A Productive Life with Stephen Wolfram

This is a wonderful long read from Stephen Wolfram, of Mathematica fame. There are many interesting ideas and tips for dealing with workloads and the bits of friction that are inevitable. I found myself nodding along with many of the passages but this one really struck me:

When I mention to people that I’m a remote CEO, they often say, “You must do lots of videoconferencing”. Well, actually, I do basically no videoconferencing. Screensharing is great, and critical. But typically I find video distracting. Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done). But if video is on, seeing people who are not paying attention just seems to viscerally kill the mood of almost any meeting.

I hate video conferencing but I love screen sharing. It always feels like a distraction to have video on while I’m staring at a screen.