim and has poor battery life. You just don't want to go to a meeting with your power plug in hand. So the iPad's promise of light, bright, long-life display is compelling. There is a problem though. Typing on the display is going to be unnerving to other meeting attendees, so I am planning on using a stylus with my iPad. I'm sure it will be essential and I will report back on this as I gain experience with concept. Interestingly, stylus products are all from third parties and Apple does not natively support "inking" in the iPad. This will be a big space for developers and early indications are that are a few developers ready to port their iPhone inking programs to the iPad.

Use Case 2: The Memex
If you have never heard of Vannevar Bush's Memex, you will be using something like it soon -- whether it's an iPad or not. Many of us use our iPhone's like a Memex now however the screen size and resolution is not optimal for many pictures and diagrams. The iPad thrusts us into the Memex age with ubiquitous connectivity, portability and accessibility. Every professional could use a Memex, so go buy an iPad. With access to Wifi or 3G, you have a port into all of your knowledge windows.

How will the iPad work with private sites, networks and personal information? Very well. I smile every time I hear or read about "lock-in" or "closed systems" on the iPhone or iPad. Have you been to the App Store lately? The iPad is going to do a few things really well out of the box, the rest is up to developers. Right now on my iPhone, I can SSH into confidential servers and sites with ease using ezShare. The same program allows me to effortlessly transfer files and capture email attachments. A killer feature that I hope is fully exploited in an iPad version, is desktop sharing. Yes, that's right, imagine cruising your own desktop computer from the iPad while you recline on your couch. Now think about accessing that file you forgot during a meeting, calling up a key piece of data to refute or confirm an issue or using the iPad as a window into a video presentation that runs somewhere else. That is the kind of thing Bush wanted in the 1930's and I wanted in the 1980's. The future has arrived.

Use Case 3: Workflow Control
I'm sure many will abuse the iPad's email functionality by blindly using push technology in a Pavlovian rush to mediocrity. The smart professional will see a different picture; one that leads to a more mindful, controlled use of action oriented tools.

We're sort of there now but the model needs tweaking. A well developed iPad app would be able to deliver information in context based on location and time of day. Imagine a scenario where a well planned day gets "entered" into the iPad and shepherds the busy professional from desk to meeting, meeting to presentation, presentation to one-on-one. Stuff arrives just-in-time and only the stuff that's needed gets delivered. It's going to happen and I'm hoping the folks at Omnigroup are working on this. I'm using OmniFocus on both a laptop and an iPhone, so parts of the workflow are there for me now. An iPad, however, would better fulfill the promise of a rich workflow management device.

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Well that covers it for now. I'm going to sit back, anticipate the launch and think about some more specific use cases. I'll be blogging about my early use of the iPad and will dive more deeply into app and workflow development.

iIf you haven't seen either Steve Ballmer's 2010 CES keynote or Steve Jobs iPad product announcement, stop reading now, find the videos and watch. I'll wait. Come back when you're done.

What did you think? If ever there was a personification of the differences between mobile computing visions it's certainly there in those two presentations. Ballmer quizzically stalking an array of machines (Wow, they all run Windows) and eventually ham-fisting a "slate" from HP with an underwhelming 30 seconds of "we can do mobile touch too" demo. Jobs on the other hand was about the concept, the idea, the promise and the future. He made it clear; the iPad will not be another Netbook and no, it's not a giant iPhone. It's magical baby and we are changing the game.

When you first see the iPad, the clarity of product vision over a 10 year span becomes very real. Take a look at the evolution of mobile and touch-based products from the first iPod, through it's various generations, to the iPhone and, yes, even the MacBook Air. Doesn't the iPad look like the screen off of a MacBook Air sans keyboard? Apple was thinking about the future and a review of the product evolution makes an outsider like me go "Doh!" at the obviousness of their direction. In hindsight, of course.

The iPad is not a pen based me-too slate or a convertible tablet. Apple actually knows something about that having had a crack at that game with the Newton. The iPad is both mobile and tactile in a way that no Windows based machine currently is. That is a key take-away -- Apple knew the pen-based model was broken. What's the point in adapting handwriting as the major source of input on a machine when multi-touch technology exists? Why are people going to pick up a pen when most laptop users have now given up the mouse?

