ClearContext Corporate Blog

It’s been quiet on the blog for a while.  Our work on the V2 product is keeping us very busy, but exciting things are coming.  More on that in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, a thought occurred to me yesterday.  Most ClearContext users have probably never seen the statistics dialog.  We keep track of messages received, Topics assigned, AutoAssign rules initiated, email priority, etc..  To get a quick picture of what your email has looked like since you installed the product, go to Clear Context > Statistics.

We’ve said it many times before, if you don’t have a process for managing your email, you’re not being fair to you or your customers.  ClearContext is a great enabler for various popular efficiency methodologies such as those developed by authors like David Allen, Michael Linenberger, Sally McGhee, and others.   One of our key focus areas with v2.0 – the ClearContext Information Management System – is to provide a flexible framework that helps you be more efficient working with whatever system or methodology you use to process all your tasks and information, whether that be your own personal system or one developed by a methodology expert like the ones mentioned above.  We also plan to provide tools and enhancements to ClearContext that help users of specific methodologies really get the most out of ClearContext.

To that end, we recently met with Michael Linenberger, author of Total Workday Control, a really useful book/system on email best practices.  We’ll write more about TWC in the future, but we’re very excited about the opportunity to provide some views and other tools that will help people really leverage ClearContext functionality while following Michael’s best practices. 

A number of ClearContext users are fans and followers of David Allen’s GTD system and have already started taking advantage of the ClearContext 2.0 functionality within that methodology.  Here are a few comments from some of those beta users about how they use ClearContext to help them optimize their personal productivity approach:

In Getting Things Done you learn about the tickler file. … ClearContext v2 allows you to defer a message by a number of days, or to a specific day and time. This has come in really handy for me for the following types of emails:

1. I have to follow up on something at a certain date/time. I’ve either asked some one else to do something or I just won’t get to something till later. This acts as a great reminder system. Since my inbox has few few messages in it then I notice these reminders quickly.
2. Shipping noticed and the like. Typically I want to discard these emails, but I need them for a short period of time. This way I can just make it go away for a while and when it comes back I can defer it again, or delete it.

This feature helps me keep both my inbox and my task list clean of clutter. In the "classic" GTD way, you must add such an item to your calendar or task list. No thanks, because I am poor about doing my weekly review, these things get lost in my task list.

I think this feature alone is worth the upgrade. It works well, and helps me manage my inbox.

– Omar Shahine, ClearContext v2 Beta

 

Outstanding software. For anyone implementing the ‘GTD’ approach – this is a must have.  I have used the GTD plug-in off the David Allen site and this beats it hands down. Why?

1. The plug-in is robust and elegant keeping everything as just as simple as it can be.
2. Defer functionality allows me to put a task or email on hold for a set period of time without it fouling up my in-box or task list
3. The plug-in does not create lots of new views and linked items in by Outlook.
4. Schedule a meeting allows you turn an email into a meeting with one click. Great for coping with folk who send out invites as email not calendar requests. Also great for when a email thread has got out of hand and needs a face to face.

– Christopher Kenyon, Comments in the ClearContext Corporate Weblog

 

If you are considering GTD – then you will like alot of the new features in V2…  I find it is much easier to keep my inbox low and focused on what needs to be done. It is very easy to file the messages to the appropriate folders and now that it has the features to delegate, or create tasks or create appointment or follow-up on a sent message – this now has all the features I wanted.

– BJ Burlingame, in the ClearContext User Forums

 

Please send us your stories on how you use ClearContext to get through your day – we love to hear the feedback!

When we receive feedback that ClearContext didn’t work for an individual, the most common response is that ClearContext "changes too much."  We have put a lot of effort into integrating ClearContext into Outlook and making its operation as seamless as possible, but yes, to get full value out of our information management system there is some expectation that the user will alter the way he/she approaches email.  I don’t think that this is too much to ask – most users would not be trialing the software if they didn’t think that email was broken to begin with!

Today, a review of the product was published on The Code Project embracing the change:

"In a nutshell
ClearContext totally met my need for a mail management tool in a lot of
ways I never expected. It really changed the way I think about email
and email management. If you get a lot of email and your work tasks can
be influenced by email then I encourage you to check out ClearContext.
Don’t just install it expecting something great to happen *POOF* and
you are a mail guru. You’ll need to spend an hour or two learning how
to embrace the ClearContext ideas and then you can start modeling your
email in a way that works for you."

For more detail on the process code-frog went through to evaluate email management solutions and how he uses ClearContext, read the entire post.

Thanks for the well written, thorough write up, code-frog!

This is a great way to kick start your 2006 commitment to good email management.

Happy New Year!

As many of you return to work after the holidays, make it your New Year’s resolution to get organized.  We made several recommendations in last year’s Holiday Email Avalanche post.  Here’s our recipe for email productivity in 2006:

1. Get yourself an email management strategy for the new year.  Buy a good methodology book like GTD, or Total Workday Control, or Take Back Your Life!  Adapt a methodology to your particular needs and stick with it.
2. Download and install the ClearContext v2 Beta to help you implement your newly chosen email management strategy.
3. Use ClearContext to triage your email on return from vacation:
   • Quickly separate the wheat from the chaff via our prioritization algorithm – using ClearContext’s automated prioritization address your high value email first (in red, at the top of your inbox) while safely ignoring junk email (in gray at the bottom) until you’ve gotten on top of things.
   • Use AutoAssign rules to quickly categorize and file bulk newsletters, group mailing lists, etc. and read them at your leisure.
   • Use ClearContext’s message threading to ensure that you are looking at the entire conversation – don’t waste time answering an email that was answered in a later repsonse by someone else.
   • As your process your inbox, use the new workflow features in our beta product to quickly convert email to tasks and appointments or defer email for later consumption.
4. Finally, keep yourself organized throughout the year.  Let ClearContext help keep you on track throughout the year by automating your daily work regimen.

