Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure (2019)
writings.stephenwolfram.com
writings.stephenwolfram.com
He documents almost every part of his daily work environment in painstaking detail. Much of it is ridiculous. All of it, including the article itself, is over the top. I am very appreciative that he chose to share.
Stephen has optimized (for him! not for me) his life to an unbelievable degree. Whether that is walking outside with a laptop working because it slightly reduces his resting heart rate, the extensive renovations to his office to remove the sound of his computer fan, or the elaborate filing system he uses for his daily notes and mail.
He also goes deep into his personal analytics. Stephen is working approximately 100% of the waking hours of the day as evidenced by the timestamps on the emails he sends, which are well plotted over 3 decades. (He's a night owl, sleeping 3am-9am). It also appears he is opening nearly 800 email every day and keeping his unreads below 200.
I should add, partially because I read this article, I began tracking half hourly sprints in the pomodoro-style and have become more interested tracking parts of my own life.
I disagree. It gives an example of what you can achieve with large amounts of money, freedom and dedication. It also contain great advice possible on a budget:
> When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.
Whether you may gain from the suggestions is up to you.
For example, if you value your health, reducing your resting heart rate seems like a valuable thing to optimize for.
> Whether that is walking outside with a laptop working because it slightly reduces his resting heart rate, the extensive renovations to his office to remove the sound of his computer fan
This seems extremely valuable to me. He's in for the long game. So am I.
Thanks to my work in the crypto space, I retired very young. I have great freedom to fail, but I remain time poor.
Reading from his experiences gives me a better idea on what will provide me the most utility, without investing too much of my time in what seems to be a failure for other people (I considered doing the book thing, but in university I fortunately moved to everything PDF, so all paper books were trashed)
Also it helps avoid what would be very little gains in practice. For ex, his note system: he had his box of archives digitized. I decided to throw everything away as his example of being able to access school notes about a rhinoceros talk strike me as a waste of time and a risk of potentially drawing wrong conclusions:
> > So, for example, here are school geography notes from when I was 11 years old, together with the text of a speech I gave
Yeah thanks but no thanks. Nostalgia is a powerful drug that can make you keep a wrong path. It is better to let yourself forget what is value less to make room for what is important. Let these unused neural pathware decay and go extinct!!
Just one thing wrong from the article:
> > How do I take notes when I’m “out and about”? I’ve tried various technological solutions, but in the end none have proved both practical and universally socially acceptable. So I’ve kept doing the same thing for 40 years: in my pocket I have a pen, together with a piece of paper folded three times (so it’s about the size of a credit card). It’s very low-tech, but it works. And when I come back from being out I always take a few moments to transcribe what I wrote down, send out emails, or whatever
This is a big one. I have found a 14" Sony ebook to be the best notetaking device. Someone I otherwise found very wise told me it was a 1k etch-a-sketch replacement to folder pieces of paper. I disagree. The ability to backup and sync my notes everywhere is priceless - and developing the habit to review my objectives everyday even more so.
It has allowed me to fully revamp my TODO system, but I found the lack of color problematic for some notes.
So now I'm in the process of replacing it by a lenovo dual display solution (Yogabook C930) - one color side, one eink side. The eink can also work as a display for regular windows applications.
Your alternative, a 14 inch electronic, or a laptop, is definitely a thing, with all the downsides of being a thing.
Worked out that If there were no delays; I would have 5 minutes at 7:25 to myself.
It was a much needed wake up call.
Changed jobs. Freed up 3 hours of commuting a day.
Wife wasn’t pulling weight with errands. She refused to drive. So that needed fixing.
Stop having to go to grocery store every single day.
Organize house a lot better. Lots of time wasted looking for clothes.
Get rid of anything not nailed down.
Try to get to a point where you do housework while the kiddo is awake and entertaining themselves.
Some medium term planning helps. Cooking enough for 2-3 meals at a time so you don’t do it everyday. I used a meal plan that told me the groceries to get. Think of some other “life hacks” or corners you can cut for things you do a lot. Take some time for self care.
Not his specific solutions, but the sort of "beginners mind" where you can solve things even if social convention dictates otherwise.
Just as an example, using scissors in the kitchen where a "normal person" would bow to convention and use a knife.
The interview was so much fun. We had an hour booked and ended up talking for much much longer until he had to leave to teach kids programming.
I spent some of the time quizzing him on whether he could answer things in his language and then him calculating the solution. He really likes what he does.
My read is that he has setup the type of life he really wants to have. Gathering and tracking productivity data is something he likes.
Here is the part of the interview that made it 'on air' https://www.se-radio.net/2019/12/episode-392-stephen-wolfram...
> computational history
> computational documents
Whenever I see an article by S.W. I do something very unconstructive, which is to just search for occurrences of "computational" to see how he manages to put it into just about any context.
