Posted on Sunday 16 April 2006
I found this article absolutely fascinating.
It has people like Bill Gates and other CEOs essentially walk you through their work day. Of particular interest to me was the way people use email. Basically for the two tech people (Gates and the Google VP) and two law people (the law firm partner and Posner from Univ. of Chicago) it’s integral in how they operate pretty much from the minute they awake to when they sleep. Everyone else pretty much avoids it like the plague with the exception of the HarperCollins CEO who seems to use it constantly.
I was also struck by how the two tech people use relatively simple tools for a large portion of their work…email and, for the Google VP, a text file of priority and delegated tasks.
Overall, it does seem that pretty much everyone is working about 18 hour days with the exception of a couple of hours that they may intentionally devote to something like yoga, working out, or spending time with family (though I think only one, the Nissan CEO, mentioned this last one explicitly).
I’d be interested to hear any comments ya’ll may have in response to this article. What were some of the things that struck you about their work styles?
Tags: Business, Science and Technology, work
Wow, I’m impressed by this. Just from what I do on a daily basis, I realize how lucky I am that I’m so organized, because hardly anything I do is integrated. Anything from meeting notes to post-its on my desk would make it really hard for someone to have a smooth transition to my job.
I’m even more impressed that they’re taking the intiative and using the tools to do this instead of always passing it onto some poor schlup (secretary) to do it for them. Seems like a waste of productivity and labor costs in that respect. The ability to control massive amounts of email into a sort of to-do list is definitely one of the biggest difficulties I think employees here face. It’s not uncommon for someone to have 200 emails in their inbox–many that go unanswered. Personally, I freak out when I have more than 20.
What I’m wondering is how expensive it is to have these tools? All I can say is that, as an overglorified secretary myself, I could really use that OneNote thing. Actually, there are a few people here I’d like to give it to.