What are you unwilling to optimise?

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

The way I work is — I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer.

I try really hard not to have Outlook manage my life.