ClearContext Corporate Blog

As long time readers are aware, we are big fans of partner Michael Linenberger’s no-nonsense approach to email and task management.  This week he has released a new productivity book, Master Your Workday Now! Michael’s new book outlines an approach for overcoming overwhelm and achieving your highest level goals.  From www.masteryourworkday.com:

“Within minutes of picking up this book you will:

• Get more done, more quickly (and then get home earlier)…
• Eliminate overwhelm (because it’s impossible to accomplish the critical, big-picture tasks when you’re buried under an avalanche of ‘minutiae’)…
• Develop hyper-focus, and concentrate on the task-at-hand (so you’re less prone to distraction from outside influences)…
• Create, and master, a more productive life…
• Have your day support your goals.
• Restore much-needed sanity to your work life…
• Instill order and sense to your daily tasks and e-mail …

For a limited time, Michael is including a free bonus video and other gifts when you order Master Your Workday Now! See MasterYourWorkday.com for more detail.

It's been a long wait, but the Office team is finally giving the public a preview of Outlook 2010, slated for release in the first half of next year.  Check out the end of this post to read more about Outlook 2010.

But why wait for 2010 when ClearContext Personal and Pro have Outlook 2003 and 2007 users covered already?  Here’s a breakdown of some of the new Outlook 2010 features and their ClearContext counterparts.

Ignore Thread \ Unsubscribe

Outlook 2010’s new Ignore Thread feature moves all messages in the current conversation to the Deleted Items folder.  Future messages are also automatically removed from the Inbox.  ClearContext’s Unsubscribe performs the same function, plus lets you review the messages later or resubscribe to a conversation.

Conversation View \ MessageContext

The new default view for Outlook 2010 is a conversation view that groups all related messages together in the Inbox.  ClearContext provides a similar threaded conversation view for the Inbox.  More importantly, the MessageContext window displays the entire conversation for each open message.  In Pro, it also shows any tasks or appointments generated during the course of the current conversation.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps in Outlook 2010 are a way to set up macros for commonly used multi-step functions.  ClearContext filing features provide many common functions without the need to create any macros — including single click filing (message or thread),  automatic message filing when replying (or creating tasks and appointments), and automatic filing based on email history.

Product Roadmap

It's nice to see productivity features like these making their way into Outlook – but at ClearContext we're already working on the next generation of more intuitive, powerful and automated productivity features for email.  Tomorrow we’ll post our full product roadmap, highlighting our continued mission to help email overloaded individuals more effectively prioritize, organize and manage their email and projects within Outlook.

More Info on Outlook 2010

Here’s the official Outlook 2010 preview video:

Here’s Robert Scoble’s longer interview with Chris Bryant, Group Product Manager for the Office 2010 team.

The Information Overload Research Group is putting on a 90-minute online event on Monday with a great group of speakers. 

Dr. Oliver Brdiczka from PARC, Prof. Gloria Mark from UC Irvine,  Col. Peter Marksteiner from the USAF, and Jonathan Spira from BASEX will be sharing a wide variety of perspectives on INFORMATION OVERLOAD: THE IMPACT ON THE ORGANIZATION.

The event is free, but does require registration, so please take a look at the agenda, sign up, and join us Monday for what will be a very interesting session.

Lifehacker has posted a list of email innovations they would like to see become commonplace in email applications.  Between the items listed and wishes in the comments of the post, it looks like ClearContext has pretty much got Outlook users covered.  Let’s take a closer look.

From the post:

Snooze This Message

   

Sometimes you just don’t need to deal with an email message this very second, but you don’t want it cluttering up your inbox or lost in a folder somewhere. Adding a "Snooze button" to your inbox could solve the problem: You hit "Snooze" on a message and it disappears from view—until a day later, when it reappears again, unread and in your inbox, ready for processing.

ClearContext’s Defer feature pulls a message out of the Inbox until you have time to deal with it.

Faceted Search/Related Messages

   

Your email inbox and sent mail archive is basically a huge personal database of communication over time, and smart search can help you slice and dice it by topic and sender.

ClearContext Pro and Personal have been showing message threads grouped together in the Inbox since v1 of the product.  In addition, the ClearContext RelatedView displays all messages, tasks and appointments in the current conversation as an integrated window within each item, giving a clear context for the current message you are working with.

From the post’s comments:

Notify me if no reply in X days.

   

Am I the only one who sees a need for this? How many times have you sent an e-mail that requires a reply and the jerk…I mean colleague…at the other end ignores it? Better yet if you could send an automated nag after a given period of time.

Use ClearContext Pro’s follow-up feature to notify you if you don’t receive a timely reply from an important email.

MUTE THREAD.

   

I get so much traffic at work from threads that I don’t need to see. When it first becomes irrelevant, I would like to be able to click a button and mute the thread, whereby all further messages in that thread go straight to a folder without cluttering my inbox.

Yep, got that too.  Unsubscribe – available in both Pro and Personal.

ClearContext also adds message prioritization, automatic filing, and advanced attachment viewing and management.  What else would you like to see?  Reply to All protection?  Attachment alerts?  Send your ideas to info at clearcontext dot com.

