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 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”
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!
All of us at ClearContext are really excited to announce the start of the beta program for ClearContext Personal. This free Outlook add-in helps people organize their email and make their inbox (and email experience) just plain better. At ClearContext, we have years of experience solving information overload challenges for email power users who deal with incredible amounts of email while managing multiple concurrent projects within Outlook. In talking to lots of individuals and companies about those problems, we’ve found that it’s not just those users that are overwhelmed with email; it seems like just about all business email users are frustrated with email and feel stressed trying to keep up with it. With ClearContext Personal, we expand the reach of our solutions to all Outlook email users who want a better answer to dealing with email overload. Here’s a demo:
Our goal with ClearContext Personal is to identify the most common problems with email faced by users of all types and provide solutions that work without requiring any effort or behavior change on their part. We want to help people figure out which email they need to deal with, put it in context with the information related to it so they have what they need to take action, and then automatically file it in the right place so all related information is neatly organized for them. And all those huge reply-to-all threads, automated notification emails, and other unimportant messages clogging the inbox? Yeah, put that to the side so they don’t keep getting interrupted. Doesn’t that sound better already?
I’ve written a lot about how email needs to improve. With this release of ClearContext Personal we’re taking some big steps towards addressing some of the key challenges I’ve discussed involving volume and context. And that’s just the start. TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm have already written about this launch – we really appreciate the great coverage from those writers and are really excited that improving email has become one of the hottest topics of discussion and innovation lately.
We’re all pretty tired around here and we still have a few finishing touches to put on some of the new web pages, so for now I’ll send you over to check out the ClearContext Personal product pages. Later today or tomorrow I’ll make a post that goes into more detail about the functionality of this release, what to expect in upcoming releases (including ClearContext Professional – a free upgrade for registered IMS v4 customers that incorporates all the new features in ClearContext Personal), and all sorts of other information about this launch.
I’ll end this post with a big THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this launch possible – everyone at ClearContext, the journalists/bloggers, and all of our incredible users who have given us such great feedback and assistance in developing a product we are sure you’ll love.
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.
Posted by brad at 1:55 pm on May 5th, 2008.
Categories: outlook, tips.
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.”
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.
Posted by brad at 2:03 pm on April 15th, 2008.
Categories: tips.
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:
You ensure that no matter the number of fires you come across during the day, you knocked an important task off the list.
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.
Posted by brad at 5:23 pm on April 14th, 2008.
Categories: identify, ims.
One of the features that I use literally hundreds of times a day is Original Message filing. It has become such a critical part of my workflow that I find it maddening when I try to process mail without it.
As you reply to a message or create an appointment or task from the message, set Original Message to File To Topic. As you save the new item, IMS will automatically file the original message to it’s associated Topic folder. This saves an extra step when processing mail to clear the Inbox.
For more detail on this and other advanced Task and Calendar management features, see our video tutorial.
Posted by brad at 4:22 pm on April 7th, 2008.
Categories: ims, manage, tips.
In this age of broadband proliferation where more and more software companies stop pressing physical media, it’s surprising to find a photo-shopped picture of a software box at every software site I visit. It’s silly really; an outdated convention that software developers need to display a retail ready picture of their product to add a sense of physical legitimacy in an otherwise digital world.
Far be it from me to buck the trend. Here’s our IMS box; coming soon to retail stores everywhere! 😉
Posted by brad at 9:44 am on April 4th, 2008.
Categories: product.
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.
