ClearContext Corporate Blog

Over the last few weeks, a number of our users have posted methods for using ClearContext as a vehicle to incorporate Getting Things Done into their lives.  As we mentioned in a previous post, one of our main goals for v2 was to build a flexible framework that helps customers work more efficiently within whatever system or methodology they use to process tasks and information.  I want to share with you some GTD-specific comments as well as some upcoming enhancements we are making that will better support our GTD customers.

Paul has posted a detailed review of how he has used ClearContext to integrate GTD into his workday.  He walks through ClearContext installation and the features he uses the most:

"As part of of my goal to incorporate the Getting Things Done way of working in my daily routine I looked for tooling that assisted me in managing my Outlook email Inbox. I had a look at the Getting Things Done Outlook add-in from Netcentrics but did not find it to support my daily work. So I looked further and found the ClearContext Information Management System Professional."

In a similar vein, Jeff uses ClearContext as one of his many shortcuts for Getting Things Done:

"More recently, I’ve added ClearContext to the mix. This is an addin for Outlook that makes organizing your Inbox very easy and efficient. It analyzes your email patterns and can move/highlight the messages you receive based on sender, topic, priority, etc. There are a number of other productivity boosters that, as you learn them and make them habits, can quickly add up. I really like the ‘task’, ‘delegate’ and ‘defer’ options, which let you turn a message into a task for yourself, delegate it as a task for someone else, or simply hide it away until a later date."

The Tech Personality blog has posted How to Handle Too Much Email:

"The technique I use is based on ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, my own techniques, and a great program called ClearContext. Now, my technique is based on Outlook & Exchange, because that is what I use, but you can adapt it to your email system of choice."

Ken has posted Implementing Getting Things Done with Outlook and ClearContext:

"In time, future versions of ClearContext should enable me to better expose the
custom fields so I can do a more clearer Category/Topic grouping to link up with
GTD’s concept of Action/Project. Overall though, I am quite impressed with
ClearContext v2.0 now that I’m using its tasks features."

This is a great segue into the enhancements that we will be making to better support our customers who want to integrate ClearContext into their workday:

1. Topic Integration in Tasks – as Ken mentions above, we will be exposing topic names in tasks in a future release to support the building of custom task views within native Outlook that include assigned Topics
2. Topic Duplication in Catgories – for all you PDA users, we’re going to give the option to automatically duplicate Topics in the Category field so that topics can be carried over to your portable devices
3. Enhanced Topic Assignment UI – we have found that many GTD users have very large topic hierachies.  We are enhancing our Topic UI to better support quick topic assignment and message filing
4. Delegate Defaults – when delegating an email, we will automatically set the delegated task’s status to "Waiting on someone else"
5. Follow-Up Category – we are going to support category assignment when creating Follow-up tasks from compoased messages

We are also investigating other enhancements, which include adding additional default options when creating tasks and appointments and enhancing the ActionView UI.  For more detail on upcoming enhancements, see the recent update to our product plan.

Are there other enhancements we should be considering to help you implement your methodology of choice?  Please feel free to post comments here or send feedback directly to support at clearcontext dot com.  All of our enhancements are driven by customer requests, so please make your voice heard.

Though we’ve had a version of the User Guide available on our website since release, I finally got the opportunity to port it to PDF.  If you want an offline/ hard copy of the IMS user guide, grab it here.

On a side note, I got to play around with Word 2007 when creating this file.  I have to say, though the new UI took some getting used to, I’m very impressed at how easy it was to stylize the document, adding themes, formatting tables, etc..  Maybe the page number in the footer is a little gaudy, but I just couldn’t resist.  Also, it appears that the native Word 12 "Publish to PDF" function did a much better job of converting my document to a PDF file than the utility I was using previously.  I didn’t know I had the talent to produce such a good looking guide!  (If I do say so myself…)

Now that we have v2.0 out the door, it’s time for a product plan update.  We have some really exciting things planned for the product in the near future that we’d like to share with you.  I also want to talk a little bit about our Office 2007 efforts.  I’m going to break this into categories – v2.x, Incremental Features, and Office 2007 plans.

ClearContext v2.x
Much like our v1.1 release, our v2.x release will be 100% driven by customer requests.  We received a ton of great feedback during our beta period and will use v2.x as our opportunity to incorporate more of your suggestions into the product.  These include:

ActionView User Interface Enhancement
Topic DDLB Enhancements – Better UI for management of large folder hierarchies
Tighter Topic Integration in Tasks
Unsubscribe from a thread
Domain Resolution for Exchange Users
AutoAssign functionality integrated with Outlook Rules
Import/Export of ClearContext Settings (in the meantime, see here)
Advanced AutoAssign Rule Management UI
Integration with an exciting new email product (more on this in the near future!)

Incremental Features
These are among the additional feature/functionality improvements that we’re considering for the product:

Advanced Contact Management Capabilities – including Smart Topic Assignment
Multiple machine support – “Master/Slave” mode
Topic/Priority sharing in groups
Custom Forms Support
Prioritization in Other Folders

Our future features and additional products list remains largely unchanged from our v2 product plan.

