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CNNMoney has a pretty interesting article about Bill Gates and his workday, by Bill Gates himself!
Say what you will about Microsoft, I don't think I'd mind having lunch with Bill Gates just to pick his brain about stuff like this.
It's interesting to note that he seems to use a minimum of tools to get his jobs done, rather than taking every software package Microsoft offers, using them in tandem.
He's also a big, nay, huge fan of dual monitors. He's got three, and it sounds like he's going for a digital whiteboard, which should be cool.
His office is surprisingly modest, which is telling. I don't think I could resist the urge to pimp out my office space if I was in his position. Hell, I'm having a hard time not doing that now, and I'm nowhere near a billionaire :)
Below are some highlights from the article..
If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
I can't agree with this more, although I have recently switched from dual monitors on the Powerbook (1 19" CRT, and the native Powerbook display under it) back to just using the Powerbook display as a sort of experiment in concentration... more on that later in another post.
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.
This is analogous to Merlin's Inbox DMZ, which I also try to use. I don't have someone hired to manage my 00_SUPERUNKNOWN folder though ;)
I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
This is a bit of a surprise, as I wouldn't know what to do next without them, no matter how many e-mails I had flagged, and regardless of my folder setup. Although our day to day task lists are probably completely different, I can see scenarios where one could get along without them.
Not me though, not today or any day soon.
Outlook also has a little notification box that comes up in the lower right whenever a new e-mail comes in. We call it the toast. I'm very disciplined about ignoring that unless I see that it's a high-priority topic.
Ha! Even Bill ignores this. One of my main complaints about Windows and Microsoft products (other than the games and some hardware!) is that the software will intentionally get in your way. MS needs less of this. Perhaps part of the reason it doesn't go away is that Bill is really good at ignoring pop-ups.
Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search. It has transformed the way I access information on my PC, on servers, and on the Internet. With larger hard drives and increasing bandwidth, I now have gigabytes of information on my PC and servers in the form of e-mails, documents, media files, contact databases, and so on.
Instead of having to navigate through folders to find that one document where I think a piece of information might be, I simply type search terms into a toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. The same goes for phone numbers and email addresses.
I fully agree here. A combination of Spotlight and Quicksilver has completely changed the way I archive data, and the way I search. I'm a SysAdmin at a busy and growing company, so my day to day activities require a lot of searching through documents and manuals for keywords. A role traditionally played by Google.
Almost immediately after I started using 10.4 though, with Spotlight activated, my searching habits had changed. Now I got more relevant document results by searching locally via Spotlight, than by searching Google, which wasn't always the case.
I'll post more about my Intelligence folder another time too, I think it could be helpful.
The whiteboards in some Microsoft offices have the ability to capture an image and send it up to the computer, almost like a huge Tablet PC. I don't have that right now, but probably I'll get a digital whiteboard in the next year. Today, if there's something up there that's brilliant, I just get out my pen and my Tablet PC and recreate it.
Yet another alternative to this, that I have used, is just to snap a pic of it via your digital camera or Bluetooth phone. Then if you're feeling really fancy you can pull out, let's say Visio, or OmniGraffle, and convert it manually to something a bit more clean.
Sidenote: Hmm, OmniGraffle has updated! Damn, I may have to shell out for an upgrade.
[posted with ecto]
Update: Just another pic of the office. Nice! He seems to have three Dell either 20 inch or 24 inch monitors there...
... where sadly I only have one ...
(yeah yeah, boo hoo eh? I am now telling myself to STFU)
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