Terence Tao

You know, like there's some referee report or something.

There's something that feels slightly unpleasant for me to do at the time.

And so writing a blog, it feels creative and fun.

It's something that I do for myself.

Yeah.

So maybe depending on the topic, it could be a quick, you know, half an hour or several hours.

But it doesn't, because it's something that I do sort of voluntarily, it doesn't feel like it, it doesn't feel, time flies when I write these things, as opposed to sort of doing something which I have to do for administrative reasons.

But it's just, it's drudgery.

Those are tasks that AI is really helping with nowadays, actually.

Yeah.

As much as I complain about certain tasks that I don't want to do, but I have to do.

So as you get more senior in academia, you get more and more responsibilities and get some more committees and whatever.

But I have also found that a lot of events that I kind of reluctantly went to because I was obliged to for one reason or another.

Because it's outside my comfort zone, I often...

find interactions with people who I wouldn't normally talk to, like you, for instance.

And I would learn interesting things and have interesting experiences.

And I would have opportunities to then network with other people that I would never have done before.

So I do believe a lot in serendipity.

I mean, I do optimize my time when I...

So there's some portions of a day where I do schedule very carefully.