The New York Times just published an article announcing the launch of the Information Overload Research Group.  This is a group of researchers from universities and corporate research group, CIOs and other people from companies struggling with the problem, and people from companies working on this problem – including our CEO, Deva Hazarika, who writes a bit about the launch on his blog. They are holding their first annual conference in New York in a few weeks.

US News and World Report published a (timely) article on productivity for entrepreneurs.  Productivity: How to Do More in Less Time by Elaine Appleton Grant talks about several tools that “solopreneurs” use to stay productive and efficient:

“Already, savvy entrepreneurs are dramatically improving their productivity and boosting their sales. But as these small companies grow, so do their workloads. Rather than add employees and overhead, many employ virtual assistants to do the mundane tasks they simply don’t have the time to do.”

Thanks to customer Denise Reynolds who put in a plug for ClearContext!

We pride ourselves on building a highly flexible Outlook Add-in that can be adapted to your individual email management process, whatever it may be.  So, whether you’re a piler or a filer, there are features in IMS that will ultimately help you save many hours a week and reduce your email and job related stress.  Along those lines, we continue to invest in new features to help both kinds of email users.

That said, I’m decidedly in the filer camp and start to feel some amount of anxiety when my Inbox has over 10 messages in it.  Because of this, I find myself having a lot of interesting conversations with folks who are the polar opposite; people who begrudgingly empty their Inbox only when they have to due to size limitations.

It looks like Merlin Mann has encountered the same time of resistance, so he has posted his take on what to do if your organizational culture is such that you receive many long, conversational email threads throughout the day that require more than a few minutes of your time:

“Every time I give the Inbox Zero talk to a tech-heavy group — and most especially when I talk with engineers — there’s pushback on a couple issues. First, a lot of techies say they love it when everything gets routed through email, and second, they think an Inbox-Zero-type methodology isn’t particularly useful for the type of communication that they get all day long. And that’s conversations. Lots of conversations.”

For folks who match this description, Merlin has posted six tips that map very nicely to IMS features – threading, processing, filtering, standards, muting and save and search.   It’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re still weighing whether emptying your Inbox will work for you.  And if you do decide to take the plunge, see this post in intelligently emptying your Inbox.

You might be interested in the results of this email research:

"By taking a “typical” employee and making some hypothetical assumptions it is possible to determine the amount of time that can be saved through implementing the guidelines mentioned above. If an employee has set up the email application to check for email every 5 minutes then it is possible, if (s)he is a heavy user of email, that there could be 96 interruptions in a normal 8-hour working day. However, if the email application was set up to check for email every 45 minutes then the amount of possible interruptions is reduced to 11 per day. For example, if it takes on average 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email and the employee is interrupted every 5 minutes, then this would only leave the employee 3.5 minutes before the next interrupt. However, if the employee was interrupted every 45 minutes and the emails had accumulated to a total of 9, then it would take on average 6 minutes to read all 9 emails and recover from the interruption. This would then leave 39 minutes before the next interruption, allowing the employee more time to get on with “real” work."

The research was completed in 2003 – I suspect the numbers become worse with the increase in email volumes and technology demanding our attention over the last few years.  Net net, use Do Not Disturb or turn off your email notifications altogether.

Over the weekend, TechMeme pointed me to an interesting piece in the New York Times.  In a lot of ways, I have the same problem as Mark Bittman; namely:

"…I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.

…

In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict."

Mark’s solution was to enforce a technology free day (or two) for the last few months.  And while he eventually found the benefits to be extremely rewarding, it wasn’t easy:

"On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven."

That, IMO, is exactly why taking a break or going through some sort of detox can be a good idea. 

Merlin Mann at 43 Folders nails it though, when he says the problem is not the technology but the way we use it:

"Let’s be brutally honest, here — I can “work” at my computer for 10 hours and do nothing but dick around with Wikipedia and YouTube. Heck, even if I do “work stuff” like email and “research,” I can easily trail off in a hundred directions that have nothing to do with my initial task. Is that the fault of the computer and the internet? Maybe, kinda. But, no more so than I can reasonably blame this crappy hammer for that awkward birdhouse I built. Stupid hammer."

Both articles are really interesting reads, if only to get you thinking about how and why you use technology.

Craig Kennedy forwarded this interesting article from the Globe and Mail.  Researchers at Northwestern University have found a link between two seemingly disparate personality traits – procrastination and impatience:

"In sum, said the study, highly impatient individuals are overly keen to engage in activities where they get what they want right away and pay the costs later, but they procrastinate when they have to put in the effort up front in order to get benefits down the road."

Dr. Ernesto Reuben, one of the co-authors of the study, suggests that the procrastinators could benefit from technology designed to help keep them focused:

‘This could be addressed by giving them the right tools, such as e-mail programs that emphasize "important" messages "because a procrastinator will easily get distracted and start reading non-important e-mails.’

Dr. Reuben, if you are out there, please contact me.  I’d like to introduce you to ClearContext Information Management System for Microsoft Outlook…

Thanks for the pointer, Craig!