ClearContext Corporate Blog

At ClearContext, we’re focused on helping make email a more effective tool.  This spans a number of areas including filing messages and keeping your inbox under control, managing tasks and activities within email, and keeping projects organized inside Outlook.  The products that we’ve built help many people who live their work life inside of Outlook stay in control of an overwhelming flood of information.  But we are continually asked two very important questions:

1. Exactly how big a problem is all this stuff?
2. How much can these solutions help?

We’ve spent a long time thinking about those issues and working with users and companies to figure out how to both identify the key areas of email pain they face, and provide solutions that make direct and measurable improvements in those areas.  We’ll be announcing more details shortly, but if you’re interested in learning more right now, please contact us at beta at clearcontext dot com.

In the meantime, we’re going to cover a few key areas where people can measurably increase their effectiveness and productivity with email over our next few blog posts.  To get started, we’ll take a look at some baseline figures illustrating the volumes of work people are faced with.  We’ll start by looking at a couple of the most basic email stats.

The graph below from a sample group of ClearContext users shows the average number of messages they receive in their primary business inbox every day.  You’ll notice that it remains relatively constant at about 110 emails per day during the week and a little over half that amount on weekends.  You’ll also notice a significant drop-off in email volume around US Thanksgiving, but after the weekend things pretty much immediately pick up right back where they left off.

Of course we know we’re all receiving a lot of email.  So, how much of that email generates even more work in the form of a required response?  Well, simply by looking at the shape of the graph below of replies sent on a daily basis, you can see that (as you might expect) there’s a direct correlation between the amount of email received and the number of replies sent out. 

In our next post we’ll take a look at how email volumes were impacted over the holiday season and start discussing how this information can be used to help people be more effective and less stressed out with email.

As we prepare to celebrate the US Thanksgiving holiday, ClearContext would like to thank all of you for the support you have given us throughout the year.  For those of you taking some time off around the holiday, here are some tips for jumping back on top of your email when you return.

See our Topic Conversion tutorial for tips on filing outside Exchange, changing your Topic folder location, and adding a secondary PST for Topic storage:

Watch a larger version here or embed via YouTube.

We morphed the Task & Calendar Management tutorial into a brief (1:40 min.) introduction to personal project management in Outlook, covering Tasks, Appointments, MessageContext, and both dashboards:

Watch a larger version here or embed via YouTube.

The updated Views & Prioritization tutorial teaches the use of prioritized views, contact prioritization, and message prioritization:

Watch a larger version here or embed via YouTube here.

The updated Topics & Filing tutorial talks about suggested Topics, the Topic Selector and filing to Topic Folders:

Watch a larger version here or embed via YouTube.

We are updating our video tutorials to reflect the latest release.  The first one, Quick Tips, covers Defer, Unsubscribe and Follow-up:

Watch a larger version here or grab an embeddable version at YouTube.

The Project Dashboard displays all messages, appointments, contacts, attachments, tasks and deferred messages by Topic and category.

Open a Project Dashboard tab from the Summary Dashboard by selecting a Topic in the Topic Summary and double-clicking or pressing Open Topic. 

To close a Project Tab, click the X on an active tab.

Title Bar   
The Project Dashboard’s title bar provides more advanced views of your Projects:

• Click the Attachment Explorer icon to open a new tab displaying all of the attachments associated with this Topic.
• The Jump to Folder icon takes you to the folder associated with this Topic.
• Toggle Show Sub-Folders on to include sub-Topics in the Project Dashboard.
• Filter your information by category with the category drop down.

Messages   
The Messages pane shows all messages in the Inbox and the Topic folder for the selected Project.  Double-click a message to open it.  Select a message and use the Actions button to act on it (Reply, Forward, Delete, Task, Appointment).  Select Jump to Folder to open the Topic folder for this Project.  By default, ClearContext only loads the most recent 1,000 messages for the selected Topic.  When this limit is in effect, click the Show All link at the bottom of the pane to load all messages in the Topic.  Use the Hide Filed link to display Inbox messages for this Topic only.

Appointments   
The Appointments pane shows all active appointments for this Topic.  By default, today’s appointments are in blue.  The pane will only show the next instance of a recurring appointment.  Double-click an appointment to open it and use the Actions menu to delete the current appointment or create a new appointment with this Topic pre-assigned.

Contacts   
The Contacts pane shows all Contacts in the To: and From: fields for messages that appear in the Messages pane.  See FolderContext for more information on working with the Contacts list.

