[Stephen Wolfram is the scientist, entrepreneur, and thinker who founded Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica, the Wolfram Language, and Wolfram Alpha. In this excerpt from his new book, Adventures of a Computational Explorer, he discusses some of the productivity habits he’s developed over more than 40 years—from the pretty straightforward to the deeply personal.]
I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have.
Now, of course, one giant “productivity hack” that I’ve been building for the world for a very long time is the whole technology stack around the Wolfram Language. And for me personally, another huge “productivity hack” is my company, which I started more than 32 years ago. Yes, it could (and should) be larger, and have more commercial reach. But as a nicely organized private company with about 800 people it’s an awfully efficient machine for turning ideas into real things, and for leveraging what skills I have to greatly amplify my personal productivity.
I could talk about how I lead my life, and how I like to balance doing leadership, doing creative work, interacting with people, and doing things that let me learn. I could talk about how I try to set things up so that what I’ve already built doesn’t keep me so busy I can’t start anything new. But instead what I’m going to focus on here is my more practical personal infrastructure: the technology and other things that help me live and work better, feel less busy, and be more productive every day.
At an intellectual level, the key to building this infrastructure is to structure, streamline, and automate everything as much as possible—while recognizing both what’s realistic with current technology and what fits with me personally. In many ways, it’s a good, practical exercise in computational thinking, and, yes, it’s a good application of some of the tools and ideas that I’ve spent so long building. Much of it can probably be helpful to lots of other people too; some of it is pretty specific to my personality, my situation, and my patterns of activity.
MY DAILY LIFE
To explain my personal infrastructure, I first have to say a bit about my daily life. Something that often surprises people is that for 28 years I’ve been a remote CEO. I’m about as hands-on a CEO as they come. But I’m only physically “in the office” a few times a year. Mostly I’m just at home, interacting with the company with great intensity—but purely through modern virtual means.
I’m one of those CEOs who actually does a lot of stuff myself, as well as managing other people to do things. Being a remote CEO helps me achieve that and stay focused. And partly following my example, our company has evolved a very distributed culture, with people working scattered all over the world (it’s all about being productive, rather than about “showing up”):