Secrets of greatness: How I work 2/2 (RD)

Marissa MayerVP, Search Products and User Experience, GoogleExecutive summary: Don't just cope with information -- revel in it.
"e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts."
"To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there's a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they're working on or what I expect from them. It's just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before."

Bill Gross
Chief Investment Officer, Pimco
Executive summary: Cut through the noise.

Vera Wang
CEO, Vera Wang Group
Executive summary: Get away from the routine.

Howard Schultz
Chairman, Starbucks
Executive summary: Rise early -- and have the occasional jolt of joe.

Wynton Marsalis
Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Executive summary: Challenge each other -- but don't hold grudges.

Carlos Ghosn
CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan)
Executive summary: Focus relentlessly, especially if you're running two Global 500 companies.

Amy W. Schulman
Partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary
Executive summary: Be compulsively organized -- and delegate.
"I get around 600 e-mails a day. I divide them into four categories, and I deal with them immediately, by and large. First are e-mails that I forward to someone else. Next are where somebody's giving me information that I need to cascade to somebody else with instructions. Third are the ones that I can read later on an airplane. Fourth are those that require me to respond immediately."

A.G. Lafley
Chairman, President, and CEO, Procter & Gamble
Executive summary: Take a break, even if you work Sunday nights.

Bill Gates,
Chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft,
"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. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. 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."

"Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search. 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 a toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. The same goes for phone numbers and email addresses."

"Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form."