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.
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?