Bill Gates has an awfully clean desk. Check out the photo in his writeup on "How I Work" for Fortune.

Other nuggets from the essay:

Gates only reads about 100 e-mails a day, and automatically filters the e-mail so that it only comes from people he knows, people he has corresponded with in the past and people from his company or partner companies.

He doesn't like to-do lists.

He usually ignores the little notification box on Outlook that pops up when a new e-mail comes in.

He gets 90 percent of his news online, and takes notes in digital form on his Tablet PC. His one low-tech piece of office equipment is a whiteboard.

He tends to write long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail over the weekend: "When people come in Monday morning, they'll see that I've been quite busy -- they'll have a lot of e-mail."