ClearContext Corporate Blog

All the talk about the GTD Summit inspired me to update our GTD setup guide.  It now includes the Project Dashboard as a way to manage by project and the Email Scorecard for metrics and measurement.  Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting excerpts from the guide.  First, a quick reference…

Quick Reference

For those of you who want to dive right into setting up your trusted system, here are the basics for setting up GTD with ClearContext Pro:

Topics = Projects: ClearContext allows the assignment of Topics to email conversations. Use Topics to designate Projects and the ClearContext filing buttons to file email to Topic folders. Use a “/” when creating a Topic to designate sub-projects (i.e. “Project 1/Sub-Project2”).

Categories = Context: Use ClearContext workflow buttons (Task, Schedule, Delegate, Defer, etc.) to quickly process messages in the Inbox. When creating a Task or Appointment, use Outlook native categories to denote context (@Work, @Phone, etc.) for easy viewing of context-specific action lists. ClearContext will automatically file messages to their Topic folder as Tasks and Appointments are created.

Review: Use the ClearContext Dashboard to review your Messages and To-Do’s by context, project and/or date. The Dashboard displays all To-Dos’ – tasks, appointments, flagged items and deferred messages – and filters them by Topic or Category.

More to come…

GTD and Getting Things Done are registered
trademarks of David Allen & Company.

We added an oft-requested feature in v4.6 – a Jump to Topic button.  It’s on the toolbar by default or you can add it via ClearContext > Options > Preferences > UI\Toolbar.  The feature pretty much does just what it says – click Jump or hit Alt-J, select or type the name of the folder you want to open and hit enter.  ClearContext even suggests your most recently used folders at the top of the list.  Quick.  Easy. 

For those of your who haven’t customized your toolbar, the first thing you will notice when you upgrade to v4.6 is the addition of the scorecard button. The Email Effectiveness Scorecard provides an overall assessment of how effectively you’re managing your email and how heavy a workload you’re facing.

Email Effectiveness Rating

This score is an overall measure of how effectively you are managing your email communications.  The higher your score, the better you are doing with email!

Excellent (80 – 100)

great job at staying on top of email and getting a lot done!

Very Good (60 – 79)

you are doing a good job at keeping up with email!

OK (40 – 59)

you are just managing to stay in control of your email.

Warning (20 – 39)

you are falling behind in your email communications.

Danger (0 – 19)

Your email is getting totally out of control.

Rating Areas

Your email effectiveness score is made up of three components:

• Response Time: This factor measures how promptly you are responding to emails.  Getting back to emails that require responses within 24 hours will result in a good response time score. Use the ClearContext Daily Workflow to get through your email faster.
• Inbox Control: This factor measures how effectively you are processing the messages in your inbox.  The more messages you have in your inbox and the longer it takes you to read, file, and/or delete messages, the lower your score will be.  Manage your Inbox more efficiently with these tips.
• Communication: This factor measures how well you are doing at sending out messages and processing messages that require response/action.

Workload

Your workload score measures how heavy your email communication volumes are.  The more emails you send and receive, the higher your workload score will be – and the harder it is for you to keep on top of your email!  Review Top Five Ways to Reduce Email Traffic.

My Stats

The My Stats tab allows you to see your email performance over time and compare your email statistics with other ClearContext users.

** Due to the online component of our metrics, you must be connected to the internet to view stats **

Summary

The stats summary provides a snapshot of your email activity over the past week and an overview of your message priority breakdown while using ClearContext.

Compare Stats

The compare stats graphs let you view aspects of your email activity (messages sent, received, and average response time) over the past month, and see how they compare to the average ClearContext user’s statistics.

My Stats

The my stats graphs let you view how well you are keeping your inbox under control (especially users aiming for “inbox zero”) and track changes in your email effectiveness and workload over the past month.

ClearContext Online

You’ll notice a “Compare your stats online” link in the scorecard section.  This component is in beta testing and features much richer stats and analytics capabilities than what’s contained in the ClearContext Outlook client.  We have a lot of exciting things in store there that we’ll begin rolling out over time.

The Microsoft Team has posted a FAQ for the Outlook 2007 February Cumulative Update.  The extended release notes for the February CU are here.  Bottom line, if you run Outlook 2007, you should install this update.  Outlook performance is greatly improved and the app shuts down more elegantly. 

One warning – your mail files will go through a conversion process the first time you open Outlook.  This can take a considerable amount of time if you have gigs of mail available in Outlook, so make sure you upgrade when you have some free time to let Outlook complete the conversion.

