ClearContext Corporate Blog

In this Salon article Scott Rosenberg refutes the idea that a crowded Inbox means you don’t have your life in order.  Lifehacker is running a poll to see if their readers agree.

CIO magazine interviewed Nathan Zeldes and David Sward from Intel about their work to help the company combat email overload.  I found this interesting:

“Knowledge workers spend about 20 hours a week doing e-mail, and one-third of that e-mail is useless,” explains Zeldes. Worse, 70 percent of e-mail gets handled within six minutes of arrival and the average worker is interrupted every three minutes, according to research. “When you switch between tasks, you incur a cognitive reorientation cost,” says David Sward, a senior human factors engineer at Intel and one of Zeldes’s partners on the infomania project. The bottom line was that Intel’s workers were wasting about six hours a week.

The article mentions some of the “technology-assisted behavior change” they are putting in place to minimize this wasted time, including delivering email less frequently and programmatically suggesting good e-mail etiquette as messages are sent.  Good stuff.

[Found via the IT@Intel blog, which has other links to interviews with these guys.]

Have you been using ClearContext for a few months?  Would you like to improve ClearContext’s prioritization accuracy?  On setup, ClearContext analyzes your email history to rank contacts by priority.  Over time, this information can become dated as new contacts become more important to you.  You can re-run this process at any time by going to ClearContext > Options and pressing the Analyze Contacts button.  This will re-prioritize most of your contacts while leaving your manually set contact priorities in tact.  Take a few minutes and give it a run.

For more information on prioritization and contact analysis – including a video tutorial – see our User Guide.

I like this article from Entrepreneur.com on better email management.  It’s a little different than most of the “Top-X” email lists, focusing on block and tackle suggestions such as learning the in’s and out’s of your email client and maximizing use of folders.  Check it out.

BONUS: the BBC says that half of Britons are ‘e-mail addicts’ and claims that reliance on mobile email access is becoming as critical as our addiction to mobile phones.  [Thanks for the pointer, LIfehacker.]

Since our last product plan update during v3 development, we’ve had the chance to take a step back and evaluate both upcoming IMS enhancements and our longer term product suite strategy.  We’re excited to tell you about what we’re working on now.  Following a near term incremental release, in our next major development cycle we’re extending the ClearContext Product Suite with smarter email management; personal project management; and analytics, reporting, and alerting capabilities as outlined below. 

Information Management System v3.2 

We’ll complete work on near term feature enhancements to improve IMS in the reporting and management arena, including the following new features: 

• Action Dashboard 
• Custom Forms Support 
• Additional Gadget Support 
• User Interface Simplification

The ClearContext Product Suite 

We will grow the ideas introduced in v3.2 via a major development effort to extend email management, personal project management and metrics and measurement in the ClearContext Product Suite.  Here’s an early look at what these releases will look like: 

IMS 4.0  – the next major release of IMS will focus on making the application smarter and simpler to use.  Major new features include: 

• Automated intelligent Topic assignment 
• Extended contact information including contact-based views 
• Simplified User Interface for email management 
• Quick launch of Topic folders for easy access to archived data

PM – a tool for project management within Outlook.  Features include: 

• Project Overview Dashboard 
• Hierarchical task management 
• Project view for maintenance of project related items including Tasks, Appointments, Emails, etc.. 
• Detailed Project Status at a glance

ARA – tools for analysis, reporting, and alerts on activity within Outlook.  Integrated with all products in the suite, analytics will include: 

• Email usage reporting 
• Metrics and performance measurement 
• Service level alerts

Timing 

v3.2 will be released this summer.  Watch this weblog for additional information on release of the ClearContext Product Suite and beta test program.

A new version of IMS Pro is available for download here.  v3.1.1 is a maintenance release that addresses a few minor issues, including a stability problem with the Email Support function, the ability to add Exchange addresses to the Detected Email Alias field in Identity and a change in the way IMS handles offline contacts in cached exchange mode.  Unless you have experienced an issue in one of these areas, it’s not necessary to upgrade from v3.1.0.

Fortune has posted 10 ways to get a grip on your e-mail, outlining exactly why it’s so important for corporations to get a handle on time spent in email:

"Let’s suppose, for instance, that dealing with your e-mail sucks up 75
days a year, and one-third of that time is thrown away on useless tasks
like reading "reply to all" messages that don’t concern you or figuring
out how to answer long, convoluted questions. Using an average
knowledge-worker salary of $30 per hour, the authors point out that the
cost of 25 wasted days is about $6,000 a year per employee – or, from
the company point of view, $6 million per 1,000 knowledge workers.
Yikes."

Tips include sending less email, scheduling live conversations, and filing effectively.  See the article for the complete list.

Thanks to Renee
Blodgett for pointing me to this article in New
York magazine on busy executives (from the likes of VH1 and ABC) who are
trying to cope with email.  This quote made me look at the article a little
closer:

"Much as it facilitates the conduct of business, e-mail is threatening to
overrun people’s lives. It’s no longer uncommon for executives — even those at
middle levels — to receive 100 to 150 e-mails a day — a
veritable torrent that floods "24-7," to use the macho shorthand of e-business."
(Emphasis added).

100 – 150 messages?  This article was published in the Summer of 1999.  I’m
willing to bet that the executives quoted in this article now long for the days
when they only received 150 messages/day!

Anyway, the article is a good read and serves to
highlight just how long the management of email has been a problem in the
corporate world.  If you suffer from some of the addiction issues described in
the article, try my easiest productivity tip: turn off your
mail notifications and set Outlook to only check for email every 30 minutes
or longer.

Robert Scoble from PodTech.Net came by a for a demo of Inbox Alert and IMS
Professional.  The result is an 18 minute video on the ScobleShow.

Thanks for coming by, Robert.  Next time I’ll have a better haircut!

So far we’ve given an overview of using ClearContext IMS Pro with Getting Things Done and talked about Action Management, Project Designation and Review.  Our last excerpt from the setup guide Using ClearContext IMS Professional for Microsoft Outlook with Getting Things Done talks briefly about prioritization and points to additional resources available on our website.

Prioritization

A core feature of ClearContext is the automated prioritization of individual email messages. Though email prioritization is not a core tenet of GTD email processing, ClearContext’s prioritization engine can be extremely helpful when trying to get the Inbox down to empty. When there are too many messages to process in the time available, ClearContext’s prioritized views allow you to address your most important messages first while saving the less important items for later.

Priority is determined by the sender of the email, the recipient(s) of the email, your level of involvement in the email thread, and numerous other factors associated with the message. Designate given senders, messages, or message characteristics as higher priority and IMS will use that information to prioritize the Inbox exactly to your specifications. Messages are color-coded and ordered by priority, with the most important email from the most important senders appearing at the top of the inbox and junk mail appearing at the bottom. In addition, as you process individual emails, manually mark email conversations as higher or lower priority, changing future email’s placement in the inbox.

Additional Information

There is a wealth of additional information on the use and optimization of Outlook available on the ClearContext Website. All of the above features are documented in more detail in our User Guide. We have created several short tutorials to help learn about the product. Check out our weblog for tips and techniques for getting the most out of ClearContext IMS and/or our User Forums for technical questions and features and tips suggestions.

[This concludes our GTD series.  Download the entire guide here.]

GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of David Allen & Company. ClearContext Corporation is not affiliated with David Allen & Company in any manner.