barisax.org

How Does Bill Gates Work?

CNN Money has one of many articles out relating an interview with Bill Gates about how he works. There is almost no paper in his office, and he has quite the setup. He runs three monitors, with Outlook on the left, IE on the right, and current emails/other work in the center. With that, he has a tablet PC with MS OneNote for meetings/doodling/etc. that sync's with his desktop system. If that isn't enough, he's about to get a cool but rather expensive digital whiteboard.

The Good

I can speak from experience that multi-monitor is the way to go. I only use two, but even with that, it's hard to go back to using a computer with only one screen. While I haven't been a fan of tablet PCs in the past, this almost (but only *almost*) makes me want to consider one.

As for the digital whiteboard, that's a little over the top and pricey, but for any group creative or brainstorming work, they're hard to beat. I'm still happy to have my standard dry-erase whiteboard at home, even if I don't use it much.

The Bad

As interesting as the article is, it unfortunately sounded like a free advertisement for MS SharePoint. I'm sure they use that internally all the time in Redmond, but there are plenty of other ways to collaborate. Group blogs and email come to mind. Even Google Groups or Yahoo! Groups work nice, the latter even having a calendar for scheduling.

The Rest

In all, the article gives some good ideas for you to try if you have the means. If you do any work that requires you to be at a computer for extended periods of time, do seriously consider running more than one monitor. I assure you that you'll never work the same way again.

posted by Jason @ 4/06/2006 02:01:00 PM