Made for Office 2007
We are extremely excited about the work we are doing with Outlook 2007, slated for retail release early next year.  Outlook 2007 will provide us the opportunity to more tightly integrate our features into Outlook, for a seamless IMS experience.  Though we can’t officially support Office 2007 until Microsoft releases it, each subsequent ClearContext release will be made with an eye towards 2007 support.  Planned “Made for Outlook 2007” features include:

Context Menu (Right Click) Integration
Enhanced Category and Flags Support
Integrated RelatedView Dialog
Ribbon UI Implementation
Optimized Performance
Additional Office 2007-specific functionality – we’re going to delve into more detail on this later

As always, your feedback can and does help us refine our product plans.  You can post feedback in our forums, on the weblog, or send us a note at info ( at ) clearcontext dot com. We will update the plan and provide more concrete timeframes as we integrate your feedback and continue product development.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates writes about the tools he uses on a daily basis in a Fortune magazine article.  He outlines his strategy for managing email, which includes the use of an assistant to help prioritize messages:

"I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know."

"I use tools like ‘in-box rules’ and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance."

"I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders
and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on
the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring
particular projects and particular blogs."

It sounds like Bill’s a piler, not a filer.  For those of you who don’t have the luxury of an assistant to priortize
and organize your email, ClearContext IMS Pro can do much of this triage work for
you by analyzing incoming messages, highlighting your most important
items, and giving you sophisticated tools for categorizing and actioning messages.

Over the last few weeks there have been several reviews on our new product that I wanted to share with you.  All of these folks were Beta testers and extremely helpful in getting the product out.

Garth Kidd – Productivity Tools

"[ClearContext] Assigns priorities to mail based on thread and participant, and colour-codes and sorts your mail by those priorities. That doesn’t sound as amazing as it is. I’ve never put down my credit card faster than when told my trial had expired."

Robyn Tippins – Email Management Is Essential For A Growing Web 2.0 Business

"I’ve been using the beta for several months now and I am impressed with the ability to organize my email.  In fact, I’m able to defer some emails to a later date (set by hours, days or weeks) and they arrive back in my inbox as if they are new emails."

Jason Clarke – ClearContext 2.0 to be released tomorrow

"The 2.0 version of ClearContext
comes with a raft of new features, tons of fit and finish, and
effectively turns Outlook into the email management solution it should
already have been."

William Bartholomew – ClearContext Evolves

"Anyone who has worked with me would have heard me rave about ClearContext; an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is invaluable in controlling your deluge of email."

Shawn Morrissey – ClearContext V2 – Get it. You’ll love it.

"Deva, Brad, and the rest of the folks at ClearContext have created the most powerful Outlook add-in I’ve found. You will find yourself touching every email exactly once (and some not even that often!) as ClearContext helps you file, defer, and followup on everything that comes through your inbox, and touching the most important items first after ClearContext automatically assigns priority based on your personal ruleset."

Finally, on Friday I had the opportunity to talk with Perry Reed on for The TabletPC Show #32.  Perry has been a user for quite a while and was kind of enough to let me talk for about 35 minutes on our new features.  Perry writes:

"We talk about how the tool prioritizes your email and facillitates filing and organizing it. We also discuss the new version 2.0 of the tool and the new features it offers. We then go over some of the technical details, particularly the difficulty of writing an Outlook plug-in and the remarkable stability of ClearContext. And we mention the integration between ClearContext and ActiveWords."

Thanks to all for helping us put the word out on ClearContext and most importantly, helping us get v2 to where it is today.  If you’re looking for more customer comments, see our testimonials page.

As I mentioned earlier, today we announced the release of ClearContext v2.  The new product line includes IMS Pro, our professional grade information management system and Inbox Manager Personal Edition, a free add-in for Outlook prioritization and filing.  For a comparison of the two products, see our products pages on the website.

IMS Pro v2 represents a giant leap forward for the ClearContext product line.  See our five minute flash demo for an overview of v2 functionality.  Here are some of the new features:

In addition, we have implemented numerous improvements "under the hood" – increasing prioritization performance, streamlining error reporting, and implementing WordMail support.

Inbox Manager got a v2 refresh as well.  Most notably, we now offer the product free of charge.  If you’re looking for a smart tool to help you get a handle on your Inbox, Inbox Manager Personal Edition is a good place to start.

On a final note, our free license program is still in effect.  Write a review of the product in any public forum and we’ll send you a key for IMS Pro.  Just forward the link to us at info at clearcontext dot com.  See our initial announcement for more detail.

We’re really excited about this new release.  Take a moment to review our new website, download the product, and let us know what you think.

I am very pleased to announce that we have officially released ClearContext v2!  I will write a longer post on v2 a little later, but wanted to share the press release below…

——————–

ClearContext
Information Management System Pro and free Inbox Manager Personal
Edition help Microsoft Outlook users efficiently cope with increasing
volumes of email by utilizing automated email prioritization,
organization, and email-driven workflow capabilities.

