ClearContext Corporate Blog

Clive Thompson, who I’ve mentioned before, published an article in the most recent edition of Wired on using artificial intelligence to make email clients smarter.  In How Email Bots Can Deal With Your Overstuffed Inbox, Clive mentions ClearContext alongside Xobni:

“Another of my favorites is ClearContext, which identifies your most valued contacts — people you reply to quickly and frequently — and flags their incoming messages. It also endows you with superpowered sorting. If a work-related thread goes off the rails — like when colleagues hijack a project discussion to argue about Lost — you can zap it. From that point on, new messages in the thread are filtered out and deleted automatically.”

Merlin Mann from 43 Folders is also mentioned, recommending Inbox Zero as the best way to get a handle on the deluge.  Check out the article for more detail.

UPDATE: I like the print title of this article better – The Great American Timesuck: Give an email bot a shot at your overstuffed inbox.

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.

Deva had the opportunity to sit down with vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco and field some questions about our company and upcoming release:

For more detail, Organizing my messy inbox with ClearContext.

I don’t know if you noticed, but we had a few things written about our Personal Beta launch in the last few days.  Here’s a collection of the latest stories:

ClearContext’s Stab at Making Email More Manageable – May 19, 2008
Mark Hendrickson – TechCrunch
“ClearContext Personal has a number of tricks up its sleeve. First, it analyzes 30-40 characteristics of each message that hits your inbox to determine its priority…”

When Outlook Gets Personal, It Get Clear Context – May 19, 2008
Om Malik – GigaOm
“One really good reason to download this app: it automatically sort emails from a wide variety of applications and websites into nice little folders. You can quickly see how many Facebook messages or Evite invitations you got.”

ClearContext swings again, adding processing power to email – May 19, 2008
Chris Morrison – VentureBeat
“The idea for ClearContext is to cut down on the number of clicks, and the amount of thought, required to deal with email.”

ClearContext for Outlook announces public beta – May 19, 2008
Don Dodge – The Next Big Thing
“ClearContext helps with project management: sorting and categorizing emails relating to a particular subject or project.”

ClearContext tames Outlook – May 19, 2008
Rafe Needleman – Webware
“On Monday, ClearContext, which has had a paid, enterprise-level e-mail organizer for a while now, is releasing ClearContext Personal, a free, de-featured version of the product”

ClearContext Personal steps up the pressure on Xobni – or does it? – May 19, 2008
Tris Hussey – MapleLeaf 2.0
“For me, ClearContext’s power and utility has been the message prioritization and the ability to file away messages quickly.”

ClearContext Personal Beta Program Begins, Puts Outlook Information in Context to Prevent Email Overload – May 19, 2008
ClearContext Corporation
“Free ClearContext Personal Outlook Add-in Helps People Process Email Faster and Keep Their Information Organized”

Some additional information about the new release, along with a sign up for the Personal Beta, can be found here.  All of the features in Personal are being incorporated into the Professional product.  The Pro production release will be a free upgrade for all registered IMS v4 customers.  If you’re interested in signing up for the upcoming Beta of the Professional product, go to ClearContext > About from within Outlook, press Email Support and send that email along with the words BETA INFO in the body.  We’ll add you to the Pro beta list and let you know when a download is available.  Thanks!

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped asked several web luminaries a simple question:

“What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?”

The result is a pretty interesting collection of tips from folks who consume a LOT of information.  Check it out.

I may sound like a broken record at times, but the first thing you should do when you encounter quirky Outlook performance issues – including slowness, startup issues and instability – is perform some mail maintenance.  This is particularly useful if you have recently installed/uninstalled some Outlook add-ins.

If you haven’t done so lately, I highly recommend that you review my post on Outlook Performance and Mail File Maintenance and take action to archive messages, compact your mail file and run SCANPST against it.  A little proactive maintenance here will go a long way towards keeping Outlook snappy.  In fact, go ahead and put it as a recurring task on your task list and run through the process every few months.  You’ll be glad that you did.

Yes, we’re in a release cycle.  Long time readers know that that means posting will be light for a bit.  Here’s something for your reading pleasure in the meantime…

Our friends at Seriosity have published a white paper on their attention economy.  For those unfamiliar with Seriosity, they have a novel approach for relieving the email overload problem.  Taking cues from the gaming industry, their product introduces a synthetic currency to email that the sender can use to give an indication of message importance.  Here’s the abstract:

“The productivity of information workers is jeopardized by too much e–mail. A proposed solution to e–mail overload is the creation of an economy that uses a scarce synthetic currency that senders can use to signal the importance of information and receivers can use to prioritize messages. A test of the virtual economy with corporate information workers showed that people in a large company used different amounts of the currency when sending e–mail messages, and that the amount of currency attached to messages produced statistically significant differences in how quickly receivers opened the messages. An analysis of the network of virtual currency trades between workers showed the different roles that participants played in the communication network, and showed that relationships defined by currency exchanges uncovered social networks that are not apparent in analyses that only examine the frequency, as opposed to the value of interactions.”

See A marketplace for attention: Responses to a synthetic currency used to signal information importance in e-mail for more detail.

Randall Stross looks to Thomas Edison and H.L. Mencken for analog answers to managing electronic mail in today’s New York Times piece Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami.  In particular, journalist Mencken responded to every piece of mail he received, but didn’t let it overwhelm him:

"YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work."

This is almost exactly what we advise in our IMS Daily Workflow.  Set aside times to process your email and focus on your work the rest of the day.

There’s also brief mention of technological solutions to the problem; including ClearContext.

The Useful Technology Blog has posted an ingenious way to dissuade you from accidentally using Reply to All:

“Are you a victim of an inadvertent ‘Reply to All’ gaffe? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Every day, thousands of people unwittingly share their most intimate thoughts with complete strangers. And it’s all thanks to that pesky ‘Reply to All’ button in Microsoft Outlook.

Thankfully, there is a cure. The NEW “UsefulTechnology Gaffe Destroyer™ (Patent-Pending)” solution works by reducing the temptation* to hit the ‘Reply to All’ button.”

Read on for a pretty novel trick to save you a little embarrassment.

The Identify phase of our IMS workflow takes place first thing in the morning and is your opportunity to size up the day before diving headlong into your email.  It’s the time for you to make sure that you have your priorities in line so that you don’t lose sight of the day’s goals.

You should also take this time to work on one or two of your most important tasks.  By tackling one of those items that you absolutely have to get done before you start managing your day, you accomplish two things:

1. You ensure that no matter the number of fires you come across during the day, you knocked an important task off the list.
2. You devote the time that is needed to address the task.  If you put off your most important task until after you have gone through email, you may find that you haven’t left enough time to give it the proper attention it needs.

On the softer side, a rewarding sense of satisfaction permeates the day when you’ve taken one of your more important tasks out so early.  Try it, you’ll like it.