Visitors to the blog will notice a sidebar section titled "Getting the Most Out of ClearContext." This is a collection of posts/informational pages that should help maximize the benefit you get from using the add-in. If you are new to the product or haven’t had the chance to check these out, go ahead and take a look:
Here’s a quick little tip that I use all the time. After you’ve created a task or appointment, you may receive information in a subsequent email conversation that you want to include with the original item. Open the task or appointment, then drag the message from the Inbox onto the open item. Outlook will automatically attach a copy of the email.
Here’s a real world example. I’ve got a business trip next week. I initially created an appointment out of the email regarding my meeting using the Schedule button. IMS pasted meeting information into the appointment automatically. Later I booked a hotel. When I received the hotel’s confirmation email, I dragged it from the Inbox into my appointment. Now I have all the information I need right there in one appointment.
As an aside, if the information you want is part of the same email conversation that you generated the task or appointment from, this step isn’t necessary. Open up the RelatedView to see all messages, tasks and appointments in the email thread.
We pride ourselves on building a highly flexible Outlook Add-in that can be adapted to your individual email management process, whatever it may be. So, whether you’re a piler or a filer, there are features in IMS that will ultimately help you save many hours a week and reduce your email and job related stress. Along those lines, we continue to invest in new features to help both kinds of email users.
That said, I’m decidedly in the filer camp and start to feel some amount of anxiety when my Inbox has over 10 messages in it. Because of this, I find myself having a lot of interesting conversations with folks who are the polar opposite; people who begrudgingly empty their Inbox only when they have to due to size limitations.
It looks like Merlin Mann has encountered the same time of resistance, so he has posted his take on what to do if your organizational culture is such that you receive many long, conversational email threads throughout the day that require more than a few minutes of your time:
“Every time I give the Inbox Zero talk to a tech-heavy group — and most especially when I talk with engineers — there’s pushback on a couple issues. First, a lot of techies say they love it when everything gets routed through email, and second, they think an Inbox-Zero-type methodology isn’t particularly useful for the type of communication that they get all day long. And that’s conversations. Lots of conversations.”
For folks who match this description, Merlin has posted six tips that map very nicely to IMS features – threading, processing, filtering, standards, muting and save and search. It’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re still weighing whether emptying your Inbox will work for you. And if you do decide to take the plunge, see this post in intelligently emptying your Inbox.
We’re really excited about some of the new features we have coming soon to IMS. Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been working on, plus an opportunity to get an early look and start providing us feedback on the new stuff.
ClearContext IMS 4 Upgrade
Our next release will be a free upgrade for all licensed IMS 4 users. In our last product plan update we hinted at some prototype projects we’ve been working on. Based on initial feedback to those projects, we decided to roll a few of them into this near term release.
Contacts and Documents – The IMS Dashboard currently pulls together emails, tasks, and appointments related to a project. Now we’re adding documents to that list – helping you deal with all of the attachments that flow through email. We’ve also extended the product to not only let you manage the tasks and activities around a project, but also find and interact with all the contacts related to a specific project or subject. Stay tuned to the blog for more details about other cool stuff we’ll be doing around contacts and documents in Outlook.
New Dashboards – The current IMS Dashboard is focused on projects. But lots of emails that clog up your inbox are notifications of some sort that can be analyzed, processed, and organized for you automatically. We don’t think you should have to manually process all the social networking requests, log file reports, corporate announcements or various other types of status and notification emails that arrive every day. We’ve developed another type of dashboard to automatically manage this sort of processing.Those and other new features are part of our plan to have IMS address the issues outlined in Deva’s Inbox Thesis blog post:
The volume of information that people (people in this context refers primarily to “information workers” but is rapidly growing to include just about everyone) receive via email is far more than they can process effectively using the sequential processing of individual messages for which most email clients are designed. At the same time, the information and the range of tasks/actions that flow through email are increasing in scope, importance, and variety. This necessitates new means of information processing consisting of the following elements: prioritization of incoming email, categorization of information, aggregation of related information, and context-specific actions for different types of information. This allows users to process information more effectively by taking advantage of the context of the information to provide a set of relevant actions to deal with information at a higher level than a single message basis.
Based on your feedback, we’re also making a number of improvements to the existing IMS 4 features. These include:
So how do you get to see all this cool new stuff? We’ll be opening up the beta in stages. If you’re interested in getting a look at early, pre-release software, send an email to beta at clearcontext dot com. We’ll put you on the top of the advance preview list and notify you when a beta version of IMS is ready for download. Honestly, I can’t wait for you to get your hands on this stuff and let us know what you think about it!
You might be interested in the results of this email research:
"By taking a “typical” employee and making some hypothetical assumptions it is possible to determine the amount of time that can be saved through implementing the guidelines mentioned above. If an employee has set up the email application to check for email every 5 minutes then it is possible, if (s)he is a heavy user of email, that there could be 96 interruptions in a normal 8-hour working day. However, if the email application was set up to check for email every 45 minutes then the amount of possible interruptions is reduced to 11 per day. For example, if it takes on average 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an email and the employee is interrupted every 5 minutes, then this would only leave the employee 3.5 minutes before the next interrupt. However, if the employee was interrupted every 45 minutes and the emails had accumulated to a total of 9, then it would take on average 6 minutes to read all 9 emails and recover from the interruption. This would then leave 39 minutes before the next interruption, allowing the employee more time to get on with “real” work."
