(upbeat music) - Let's move on. What do we got? - Okay, moving on here. We got a question. Basically, he has a question about, he thinks that your mom might be a computer scientist and she-- - She was a computer programmer. - Okay, so he's got a question about that and types of values she instilled in you.

- All right. - Hey Cal, this is Michael from Falls Church, Virginia. I recently read in one of the magazine articles of yours, I think it was in New Yorker, you said your mother was a computer scientist. So I can imagine she must have instilled some values and habits into you that are different from most mothers your generation growing up.

Could you probably share some of these values and habits that she instilled in you that helped shape who you are today? Thanks and I hope to see you at an in-person event or a talk or a bookstore around DC one of these days. - Well, yeah, first of all, to your second point, yes, we should hope to see you in person at some point once Jesse and I get our act together to organize something.

Falls Church is not too far from here, so that would be great. Yeah, so my mom, the article you're talking about was an article I wrote early in the pandemic about remote work. She wasn't a computer scientist, she was a computer programmer, COBOL programmer on series seven IBM mainframes for the Houston Chronicle back when we was born and raised in Texas.

And so, yes, so I talked about in that article the fact that she was one of the first remote workers and they had set up a terminal, but that's important for your question because what it meant was is we had computers, personal computers in our house in the '80s at a relatively early period, because again, as a very early remote worker, she had a personal computer that she could connect into the mainframe and program from home there in Houston.

So we had computers in our house in a very early age. So that had an impact on my interest in computers and eventually in computer science, because I could ask her what she's doing and she'd tell me what computer programming was. I knew what computer programming was. We had computers in the house.

So at a pretty early age, I started computer programming. And I got pretty deeply into that. And that set up my whole computer science career. Of course, ironically, as soon as I got to MIT in grad school, I said, "I'm done with computer programming. "I wanna be a theoretician." And I haven't programmed a computer since, more or less, but that was very useful.

The other influence here, and I'm gonna say right now, I'm just focusing on influences relevant to my public professional life. Obviously, there's very important influences on my values and me as a person and character, but I don't wanna get into all of that right now. But in terms of things that are publicly visible in my professional life, the other important thing that I got out of my mom is that when we moved, we moved to New Jersey, and I have three siblings, so there's four of us.

And we moved to New Jersey, she stopped working for the Houston Chronicle and was just helping to raise the kids because we were at an age where it's four kids, it's a really hard job. And we generated a lot of chaos. There's a lot of paperwork and things that happen when you move.

And my memory was it was quite overwhelming until one of her friends sold her on a Franklin Planner. It was like the Franklin Planner is a productivity organizational system that was in particular quite popular in the '80s and '90s. And she got very organized, and it made all the difference in the world.

And it went from chaos, like a completely organized household, a completely organized childhood, in a way that was very impressive and very comforting. So I had been exposed all throughout my childhood to the power of being structured and organized in terms of your calendar, your to-do list, your days, your plan for what should happen.

There's a lot of ideas from that original Franklin Covey system that permeate the time management systems I talk about today. Looking to the week ahead, figuring out in advance when things were gonna happen, full capture of things. You had all the information in place. Avoiding the chaos of what do I wanna do next, and instead having the structure of what's my plan for the day.

A lot of that I saw happening as we were growing up. And it meant a very stable, structured household. Oh, it's this holiday happening, those decorations come out, there's these events we do, everyone gets their, we gotta get clothes for the kids, that was a big thing, because you grow out of your clothes so fast, and my mom would bring down the catalogs, be like, okay, you have to go through and circle what you want, and there would be the day she called and ordered it.

And that, I think I took to heart for sure. And that would lead me to be someone that had productivity and productivity systems instilled in my DNA. So those are my two things I will say, in terms of my mom's influence on my public, my public, professional, visible lifestyle.

Me as a computer scientist, and me as someone that does some productivity guru-ing, that goes back to her. Nice, good question. (upbeat music)