San Francisco, CA – March 22, 2006 —
ClearContext Corporation today announced the release of ClearContext
Information Management System Pro (IMS Pro), a Microsoft Outlook add-in
to help individuals efficiently manage email, tasks, and appointments
in a fully integrated fashion, and ClearContext Inbox Manager Personal
Edition, a free product to automatically prioritize and organize email.
Both products utilize patent-pending email and contact prioritization
algorithms to highlight a user’s most important email and provide
features to quickly organize and file related emails by project.

IMS
Pro includes additional functionality to create, process, and organize
not only emails, but also tasks and appointments. “As business users
face ever increasing email volumes, taking quick, effective action on
messages becomes vital,” said ClearContext CEO Deva Hazarika.
“ClearContext IMS Pro allows users to instantly identify critical email
and with a single click create action items linked to that email –
transforming Outlook into a powerful information management system.”

In
addition to instantly converting emails into tasks and appointments,
IMS Pro also allows users to delegate email to others or defer emails
so they disappear from the inbox and reappear at a later date. “Defer
is like a snooze button for email,” said Brad Meador, ClearContext’s VP
of Operations. “The combination of these features and automated email
prioritization allows busy users to very quickly perform ‘email triage’
on their inbox.” Outgoing message features include the ability to
generate reminders if a response is not received within a certain
timeframe and automatic filing of sent messages into project folders.

To
help users manage their action items, two powerful new dashboard views
have been integrated into Outlook. ActionView provides users with a
consolidated view of all pending action items (tasks, appointments,
deferred messages, and flagged messages) filtered by project, enabling
individuals to more efficiently manage and organize their workday.
RelatedView displays all related emails, tasks and appointments along
with a history of all activity within the email conversation, allowing
users to at a glance see when emails were sent or received and view all
action items generated from these messages.

ClearContext
Inbox Manager Personal Edition is available completely free of charge.
ClearContext Information Management System Pro is priced at $69.95 per
single-user license with a 30-day free trial available. Both products
can be downloaded at www.clearcontext.com.

I started to write Shawn Morrissey a note about this, then thought it’d be more fun to share.   Shawn writes:

"I found that, given the right seat on an airplane so I actually have
room to open a laptop, I can get lots and lots of work done.  I don’t
know why it took so long to break through the “duh” factor, and I
finally started doing the same thing when I’m on terra firma.  I’ve
started setting aside 90 minutes or so every day, and set Outlook into
Offline mode.  Then I can do tearing through my inbox without
distraction."

Once, for a big project, I traveled back and forth from San Francisco to NYC almost every weekend for about two years.  I flew so much that United sent me a gift.  "We see that your travels often take you to New York, so we thought you might like a New Yorker desk diary."  That’s when you know you’re on the road way too much.

The point is, I’ve never been more productive then when I was on that plane.  My team HATED when I flew, because after I landed I always connected up and sent off 50+ emails that had been written while in the air.  It was my time to catch up on all of the unanswered email of the week, take a project status check, and get my my team’s ducks in a row for the following week.

I think Shawn’s on to something.  If you need to focus on your Inbox for a while, take Outlook offline and pretend you’re flying.  If only I could figure out how to get a complimentary drink and bag of peanuts, too…

Before you read the article below, answer this question:

What word is related to the following other three? Cookies, sixteen, heart.

The answer is in the text and I unfortunately read it before I thought about the question.  Is it patently obvious or not?

Fortune Magazine’s Anne Fisher asks the question – if Archimedes were taking a quick shower instead of a bath, would he have formulated his displacement principle?  The gist of the article is that it takes blocks of time to come up with the really smart, creative ideas and our interrupt driven, multi-tasking work environment is making this increasingly difficult.  Here’s a quote:

"What scientists have only recently begun to realize is that people may do their best thinking when they are not concentrating on work at all. If you’ve ever had a great idea pop into your head while you were washing your car, walking your dog, or even napping, you already know what a team of Dutch psychologists revealed last month in the journal Science: The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all."

Now, as I read it, this is what David Allen has been trying to tell us all along – get your daily tasks under control so you don’t have to think about them to free your mind to be more creative.  This is certainly true for me – I do my best thinking on my walk to work when and my creative pursuits always benefit from downtime.

Jason Clarke has some great comments on why effective email management is essential to success in business and life.  I can’t say it better, so go read it now.

On thing I’d like to add – there is a huge sense of satisfaction you get when you keep your email (and consequently, your life) organized.  This is one place where David Allen and his GTD disciples are dead right.  I start to feel a lot of anxiety when the messages pile up in my Inbox.  It’s a constant reminder that I’m not on the ball and I find myself wasting time, going back through my email to make sure I haven’t missed something.  It’s a relief when I can finally sit down and action all those emails.  Don’t underestimate just how much of a difference this can make in your life!