Happy New Year!
As many of you return to work after the holidays, make it your New Year’s resolution to get organized. We made several recommendations in last year’s Holiday Email Avalanche post. Here’s our recipe for email productivity in 2006:
- Get yourself an email management strategy for the new year. Buy a good methodology book like GTD, or Total Workday Control, or Take Back Your Life! Adapt a methodology to your particular needs and stick with it.
- Download and install the ClearContext v2 Beta to help you implement your newly chosen email management strategy.
- Use ClearContext to triage your email on return from vacation:
- Quickly separate the wheat from the chaff via our prioritization algorithm – using ClearContext’s automated prioritization address your high value email first (in red, at the top of your inbox) while safely ignoring junk email (in gray at the bottom) until you’ve gotten on top of things.
- Use AutoAssign rules to quickly categorize and file bulk newsletters, group mailing lists, etc. and read them at your leisure.
- Use ClearContext’s message threading to ensure that you are looking at the entire conversation – don’t waste time answering an email that was answered in a later repsonse by someone else.
- As your process your inbox, use the new workflow features in our beta product to quickly convert email to tasks and appointments or defer email for later consumption.
- Finally, keep yourself organized throughout the year. Let ClearContext help keep you on track throughout the year by automating your daily work regimen.
Best wishes in 2006. May all of us have a more productive and prosperous New Year!