ClearContext Corporate Blog

Inc Magazine has named ClearContext “Best for Organizing Outlook Chaos” in their article E-mail’s Little Helpers:

   

“What’s cool: It scans your inbox and automatically color-codes all tasks, appointments, and e-mails according to the subject matter and how frequently you correspond with the sender. That typically means everything in Outlook having to do with a key client shows up in red, while spam is shaded gray. ClearContext reminds you to follow up on unanswered e-mails from important contacts. In the pro version, you can schedule a meeting from within an e-mail — a function sorely lacking in Microsoft’s original.”

Also, CEO Deva Hazarika was quoted in this morning’s L.A. Times article You’ve got too much e-mail.

Deva is quoted in an article on the USA Today technology blog about next week’s IORG conference:

   

“The biggest impact, by far, is on business e-mail users," says Deva Hazarika, vice president of IORG and CEO of ClearContext, a maker of organizing software for Microsoft Outlook.

   

"Quite simply, the volume of e-mail people are getting is increasing and is more time consuming," Hazarika says. "On average, over the last few years it has doubled, to 100 to 200, a day. And the content of each mail has evolved from a simple note to a project-oriented task that requires a detailed response."

Last month NPR spent an entire week talking about email overload:

“E-mail. It was supposed to make communication easier, maybe even make life more manageable. The benefits are obvious — speed, global reach, mobility. But many people feel burdened rather than liberated. NPR looks at the e-mail assault and how to fight back.”

Segments include family spam, overload, no-email fridays and email security (among others).  Definitely worth checking out.

The E-Mail Age : NPR

Kelly Forrister has a great tip on the Simply GTD Blogs:

“Feel like you’ve gone numb to the Reminder windows that pop up on your Calendar? (Hint: answer yes if you find yourself clicking snooze or dismiss most of the time when you see that window.) Don’t feel bad. Most programs are built to help you to go numb to those Reminder because they set them on everything that is timed.

I’m not saying don’t use reminders–just use them sparingly so that when they go off, they actually mean something.“

She describes in detail how to disable reminders by default in Outlook and other tools.  Excellent advice if you haven’t already done it.

Nathan Zeldes has posted the results from two of Intel’s productivity pilot programs.  It looks like “Quiet Time” was more well received than “No Email Day”.  Read for more detail.

Over at Macworld.com, Joe Kissell recommends getting control of your Inbox by following a three step process; volume reduction, filing and message processing.  Though I’m not a big fan of Joe’s simplified filing system, it’s a good read regardless of which email client you use.

Additional reading – take a look at post Intelligently Empty Your Inbox if you are serious about getting your Inbox under control.

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.

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who has downloaded
or signed up for the ClearContext Personal beta. The level of
interest has been incredible. We’re
working hard so we can send invites to everyone still on the waiting list as
soon as possible.

One thing we didn’t really expect was how quickly so many people
would download, install, and send us feedback about their experience with
ClearContext Personal. Based on that, we’re
changing our plans a little bit. The
initial plan had been to roll out the first wave of invites to a group of
Outlook 2007 users, follow that with a quick round of bug fixes, and roll out
to a larger group of Outlook 2007 users plus Outlook 2003 users. We’ve received a lot of enhancement requests
and feature suggestions (many of which were already on our plans for the next
beta) from our beta testers in a few key areas that we agree will make the product both easier to use and more valuable to our users. So we’ve decided to extend development a few
weeks and roll a number of these changes into the product. People currently on the waitlist will
have to wait a little longer than initially planned, but the beta you’ll get
will be a much improved version of the product. Again, thanks a ton to everyone who has provided us with all this great
feedback. Here are a few key areas
we’re working on:

• Guided Setup – walk-through during setup with more details
  on contact prioritization and options for
  color-coded inbox views
• Filing – make one-click filing capability
  even smarter and more automatic, so keeping email organized will be even easier
• Contacts and Attachments – additional
  actions on contacts and attachments, and make it easier to work with groups of related items
• Message Prioritization – make it easier for people to customize how important messages from different contacts are to
  them
• Notification Managers – simplify the installation
  process for notification managers

We really appreciate all the feedback we’ve received so far
and are excited about these improvements that will make the product even easier
to use and give users a much better email experience from the first moment they
install the product. Please keep signing
up for the beta and stay tuned to the blog for more
updates. Thanks!