Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates writes about the tools he uses on a daily basis in a Fortune magazine article. He outlines his strategy for managing email, which includes the use of an assistant to help prioritize messages:
"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."
"I use tools like ‘in-box rules’ and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance."
"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."
It sounds like Bill’s a piler, not a filer. For those of you who don’t have the luxury of an assistant to priortize
and organize your email, ClearContext IMS Pro can do much of this triage work for
you by analyzing incoming messages, highlighting your most important
items, and giving you sophisticated tools for categorizing and actioning messages.