Attachments   
The Attachments pane shows all attachments found in the messages that are displayed in the Messages pane.  See FolderContext for more information on working with the Attachments list.

Tasks and Actions   
The Tasks and Actions pane shows all tasks and deferred messages associated with this Topic.  Double-click an item to open it.  Mark tasks complete via the check box.  Click a header to sort the information in this pane.  Select Actions to delete a task or create a new one with the current Topic pre-assigned.  Items are color-coded by due date.  Adjust color display options or toggle the display of completed items using the links below this pane.

Global Buttons   
There are three buttons at the bottom of the Project Dashboard:

• New Task starts a task with the current Topic pre-assigned.
• Similarly, New Appt starts an appointment in the current Project.
• The Refresh button reloads all data in the Dashboard.

Jump to Dashboard

While in a Topic folder, quickly open a Project Dashboard by selecting Actions > Jump to Dashboard from within FolderContext.

The complete ClearContext Personal and Professional User Guide, including a downloadable PDF, is available here.

Divided into four panes – Topics, Notifications, Tasks and Actions, and Appointments – the Summary Dashboard provides a control panel for your workday.  Open the Dashboard by pressing the Dashboard button on the main toolbar.  To close it, click on another folder, such as the Inbox, or another area in Outlook, such as the Calendar.

Topics   
The Topics pane shows a summary of all of your Topics, along with counts of today’s appointments and tasks that are overdue, due today or due this week.

• Type a Topic name in the filter to narrow the list of Topics down
• Click Open Topic to launch the Topic Selector and open a Project Dashboard in another tab.
• Select Active Topics Only to display only those Topics that have active items in them.
• Double-click any Topic in the list to drill down to a Project Dashboard tab.

Notifications   
The Notifications pane shows a summary of all active Notification Managers.  For more details on this functionality, see FolderContext.

Tasks and Actions   
This is a global list of all of your Tasks and Deferred items in Outlook.  Double-click an item to open it.  Mark tasks complete via the check box.  Click a header to sort the information in this pane.  Select Actions to delete a task or create a new one.  Items are color-coded by due date.  Adjust color display options or toggle the display of completed items using the links below this pane.

Appointments   
The Appointments pane shows all active appointments.  By default, today’s appointments are in blue.  The pane will only show the next instance of a recurring appointment.  Double-click an appointment to open it and use the Actions menu to delete the current appointment or create a new appointment.

Buttons   
There are three buttons at the bottom of the Summary Dashboard:

• New Task starts a task.
• Similarly, New Appt starts a new appointment.
• The Refresh button reloads all data in the Dashboard.

Get the Most Out of the Dashboard

The Dashboard is the crux of the Succeed component of the ClearContext process, allowing you to view all of your Outlook information by Topic or Category.  To take full advantage of this functionality, instruct ClearContext to query for Topic assignment to Messages, Tasks and Appointments as you create them.

The complete ClearContext Personal and Professional User Guide, including a downloadable PDF, is available here.

The Contact Exporter lets you create and export groups of email addresses found in messages stored in the Outlook folders you select.

Select the email addresses from a prioritized list of contacts generated for you to create an Outlook distribution list, Outlook contact records, or a CSV export file.   

• Send a group email to people on your team – Select your work or team folder and create an Outlook distribution list. 
• Create a party invitation for your friends – Select your personal correspondence folders and generate a list that you can send an email to or export to an online invitation service. 
• Add all your business contacts to LinkedIn or your personal contacts to Facebook – Select the appropriate folders and create an export file you can upload.

To use the Contact Exporter:

1. Go to ClearContext > Contact Exporter (Personal) or ClearContext > Tools > Contact Exporter (Pro) from the main menu. 
2. Select the folders containing emails you want to export contact information from.
3. The contacts found in those folders are divided into a list divided into three groups:  More Relevant, Relevant, and Less Relevant.  Use the selection links to select/deselect groups of those contacts or the checkboxes to individually select/deselect the contacts you want to export.
4. Check the export formats you would like for the email addresses and enter names for the files – Outlook distribution list, Outlook contact records, or CSV file.

Import Contacts into Popular Websites

Once you’ve created the list, you can import these contacts into any services that accept CSV files.  Here are import links for a few popular sites (log into the sites before clicking the links below):   

• LinkedIn
• Facebook (click Email Application and scroll down to Contact File)
• Evite
• Socializr

The complete ClearContext Personal and Professional User Guide, including a downloadable PDF, is available here.