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.Bill Gates, email, productivity, workflow

Tags: Bill Gates, email, Productivity, workflow

A Hawk Wings reader emails to ask:

The mailboxes I have in Mail.app, they’re sorted alphabetically. But I’d like to order them so that personal mailboxes are at the top, and business mailboxes are at the bottom. Do you know if there’s a way to do this?

Good Question.

The Mailbox Drawer lists your Inbox and other “Special Folders” first, then your smart mailboxes and then your local folders.

You can re-order your smart mailboxes by dragging and dropping, but the local folders are always listed in descending alphabetical order.

This is not useful if your most used or most important folders start with letters further down the alphabet.

I know of two ways to change this:

You can add a number to the front of each mailbox that will force them to order in the way that suits your workflow best.

Or you can add spaces to the front of each one, which looks a bit nicer.

The number of spaces that you need will vary. In the image above the top mailbox has three spaces in front of it, the next one two and the last one one. Then the normal alphabetical ordering kicks in.

“Getting Things Done” (GTD) people may be glad to hear that the @ symbol also kicks folders to the top of the list.

These work for me, although I am always glad to hear of other ideas (UPDATE which you can find in the comments).mailbox sorting, workflow, alphabetical, GTD, productivity, Mailbox Drawer, smart mailboxes, tips, mail.app, apple mail

Tags: alphabetical, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, gtd, mail.app, mailbox drawer, mailbox sorting, Productivity, smart mailboxes, workflow