Bill Gates’ paperless office
CNN Money carries a report 
on how Bill Gates organises his office, his email and his workflow.
In front of this three LCD screens, each with its own function, he reads only 100 emails a day. An assistant reads the rest and provides him with summaries. (Wouldn’t that be nice!).
He says,
We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.
To Do lists are out. Email and his calendar are enough to keep him on track. And paper in general “is no longer a big part of my day”.
The main trick, he says, is maintaining your focus, although he also makes an interesting point about “information underload”—not becoming totally reactive and critically assessing the information to hand:
Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
It’s an interesting article.
Similar Posts:
- Microsoft: Spam problem is solved
- Microsoft to launch a GDrive competitor
- Could your emails bite you on the butt?
- Know yourself: Geek or nerd?
- Smarter subject lines
Tags: Bill Gates, email, Productivity, workflow
April 8th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Yeah, I, too, loved how the most important tool in his workflow is an assistant reading every e-mail that doesn’t come from a whitelisted sender. Why doesn’t everybody have that?
It’s no wonder, either, you can live with just e-mail and a rudimentary calendar when you’ve got several assistants and aren’t expected to do anything, but only think. Of course he doesn’t need a to-do list.
Interesting read indeed, but not applicable to anybody else. I don’t think people with assistants should ever be allowed to form an opinion on collaboration and communication tools.
April 8th, 2006 at 12:44 am
” don’t think people with assistants should ever be allowed to form an opinion on collaboration and communication tools.”
It’s a valid point. The whole purpose of those tools is to provide an automated assistant for the masses.
April 8th, 2006 at 12:52 am
But isn’t it interesting that much of the “Productivity Industry” is driven by middle- or upper-management level execs who have secretaries and PAs but still can’t get themselves together?
It’s not grunts like you and me that can afford to employ David Allen to come over and sort out their inboxes.
April 8th, 2006 at 2:53 am
This is true — the majority of old school middle/upper management has no clue about how to keep themselves inline — some of this is ego. Some of it maybe because Bill Gates needs some ‘smart’ folders and windows doesn’t have that:)
Regardless, I think it varies on management style. I grew into this industry not thinking managment is a level above employees; you have individual achievers that can excel but are not good managers, and you have managers that are not good individual achievers. Managers are like coaches, they keep their star players well oiled, and direct/support as needed — individual achievers are your star players that care about their peers but are more focused on their own internal drive, though they think of the team as needed.
The point is, too many coporations subscribe to the old mentality — which means a good majority of these uninventive, uncreative, directive types lead the vision of a company and the growth of that company. They have little care to improve individual goals, but focus on a whole — which keeps things oiled but stifles growth and direction. It also masks incompetence — the good ol’ boys keep the decisions to them and ignore their hired guns who, for the most part, see much of the faults in day to day operations and have strong opinions about improvements.
I’ve worked for some large companies that subscribe to this same ideal (Pixar is a clear example), and they speak volumes.
In the end, don’t forget most managers know little of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle — or, again, don’t know how to use smart folders:)
April 8th, 2006 at 2:58 am
Interesting. I’ve not heard of the Pareto Principle before. I’ll be reading a bit more about that. Thanks for the tip.
April 8th, 2006 at 3:01 am
You’re welcome — as a notice, I remember talking to a friend about ‘coach’ management, and I explained that in this scenario, much like basketball, and individual achiever can make more money than the management — has to follow the managements guidelines, but can still speak out over the management. Conflict creates art.
April 8th, 2006 at 3:54 am
don’t think people with assistants should ever be allowed to form an opinion on collaboration and communication tools.
Well… form one, yes. We can’t stop ‘em. But they shouldn’t really propagate those opinions as though they’re of much use to The Rest of Us (© Steve Jobs, who also has more assistants than he knows what to do with).
I find it slightly patronising when fellows like Mr G tell us how cool they are at running their affairs. When did Bill last have to sort out his car insurance, do his banking, collect his dry-cleaning, argue with the cellphone company etc., while all the time trying to run his business and keep on top of work? We all hope there’s a Holy Grail (© Dan Brown, who would be all the better for a good hard smack) out there, and indeed there is. A slew of assistants and gofers. But that’s not a practical solution for me, at least. For the moment, it has to be GTD. Sorry, Bill. (But at least it explains why the to-do lists in Entourage are So. Damn. Poor.)
April 8th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
I’ve always found To Do lists a bit useless. Who uses them? I find it counterproductive to be spending time maintaining a simple to-do list, and it’s also depressing to see how long the list usually is.
On the other hand I don’t mind custom to-do lists, where tasks are broken up into projects or sections and you just list key deadlines. But honestly, I find Excel a better ‘to do list’ manager than Outlook.
I did once work in an environment where we used a shared Exchange for a shared task list. That worked quite well, though it was a real pain that you had to setup the custom fields, grouping and other list formats on every single PC.
I hate the way Microsoft makes generic one-size-fits-all tools that can be made to do just about anything but the things that people commonly do in offices (without loads of configuration).
April 9th, 2006 at 8:31 am
It’s a fine line, for sure. I’ve discovered that I can spend as much time maintaining productivity tools and I save by using them. Sometimes more.
The other interesting thing in the article was the lack of “boundaries” in the Gates household. I guess that you expect someone like Bill Gates to be fairly “driven”, but bringing so much work home on the weekends? That can’t be healthly.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:30 am
Eh, you know, I use todo lists all the time — I used to mark what I was doing throughout the week in my iCalendar on each day, but that was becoming too burdensome to maintain since things changed so fast, so I started a todo list in ical, rated by due date and priority; that I find very useful and productive. I just add and check when needed. If I didn’t do that, I’d sure need a lot of sticky notes:)
It gets cumbersome though, I’d like some more advanced features, I believe there’s some shortcut keys in quicksilver that may lead me on the right path.
As for work on the weekends, it isn’t healthy, I’m going crazy myself, I don’t know how he does it. I’ve been that way since I started this show a couple years ago, and I know it’s part of starting out, but there’s got to be a balance and a stopping point sometime or you’ll go nuts. Then again, that’s the drive that made him as rich as he is, though by rich I mean financial and the rest ‘rich’ maybe questionable…
April 18th, 2007 at 2:09 am
I think it’s very interesting that he just works with email and calendaring, I do something very similar… when your time is worth as much as his, it must become very important to optimize it.