Let me start by saying... this is as must read article. I share it often. It is
1. extremely fascinating
2. patently ridiculous
3. something to learn from
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.
The biggest lesson I took away from this experience in my own life was learning to leave tasks in a resumable state. If I did get to work on something, I would do my utmost to leave it in a state where I could come back to it and dig in right away. For code at work, I might break the code where I wanted to jump back in (uncommitted change) so a build would show me what line of code I was editing when someone threw up or doorbell rang causing the baby to wake, the dog up freak out, and my train of thought to be derailed for the next hour. That, and learning how to survive on what is essentially polyphasic sleep.
I found myself in a similar situation to yours... and then had a second child. If I had the time to track it, I'm sure the results would not be much better. After that much needed wake up call, what did you end up doing?
Lower your standards for everything. Work, cleanliness, relationships, hobbies.
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.
This essay was published as part of a book and I got an interview with Stephen setup by his publisher when it came out.
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.
> Much of it is ridiculous. All of it, including the article itself, is over the top
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.
I think the bit of paper idea is that it’s so minimal it’s not even a thing, and brings all the pocket-ability, portability, works any time anywhere, benefits of not being a thing.
Your alternative, a 14 inch electronic, or a laptop, is definitely a thing, with all the downsides of being a thing.
Recently, I came across the podcast on Talk Python where you talked about Dogsheep and Datasette. Dogsheep looks amazing and I can definitely get behind your philosophy of SQLite for everything.
The problem I have with super productivity is that it appears to push people only in one direction. I think giving oneself a break and having unstructured time is something that is overlooked with these regimes. Merely talking daily walks without any devices or technology helps our brains enormously. And a bit of chaos (under control of course) can be very beneficial
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.
I went through all occurrences and I think it makes sense every time! The man simply computes a lot. What would you expect from someone who made their own computational environment though...
I wonder if he’s happy. I mean, genuine question, not a snark. There’s obviously important reasons to be “productive” but there are many reasons to just let go, too. I wonder what his mental health looks like.
He also mentions this, right at the beginning of the article:
> 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.
He probably had $10 million close to 30 years ago, so I'd guess he is pretty happy.
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.
I think being “productive” [1] is a hobby for him. Some people organize their vinyl collection with painstaking detail, others build dioramas.
[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.
You must have missed that his Fundamental Theory Of Everything™ is just a bunch of pretty pictures, a few blog posts and promotional videos on YouTube. That's not how science is done, and that's exactly why physicists at large don't take him seriously.
If physicists at large say "that's not how science is done" that renders the work which went into it non-existant and turns it into "mundane information about his life"? No, clearly it doesn't.
I didn’t read the article to the end but enjoyed the first half. If he were my friend, I would have a serious talk about using a tablet when walking outside. I live in the mountains and spend a huge amount of time walking around my neighborhood and also wilderness hiking. Some of that time my mind is absorbed in nature, gratitude for what I am experiencing. But I also use some hiking time, when I am not with friends, for listening to a wide range of podcasts and enjoying fine literature on audiobooks.
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.
I can share some experience about having a treadmill in the office. I built my own using a second hand treadmill from which I removed everything but the lower part (belt, drive and housing). Then I purchased an IKEA Skarsta height adjustable desk. Finally all I needed was a monitor and a desk mount for the monitor. Without the monitor the price was less than 300€.
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.
I picked up one of these [1] a couple years ago and have LOVED it. I've logged on average probably about 7 miles a week on it. While that might not sound like much, it adds up, and it's 7 miles a week that I would have otherwise been sitting.
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.
It’s very slim and seems quite capable but 750 is a bit steep. I actually got a tramploine and the workout I get is a lot more vigorous and shorter, I average 10 mins a day on it.
How fast is the treadmill going? For walking desks it seems that it needs to be a pretty slow pace, and slower than the pace at which one would normally walk.
I can control the speed with a little potentiometer (that is basically the control that I stripped from the original upper part). So it can go quite slow, which really is necessary if you want to use a mouse or keyboard. For watching youtube, you can go pretty fast.
The only thing I really got out of this long article was the importance of having a customized organizational and workflow system that suits your lifestyle. For me there's two books / methodologies that has made a huge impact in how I think about and organize my work. The first is David Allen's getting things done system. It is extremely generic but comprehensive and suitable for pretty much any kind of knowledge worker. The second is using a personal kanban board for organizing all of my work and personal tasks. Highly recommend the book Personal Kanban.
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.
Stephen Wolfram is a person. The Wolfram Language is a language he made (in the same sense that Guido van Rossum made Python – it's the programming language behind Mathematica). WolframAlpha is a website that also contains a partial implementation of the Wolfram Language.
And for at least the past couple of years—unless I’m bringing the bigger computer, usually in a backpack—I have taken to “wearing” my little computer wherever I go. I originally wanted a bag where the computer would fit completely inside, but the nicest bag I could find had the computer sticking out a bit. To my surprise, though, this has worked well. And it’s certainly amusing when I’m talking to someone and quickly “draw” my computer, and they look confused, and ask, “Where did that come from?”
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.
> "If I actually want to write anything serious, though, out will come my little computer, with its full keyboard. Of course, if I’m standing up it’s pretty impractical to try to balance the computer on one hand and type with the other."
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.
For such an elaborate setup, I'm quite surprised he missed a few things from the gamers world. And yes, these gamers do have some serious sh*t. Gamers mice and mousepads are order of magnitudes more precise and comfortable. I had the Logitech G900 and recently got the Razer Viper Ultimate. Anyone having strains from using the mouse should try these things.
I liked the idea of the plastic envelopes to group things. They stack things vertically and keep them flat so I can better use the abundant vertical height of my backpack and with different colored plastics, can easily get to the correct set. Will try to find ones that have multiple compartments.
This is an amazing article. Thank you for sharing. I'm also a little upset I didn't know Wolfram had all of these amazing apps. I now know what I'm doing this weekend.
I have no idea what the company is like, nor do I know what working for Wolfram is like (person and company), but Wolfram the person streams a lot of his meetings.
Is this a specific accusation against Wolfram or a general comment? (I did a quick google search and found nothing, but without being sure if I was even looking for something, I limited the amount of time I spent.)
The thing I’ve noticed about people around me using tons of “productivity” tools is that in the end they’re not actually producing more stuff than the regular folk who don’t organize their life around Notion boards or personal wikis...
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?
The most productive people in terms of output and success are the ones who do not talk about what tools they are using. But instead they almost solely talk about behaviors and ideas.
Once I realized that I quickly learned to ignore all of the productivity/self help space that plagues the internet today.
"his achievments are pretty underwhelming" - I don't feel that at all. Sure, his self-promotion can make it easy to be skeptical. But he has built SO MUCH stuff in his career.
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.
If the science community does not take the guy who invented Mathematica seriously, they are just a bunch of arrogant §%#$s, but I doubt that is even true.
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.