How I Work: Bill Gates Not much of a paper chase for Microsoft''''s chairman, who uses a range of digital
tools to do business. Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft, U.S.A. April 7, 2006: 5:17 PM EDT
NEW YORK (FORTUNE)
It''''s pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft (Research) was starting and realize how work has been transformed. The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I''''m reading and responding to. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I''''m working on something, and to bring up a link that''''s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls,
documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I''''ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. 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. 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. Outlook also has a little notification box that comes up in the lower right whenever a new e-mail comes in. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks. In May, I’ll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. It’s like having a super-website that lets many people edit and discuss-far more than the standard practice of sending e-mails with enclosures. 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 toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. I don’t have that right now, but probably I’ll get a digital whiteboard in the next year. So then it’s great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn’t get to. If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they’ll wee that I’ve been quite busy-they’ll have a lot of e-mail.