The research was completed in 2003 – I suspect the numbers become worse with the increase in email volumes and technology demanding our attention over the last few years. Net net, use Do Not Disturb or turn off your email notifications altogether.
The Guardian calls email "a broken business tool" in a Sunday article. Some facts:
"The average employee spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, suffering interruptions and distractions with every ping from their PC or BlackBerry. Worldwide email traffic has now hit 196 billion messages a day, according to the research firm the Radicati Group, and is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011."
Tom Jackson, a senior lecturer in the information science department at Loughborough University, has an interesting solution to the problem:
"Jackson, who has provided email training to clients including the Danwood Group and Leicestershire police, has also designed a program which can name and shame bad emailers within an organisation. ‘It will go through all the emails you’ve sent and give you a score. It looks at how many people you sent it to, did you "reply to all", how big your subject line is, whether the message is well written. It gives a ranking of good and bad emailers, which can be a shock and make people reconsider what they’re doing."
Though I am personally pro-training and anti-shaming when it comes to email management, we have heard from many who are interested in finding technical solutions to help employees understand the implications of their personal email management style. Maybe better knowledge of the potential impact your message will have on others is part of the puzzle?
Thanks to customer Patrick who forwarded both this and last week’s BBC article!
A quick Friday note – the BBC has published an article on email that’s part history, part problem, and part solution. Here’s my favorite stat from the post:
"On average, we spend 52 hours a year just dealing with our junk mail."
They also mention the mixed results Deloitte saw from Free Email Day and give five tips for taking control of the Inbox (Filter spam, target email, write carefully, reduce interruptions, get training).
Yesterday Jason Clarke at Download Squad published his take on clearing a bulging Inbox. His process, deemed Inbox 0.5, involves decreasing the number of messages in your Inbox by half every day until it’s cleared.
If the psychic weight of being an Inbox Piler is taking its toll, there are a number of similar recommendations for clearing your Inbox and getting to zero email bounce. In addition to Jason’s Inbox 0.5, there’s Merlin Mann’s Email DMZ (Michael Linenberger recommends a similar process) and Deva’s Ten a day plan.
All of these plans have their merits and I can attest that, whatever process you use, the feeling of relief you get when you keep your Inbox count low is well worth the effort. If you’re concerned that you’re going to drop some important messages when cleaning house, use a variant of our Vacation Email Triage recommendations to jumpstart the process and intelligently dump messages from the Inbox:
Email is the Internet’s killer app, so it’s no surprise to me that, when given the opportunity, the web luminaries at the Future of Web Apps conference chose to design an app to help them with email. In a panel that was given 40 minutes to design a new web app from the ground up, the group spent the most time working on an app to help manage email. From moderator Erick Schonfeld’s TechCrunch post:
"But the app we ended up spending the most time brainstorming was one that Digg’s Kevin Rose dreamed up to help him manage his e-mail. He can’t keep up with it all, and wanted to come up with a way to stop offending people who he never gets back to by sharing some of his e-mail data with them. The concept was a site that keeps stats on your e-mail usage that your friends can check to see how far behind you are in responding to e-mails in general. (”It’s not you, it’s me”)."
Of course, this doesn’t really help. Regardless of what system you have in place, you respond to the messages and people that are most important to you. Letting someone know that you’re a really busy guy and that they’re not important enough to merit a personal response isn’t going to make them feel better. The key is to put in place technology and methodology to increase your efficiency and get more done so no important messages fall through the cracks. See Deva’s Inbox Thesis for more on this subject.
CNET’s Caroline McCarthy took the opportunity to sound the email death knell. As I have said before, nothing could be further from the truth. Email is going to have a place in the business world for a long long time and, when it goes toe to toe vs. today’s newer collaboration tools in an enterprise setting, you’ll find that email’s so-called replacements sorely lacking. The comments on the CNET article seem to agree.
Drew Loika has written a very flattering review of ClearContext IMS on his PreMagination blog. In addition to a detailed explanation of how the product has helped, Drew writes:
“Recently my demo expired and while I already deeply appreciated the tool, that appreciation has been further emphasized due to the tools absence.”
Lucky for Drew, our long-standing, free license program is still in place. Write a review of the product in a public forum (blog, website, discussion forums, newsletters, etc.), send us a link, and we’ll send you a license that will unlock the trial version of IMS. It’s really that easy.
Here are the details:
That’s it. Follow the guidelines above, send us the link, and we’ll send you a license.
And Drew, thanks for the help putting the word out about ClearContext! Drop us a line at support at clearcontext dot com and we’ll get you a key.
*** The free license program has been discontinued. This blog post remains up for reference only