> Much of it is ridiculous. All of it, including the article itself, is over the top

I disagree. It gives an example of what you can achieve with large amounts of money, freedom and dedication. It also contain great advice possible on a budget:

> When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.

Whether you may gain from the suggestions is up to you.

For example, if you value your health, reducing your resting heart rate seems like a valuable thing to optimize for.

> Whether that is walking outside with a laptop working because it slightly reduces his resting heart rate, the extensive renovations to his office to remove the sound of his computer fan

This seems extremely valuable to me. He's in for the long game. So am I.

Thanks to my work in the crypto space, I retired very young. I have great freedom to fail, but I remain time poor.

Reading from his experiences gives me a better idea on what will provide me the most utility, without investing too much of my time in what seems to be a failure for other people (I considered doing the book thing, but in university I fortunately moved to everything PDF, so all paper books were trashed)

Also it helps avoid what would be very little gains in practice. For ex, his note system: he had his box of archives digitized. I decided to throw everything away as his example of being able to access school notes about a rhinoceros talk strike me as a waste of time and a risk of potentially drawing wrong conclusions:

> > So, for example, here are school geography notes from when I was 11 years old, together with the text of a speech I gave

Yeah thanks but no thanks. Nostalgia is a powerful drug that can make you keep a wrong path. It is better to let yourself forget what is value less to make room for what is important. Let these unused neural pathware decay and go extinct!!

Just one thing wrong from the article:

> > How do I take notes when I’m “out and about”? I’ve tried various technological solutions, but in the end none have proved both practical and universally socially acceptable. So I’ve kept doing the same thing for 40 years: in my pocket I have a pen, together with a piece of paper folded three times (so it’s about the size of a credit card). It’s very low-tech, but it works. And when I come back from being out I always take a few moments to transcribe what I wrote down, send out emails, or whatever

This is a big one. I have found a 14" Sony ebook to be the best notetaking device. Someone I otherwise found very wise told me it was a 1k etch-a-sketch replacement to folder pieces of paper. I disagree. The ability to backup and sync my notes everywhere is priceless - and developing the habit to review my objectives everyday even more so.

It has allowed me to fully revamp my TODO system, but I found the lack of color problematic for some notes.

So now I'm in the process of replacing it by a lenovo dual display solution (Yogabook C930) - one color side, one eink side. The eink can also work as a display for regular windows applications.