The number is somewhat arbitrary, but it's enough money to spend most of your time doing what you want to do. Not enough to chase every whim, but enough that what you end up doing with the bulk of your time is a choice.
This is the saddest thing I've read recently
>> This is the saddest thing I've read recently
I read something sadder recently -- a mother in the US who was crying because she couldn't afford insulin for her child.
Seriously, sure, money doesnt solve all problems. But it sure as heck solves most problems. It adds others, but not as big as the ones it takes away.
(FYI, i've lived across the income spectrum thru my life from $10k/yr w/o healthcare to top 1%)
[1] I’m putting it in quotes, because it seems that the output of all this “productivity” consist mostly of filing cabinets and databases filled with mundane information about his life.
Or the bit where he runs Wolfram Research, a company with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions a year in turnover which makes Mathematica?
> I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive.
For anyone who is like this, you know exactly what he means. This is likely the result of the way you were raised, but for some of us, our mental health in adulthood really does hinge on feeling productive or not.
Whether that's healthy is a ship that sailed when we were just children. Instilled in us is a deep need to feel productive, and that's how we feel happy.
So yes, I think he's probably as happy as he can be.
Looks like they're round tube frames, filled with a liquid dyed blue. Which apparently tricks your brain into thinking it's the horizon(which moves with your vehicle). https://cdn.pocket-lint.com/r/s/1200x/assets/images/148075-g...
My new years resolution for 2021 is listening to more great music and reading even more than I typically do.
I very much liked Wolfram’s organization and productivity hacks. My system is much simpler but I also like his.
I have twice tried to integrate Wolfram language and notebooks into my technical life, but it didn’t work out. Last time I read that they were baking RDF, SPARQL, and other linked data/Knowledge Graph tech into their platform, but it was not fully baked when I tried it and I walked away in frustration. Maybe I will give their knowledge platform another try sometime.
But the thing is, while it works really well in theory, I rarely use it. I find working while walking very difficult. I cannot concentrate very well and movements get really erratic. It is mainly useable for longer browsing sessions, but long browsing sessions usually occur by accident and are usually not planned in advance. So yeah, the whole machine is right next to me while I write, but I am not using it.
Also, Linus Torvalds has a similar setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE0JtUeyVJA
If I need to REALLY focus on a very challenging problem, I will sit down. But if I'm doing something more routine, it's perfect for walking.
The best part of the treadly is how easily it's stored. Just flip it up and lean it against the wall. Out of the way.
with a sufficient organizational assistant in place I don't feel the need to be productive all the time. I know that when I sit down my work is already planned ahead so I can immediately start being productive. I also review and plan my work ahead a little bit which saves a lot of time and makes contact switching less costly.
-- Thoreau
Today I learnt that Stephen Wolfram dos not live anywhere it rains very much, because I sure would not take my laptop out in that bag when I lived in Seattle, nor would I take it out in that now that I live in the tropics.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2019/02/10-...
Something I've not seen, but wondered about, is a chording keyboard on the back of a tablet device. Especially since he mentions chording keyboards earlier in the article, a tablet screen could have keys for one or both hands while holding it.
> "(I periodically try using drawing tablets but I don’t like the way they treat my whole screen as a canvas, rather than operating in a window that I can move around.)"
Bit surprised that a multimillionaire computer programmer can't get this solved when it seems like "only" a software problem?
- define what productive means for you. The narrow definition of "doing work" won't work for the missus, kids. And your general well being for most of us. The author doesn't dive into that. I guess because the article is already too long. My take is - doing the things that matter. - Being meticulous and ruthless about removing garbage getting in the way. And for that all the data and tracking help.
The brand isn't mentioned in the article, the name of the tool isn't mentioned.
Had to zoom in and try and guess the name from, there. Apparently "Versa Desk"
This article is yet another example of this phenomenon. I mean sure, Stephen Wolfram founded the company that makes Mathematica. But other than that, his achievments are pretty underwhelming especially when discounting his aggressive self-promotion. His body of work is mostly a lot of handwavy stuff with some interesting ideas sprinkled in. The science community doesn’t really take him seriously. So the question remains: are these productivity habits anything but symptoms of a mild case of OCD? Where’s the purported “produce” that these productivity tools enabled him creating?
Once I realized that I quickly learned to ignore all of the productivity/self help space that plagues the internet today.
- Wolfram Physics
- Wolfram language
- Wolfram Mathematica
- Wolfram Alpha
- several science books
- hundreds of talks and presentations
- ...
Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language and Mathematica are incredible achievements.
As an open source focused person I tend to avoid them in favour of OS alternatives (not that the open source world has anything even remotely comparable to Wolfram Alpha) but I can't deny that they are astonishingly powerful products.