Want to work like Bill Gates? As has been widely circulated around the interweb, the world's most technologically advanced human has walked us all through his workflow. Unfortunately for us mortals, he's using a bunch of bloated, pricey MS-branded tools. So I took his tools, found free alternatives, and reconfigured his workflow to be a little cheaper. There's nothing I can do about hardware though. So if you're looking for a $100 Tablet PC, sorry folks. I couldn't find an OSS version of whiteboard capture tools either, probably because it relies on hardware. I will admit that Bill's three screens improve productivity. Now if I could only afford two at once... But still, his major goals are the same of most managers: reduce paper, increase communications, and share information centrally. So let's look at these, shall we?

Email & Calendars
Obviously Bill's going to use Outlook. He's fortunate enough to have assistants filter his email. Mere mortals will have to depend of their ISP and local softwares. My recommended Outlook replacement is Thunderbird, for its cross-platform goodness. Want to know how to use Thunderbird, and retrain yourself? Check out this series on using Thunderbird, a very thorough walk through from installation to spam filtering. To integrate calendars, you'll want to stick with the iCalendar format, which is supported by Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone calendar application. My preference in calendars is Calendar, also from Mozilla, because it integrates with Thunderbird and Mozilla browsers. iCalendar is also supported in OS X's iCal app, so Mac users can keep their native app if need be. If you need to sync with Palm devices, you can try using PHP iCalendar in conjunction with this Datebook to iCal exporter. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, I'm all ears. Next up: your document creation and sharing issues solved...