A day in the life of Bill Gates

take a look at how gates work. While his house was filled with fancy gadgets and huge rooms, his daily work day is not nearly as extravagant. Gates gave CNN Money a brief write-up about his daily happenings and the technology that he leverages to get through the day, and it is surprisingly tame.

The average day in the life of Bill Gates consists of attending meetings and reading e-mail. He has three monitors in his office that contain his inbox, the current e-mail he is reading, and a browser, respectively. Gates receives about 100 e-mails per day that he reads, although many unknown e-mails are filtered out by his personal assistant. For a man that runs one of the most powerful companies in the world, that may not be as many as you would have thought. Nevertheless, he still runs into information overload.

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.

What is a man to do when there is more news than there is time? If that man is Bill Gates, he turns to SharePoint.

SharePoint puts me in touch with lots of people deep in the organization. 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. And it notifies you if anything comes up in an area you're interested in.

Recently, Gates has been preparing for ThinkWeek, where he will read over 100 different papers from Microsoft employees which focus on topics ranging from the company's future to the future of technology in general. After reading the papers, he posts comments that are available to the entire company, and SharePoint helps keep everything organized.

Other pieces of technology that Gates uses almost daily include his TabletPC, OneNote, and desktop search software, most likely Windows desktop search. Even though he is surrounded by vast amounts of technology, Gates admits that he still uses whiteboards from time to time. The catch is that some whiteboards within Microsoft can have their screens captured and uploaded to a digital medium. But Gates doesn't have one of those, yet.
When the day has come and gone, Gates puts the kids to bed, and, get this, he reads his e-mail! There's no better way to relax than by reading e-mails that may have slipped past you during the day, right?  Yeesh.
Now that you have an idea of how Microsoft's head honcho lives out his day, do you feel that you can relate? I do. Like a lot of us, his day is filled with meetings and technology. That's just the way the IT industry works whether you are providing tech support or managing a multi-billion dollar company.