The gestures and cues that appear on an iPad show a real integration between the software and the hardware. Previews of key applications demonstrate that somebody actually designed the software with the functionality of the hardware in mind. Applications currently run one at a time and that, to me, is important. This is a tool for focusing on doing one thing well while you're doing it. If you want to watch a movie while you write a movie script, IM a movie actor and chat to friend about the movies then use another class of computer. The iPad wants your attention. The navigation does not seem like an afterthought in the way that "flick" technology in Windows 7 does. iPad is hands-on, just like a keyboard but better. A two year old is going to grok the iPad. A 2 year old. Give a two year old a Windows based Tablet and all they will do is chew on the stylus.

Let's step back a bit from the iPad and take a look at professional workflows and current software tool sets.

I am a Professional Engineer. I manage professional teams of electrical engineers and designers in the building science field. We work with our customers, Architects and other Engineers to make things. Our work is partly creative and partly analytical; engineering is about what is possible, what is safe, what is appropriate. We work on a myriad of projects, sub-projects, developing ideas and business concepts. By myriad, I mean hundreds of GTD style projects are active on a regular basis.

Conventional Microsoft Office tools are ill suited to planning, strategizing and determining what is important. (A lot of other applications software fits that description too.) In order to use Microsoft products, you need to smear a layer of customized developer goodness on top of the basic applications, all of which have too many features. For the average user, Microsoft Word is a Boeing 747 cockpit. It is impressive, daunting, clearly powerful and entirely useless without extensive education, practice and regular use. You have to be a highly skilled, demonstrably expert airline pilot to fly Microsoft Word. That makes no sense. It's the same with Excel and especially Outlook if you really want to lever rich value out of the software. Why do you need to become as heavily invested an expert with the craft of the tool as you are already in your field of choice? I do not have to become an airline pilot to fly from Vancouver to Toronto. Every time I need to be productive in a Microsoft application I have to think really hard about whether what I want the program to do will make me more productive or force me to burn cycles discovering how to make it work.

Many companies use Microsoft platforms and applications. The platforms are okay. The applications... well, umm.... please re-read the previous paragraph. This then is the challenge of the modern professional worker: How do you break free of the constraints inherent in tools that have a lineage forged when the space shuttle was new technology? How do you establish a workflow that can both conform to the incumbent's behaviors; but also, enhance your workflow? That kind of magic happened in 1979 with the release of VisiCalc. Ever since we've just been tarting things up with feature after feature.

There is no miracle in my efficiencies or work patterns. I am inundated with no more emails or phone calls than many; considerably fewer than many well known gurus or mavens, I would guess. The biggest difference is that, perhaps, I can afford to ignore far fewer of the messages I receive. There are nascent actions buried in about 75% of my emails. I am getting better at appraising content and determining whether it necessitates a reply, largely due to a multi-year rumination on the thoughts in "Getting Things Done". Not replying is not the same as ignoring messages. A celebrity may get thousands of "Ur kewl" greetings that can be dealt with by way of an auto-reply. Engineers don't have fawning masses that can be assuaged with a mail rule. Working professionals get deluged by documentation and deliverables. In turn, we generate a considerable number of our own deliverables; drawings, sketches, letters, reports, calculations, presentations and, latterly, many more photographs, even videos and audio recordings.

The Microsoft Office of today enhances the production of deliverable spew but it does little to organize the volume of stuff. Take a look at the average professional's computer desktop or file structure. There's crap everywhere. It may be crap. Or it may be really important. It may be a really, really important file that sits in an obscure folder, that was updated, never re-named and saved in the wrong place after being emailed to only 2 of the right people on a distribution list that should have had 3 others on it. Only in the last couple of years has a product like Sharepoint emerged that can help with these typical distribution and filing faux pas.

We have developed bad habits in office and professional workflows. The biggest of these is that we react immediately to our email applications; Outlook while at our desks and the Blackberry when on our feet. Should I be interrupting a conversation to look at my pocket delivered email? Why, how, when did email become an immediate communications medium? These are neither new nor original thoughts. Rather than lamenting what to do about it though, professionals have an obligation to move to a more productive and responsible model. For a variety of demographic, competitive, economic and humanitarian reasons all professionals must assert more creativity and innovation. That means not being professional email reactors but actually being more professional. Do more of what the profession requires of you and less of what the tools require of you. Nobody wonders what kind of typewriter Ernest Hemingway used.