You have to jump through a couple of hoops to download, but it’s worth it.  Go here and click View and Request hotfix downloads:

Our support forums are back up on a new server:

http://online.clearcontext.com/forums/

If you’re unable to access, give it another few hours as the DNS changes make their way across the tubes.  If you subscribe to the forum RSS, you will need to re-generate your feed here:

http://online.clearcontext.com/forums/create_syndication.php

Our Features and Support forums are unavailable while we perform maintenance over the weekend.  Full functionality will be restored by Monday morning Pacific Standard Time.  In the meantime, contact support at clearcontext dot com with questions.

We just released a minor update to ClearContext for Outlook.  v4.6.4 addresses the following:

• Fixed a calendar display issue
• Fixed a problem in the selection of Topic assignment preferences
• Changed the Response Time score to accurately handle low volume

Please download and upgrade at your convenience.  This is a complimentary upgrade for all registered v4 customers.  You do not need to uninstall prior versions before upgrading.

Today we’re releasing a significant update to ClearContext Personal and Pro.   v4.6 is available for download now at www.clearcontext.com.  Thanks to everyone for contributing feedback and helping out with the beta program for this release.  Please download and let us know what you think!

This release is focused around two main areas of improvement:

• The first is a sneak preview of ClearContext measurement of email statistics, metrics, and effectiveness.  We’ve added an Email Scorecard and Stats module inside Outlook as an introduction to this new feature area, but a lot more is coming very soon.  Watch the blog for more detail.
• The second focus area is a large set of feature enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Here are the highlights for the v4.6.3 production release:

Brand New Features

• Email Scorecard – Learn more here
• Jump to Topic button

Feature Enhancements

• MessageContext and FolderContext on/off preferences
• Notification Managers location
• Toolbar Defaults
• Dashboard Message sorting
• Dashboard Tasks filtering
• FolderContext Sorting Preferences
• Topic Assignment defaults

Compatibility and Performance Improvements

• Sent Messages & Exchange NDR issue fix
• Enhanced Add-in Compatibility
• Asynchronous MessageContext
• Non-Supported Mail File Check (for Oracle Beehive customers and others)
• Performance improvements

For more detail and discussion around this release and a list of additional bug fixes, please see this forum post.

Thanks again, and we hope you enjoy the new release!

In our previous post, we started looking at some basic email volume statistics and began to think about how we can use that info to become more effective in working with email.  We also looked at how the Thanksgiving holiday impacted email activity.  In this post we’ll take another look at those statistics to see how consistent they really are in terms of baselines to evaluate our own email activity levels against, as well as see what kind of impact the holiday season had on email volumes.

First we’ll take another look at received email volumes.  The average stays around 110 per weekday before and after the holidays, but email volumes are drastically lower for two entire weeks.  Not a surprise, but it’s still interesting to see the rapid declines approaching both Christmas and New Year’s, and then the quick return back to business as usual right after.

Now, does that mean people’s overall workload is going down at those levels?  Well, there are a number of factors to take into account, but one of the most basic measures is to simply look at how many messages people are replying to.  As the graph below shows, the number of replies people are sending tracks quite closely with the reduced volume of emails being received, so it does appear that overall email workload was reduced over the holiday season.  It’s good to know that at least everyone wasn’t just at home catching up with all of their overdue email replies!

OK, now we’ve established some baseline metrics in terms of inbound email volumes and outbound email reply volumes.  So what do we do with that and how can we help people and companies use that information to get better at handling email effectively?

In the next post we’ll discuss some of the ways all of this information can be used to measure the level of email workload people are facing, identify key sources of email strain, measure effectiveness levels in dealing with the email, and provide suggestions so people and companies are able to get better at managing all of this email.

Robert Scoble, who has written about his struggle with email many times, has published an article at FastCompany recommending six tools to help get on top of email.  ClearContext is mentioned alongside ActiveWords, Xobni and Gist:

“If I were going to recommend only one tool, ClearContext … offers the most immediate productivity gains. The Outlook add-on looks at who you're replying to and how often, then automatically prioritizes the messages. It color-codes the most pressing ones, graying out mass emails. This is a small thing, but it minimizes a torrent to a manageable few. ClearContext removes that dread we feel when we open our inbox.”

Thanks, Robert!  Here’s Robert’s interview with Deva last year (Get a handle on your email with ClearContext):