ClearContext Corporate Blog

I have written about this before, but last week the Microsoft Outlook team blog posted, in great detail, one of my favorite Outlook 2007 features – collapsible folder list and To-Do bars…

As the problem of information overload continues to grow in the workplace, we’re seeing more entrants into this space with their own twist.  One example is Seriosity, a recent entrant with a novel concept for the enterprise.  They have created a system of email credits that people use to signify the importance of emails and compel recipients to pay attention.   Multi-player gaming for email!  Today we welcome another entrant to the space as the guys over at Xobni (a Y Combinator company) launched today at TechCrunch40.

Xobni is focused on contact-based organization, analytics and search within email.  They utilize a number of concepts similar to that in a product from Microsoft Research, SNARF, to rank the importance of contacts and provide analytics about your email traffic with each individual.  They also provide threaded views of email conversations, something we also do in both our Inbox views and RelatedView.  Another focus of their product is search, though with indexed search in Outlook 2007 as well as free desktop search tools we’re not sure how important that area is for further independent development.  Overall Xobni looks like an interesting product, sort of a slicker, updated version of Nelson Email Organizer integrated within Outlook to provide some interesting statistics about your email to help you be more efficient.

There are two main differences between our take on the solution to email overload and Xobni’s.  While we share their passion for analytics and organization, more of our focus with ClearContext IMS is on effective ways to process incoming email.  Secondly, their organization capabilities revolve around the contact.  While we do a lot of things based around the contact, a key area of focus for us is relating and viewing information on a complete project basis, encompassing multiple to-dos, appointments, and emails from various contacts.

We’ve also been quite busy with new developments ourselves.

Having worked with thousands of customers over the past few years to help them be more productive in email, we’ve developed our own unique perspective on the best solution for the space.  Like Xobni, our ClearContext IMS Pro product automatically identifies the highest priority contacts and your email relationship with then.  We use that to prioritize incoming email messages, then provide functionality to take action on these messages and keep all of the information organized.   While that is enough for many customers to love the product, we’ve also found that for many people the technology is just part of their whole solution.  Productivity methodology gurus like David Allen (GTD), Michael Linenberger (Total Workday Control), and many others provide a structure for working with email that for many people goes hand-in-hand with the technology to provide a complete solution.

Over the past year, we’ve been working with a number of customers to distill the most high-impact techniques for managing their workday into a streamlined system that can instantly help anyone be more productive and get more done.  We’re excited to show you how simple it can be to stay in control of email when, later in the year, we announce the next release of ClearContext IMS, a complete solution integrating best practices and software automation to help people be more productive and get more done with less stress.  We’re in the midst of beta testing right now and will be expanding the beta group soon, so let us know if you’re interested in an early preview.  It’s exciting to see more awareness building about the magnitude of the information overload in the enterprise, and we’re looking forward to seeing even more innovation in this space.

The ClearContext Team

Now the Wall Street Journal has got an article running on email overload.  This one’s a hodgepodge of suggestions from the likes of David Allen, Merlin Mann and Mike Song (among others).  I like this tip from Julie Morgenstern:

Another idea, if your job allows it: Ignore your in-box for the first
hour every morning, instead focusing on an important project. "Once you
open the email there are a million and one interruptions," Ms.
Morgenstern adds. "It’s very hard to settle your mind down and
concentrate."

Read more for the usual tips on email effectiveness,

Intel recently had their analysis of Infomania (“the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions”) published at firstmonday.org. The paper, Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer, is aptly titled; it shows that Intel stands to save almost a billion dollars annually by overcoming the inefficiencies due to information overload: 

“The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge–intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.”

The paper hints that the calculation above, based almost solely on measurable employee efficiency losses, may only be the tip of the iceberg. The group also found that information overload had a very tangible, negative impact on intellectual property generation, work quality and employee satisfaction. For example: 

“It is critical to understand this huge impact: because of Infomania, employees are not creating new ideas to the extent they could. New, significant inventions remain un–invented. Better solutions to major problems that may be hobbling an organization’s performance toward its goals are left undiscovered. The engineer who could have the “Aha!” insight leading to the next major product innovation is trying to find 30 minutes to think about it, and failing. The supervisor who could double a fabrication line’s efficiency can’t because they are nearly brain dead from staying up until one AM working on e–mail. Across the industry, knowledge workers and managers are thinking less, inventing less, producing less, succeeding less.”

If you think that your organization suffers from these same issues, please forward this paper to a technology buyer at your company and let them know how IMS Pro has helped you get on top of email and become more efficient. Send them my email address (brad at clearcontext dot com) and let them know that we would be happy to help them understand the scope of this issue and the solutions out there to help combat it. Thanks! 

A final note – I found this via the IT@Intel blog. If you’re interested in the solutions they are implementing to solve the problem outlined in this paper, see http://blogs.intel.com/it/tags/infomania.

The Times reports on research that found that 61% of workers felt “stressed” or “driven” by email.  The money quote from this article:

“E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives.  It’s an amazing tool but it’s got out of hand.”

Somebody please tell these guys how IMS Pro can help!  Thanks to Mike Koehler for the pointer.

NBC Nightly news ran a piece last night on email overload.  From their website:

“As our society becomes more and more dependent on e-mail and text messaging, it’s easy for all that communication to get out of control.  NBC’s John Yang reports on how some people are coping.”

Andrew Baron is featured in in the interview and is in the process of declaring email bankruptcy, but says he hasn’t figured out what he’s going to do to manage email more efficiently going forward.  Sorry we can’t help you out, Andrew, but IMS Pro isn’t available for OS X yet.  In the meantime, check out our tips for handling Email Overload.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the results of the annual AOL email usage survey are all over the blogs today.  AOL found that 15% of surveyed Americans assert that they are “addicted to email” and 83% check email while on vacation.  It sounds like a widening gyre to me.  Folks are constantly in email to try and stem the flood, yet outgoing email begets new incoming email and the problem deepens.

Merlin Mann from 43 Folders gave an excellent talk at Google last week on effective email management.  If you’re looking for a nice, concise explanation of how to handle your email and why it’s important, I highly suggest you check it out.  The scripted part of the talk lasts 35 minutes or so, followed by some Q&A.

Lifehacker has some fairly spirited discussion surrounding a post suggesting that the best way to deal with email over vacation is to send an auto-response to the sender and automatically delete the original message.  From one of their readers:

“I’m going on email-less vacation for a week and already I’m dreading the mountain of messages I’ll face when I return. I’m toying with the idea of setting up a filter that auto-responds to messages while I’m on vacation saying that the sender should email me again, after I get back, if they need a response. Then delete the message automatically.”

As several commenters on the post noted, this is highly irresponsible and probably not the best move professionally.  I’ve said it before, if you aren’t managing your email effectively you’re not being fair to your customers, your co-workers or yourself.

For those of you returning from summer breaks, try using ClearContext IMS for some vacation email triage instead.

This morning the San Francisco Chronicle published an article by Chris Colin on the emotional impact email overload has on the user.  Ironically, he gathered data for the piece by spamming his contacts with questions about their relationship with email.  The result is some interesting stuff that focuses less on technology and more on negative feelings that arise from trying to manage too much email:

“Complaining about e-mail is like complaining about traffic or tourists: a facile old whine. But whines have good and bad years, and 2007 has been a doozy.”

Check it out.