Over at his blog, Stephen Wolfram writes about his personal infrastructure and workflow. Wolfram, of course, is the CEO of Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha. He describes himself as a very hands-on CEO but what’s surprising is that he does it remotely. He works almost exclusively out of his home, which is about 1,000 miles away from the company headquarters.
The blog post is mostly about how he does this: what equipment he uses, his procedures for communicating with other Wolfram workers, how he handles virtual meetings, and what technology he takes with him when he travels. I really enjoyed the post because it covered two topics that I’m really interested in: procedures for remote work and the recording of personal and other data for historical and analytical purposes.
I like to gather data too but I’m a tyro compared to Wolfram, who has been collecting and saving information his whole life. He still has files from the fourth grade. The blog post talks about how he manages this information and what his file structure looks like.
All of this is organized around the Wolfram Language, which he uses to process and curate the data. I was struck by how similar his procedures are to mine even though I use Org-mode to deal with my data. Rather than a fairly fine-grained file taxonomy that he uses, I prefer to keep my data in just a few Org files. Of course, I don’t have nearly the amount of data that Wolfram has so my method might not scale to a data set the size of his.
The post is long but interesting. Wolfram is a famously productive guy and this post describes some of his strategies for being so. It’s definitely worth a read.