Best wishes in 2006.  May all of us have a more productive and prosperous New Year!

Season’s Greetings from ClearContext!  Hopefully you are all getting a much needed break and spending time with your families over the holidays, while we are here feverishly working on our 2.0 release.

We are pleased to announce the public beta of our v2 product, the ClearContext Information Management System.  IMS extends some of our key v1 message management concepts to task and calendar items.  New features include:

• Defer messages for later consumption
• Create follow-up reminders
• Generate tasks and appointments from email
• See a consolidated view of the information in Outlook via our RelatedView and ActionView buttons.

To download and read about the product, see our beta page.  For more detail on our v2 plans, see the second half of this blog entry on email management.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us test the v2 product so far.  The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive – we look forward to hearing what the rest of you think about our new features!

Perry Reed at The Podcast Network spent some time comparing ClearContext to SNARF on episode #25 of the Tablet PC Show.   He concludes that ClearContext is a "better way to go" and that, for him, it is "a very nice way to organize my email, to keep track of it, to know what I need to respond to right away, and then to manage it after I’ve read it."  To listen to Perry’s analysis, check out his podcast at around the 21 minute mark.

Thanks for the review, Perry!  We agree, there is more to email management than simple prioritization.

A note for Tablet PC users.  If you’d like to ink basic ClearContext functions, use our stuff in conjunction with ActiveWords InkPad.  Using our ActiveWords agent, create AW’s that assign ClearContext topics to email conversations, automatically file messages, etc..  I think you will find that our application, in conjunction with ActiveWords InkPad, will greatly enhance your productivity within Outlook.

Microsoft Research today released a new utility called SNARF that “filters and sorts e-mail based on the type of message and the user’s history with an e-mail correspondent.”
It’s interesting and good to see Microsoft acknowledging the
significance of some of the problems we’ve been tackling at ClearContext for the past couple of years, but there’s a lot more to solving these problems than prioritization and triage.

In March 2004 we described a number of email-related problems and discussed our approach to solving them in our white paper, Designing a More Effective Inbox.
In that paper we describe the design philosophy behind the
patent-pending contact analysis and email prioritization algorithms at
the core of the ClearContext Inbox Manager product we released last
year.  A key consideration in our design was to seamlessly
integrate this functionality into the existing Outlook Inbox that
people use every day, We chose not to add more overhead to their busy
worklife by creating a second interface for them to use (as products
like the SNARF utility or NEO require).

Based on our survey of high-volume business email users, we found
that email prioritization and triage was definitely an important factor
in effectively dealing with email, as described by a number of our
users, including Omar Shahine.  That was just one of three key areas where our users wanted help with email, though.

The second area we received the most feedback about had to do with
filing and organization of email.  ClearContext Inbox Manager
allows topics to be assigned to email conversations, automatically
organizing related emails in easy to manage topic folders as described
in William Bartholomew’s review.

The third key area has to do with action items and workflow
generated from email.  Email is no longer just about
information.  The tasks, appointments, and other action items that
make up an individual’s workday are largely driven from email.
Our focus in our 2.0 release has been on extending ClearContext
functionality beyond just the Inbox and emails to integrate across and
link all of these items.  We describe a number of the features in our product plan.

We have recently started beta-testing ClearContext v2.0
with a small group of users.  We will very shortly be announcing
an openly available beta 2.  In advance of that, we’d like to give
you a sneak-peek our ClearContext 2.0 product line (that will be
officially announced in more detail upon GA release).

ClearContext Inbox Manager Personal Edition 2.0 – this free product will be focused on inbox prioritization and color-coding functionality

ClearContext Inbox Manager 2.0 – this upgrade to our existing
product will expand functionality beyond the inbox and add a number of
brand new features, such as unified views of all Outlook items related
to the same topic/project

ClearContext Professional Information Management System 2.0 –
this product goes beyond email management to add email-driven task
assignment, scheduling, deferral, delegation, follow-up management, and
other workflow functionality

As a special bonus for our existing 1.0 users, all registered users who participate in a follow-up survey to our email usage survey will be given a free upgrade to our IMS 2.0 product.

It’s good to see a lot of awareness and momentum building around
something we’re very passionate about here, making email a better and
more efficient tool for communication and workflow.  We’re excited
about our upcoming releases and look forward to hearing your feedback
as more of you try out our new products in the coming weeks.

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!  In particular, we would like to give special thanks for everyone who has helped ClearContext grow throughout the past year.

We would also like to thank in advance all of those who are helping or will be helping us test our next major release, ClearContext v2.  Yesterday we released ClearContext v2 Beta 1 to a limited group of testers.  We will be gathering feedback, integrating changes, and release a public beta as quickly as it makes sense.  If you aren’t on the current beta test list, feel free to send us a note to beta@clearcontext.com and we will notify you when we have something ready to look at.

So, enjoy your holiday and watch our blog for future announcements regarding v2.

I’ve been busy testing ClearContext v2 (more on that in a day or
two) and let a couple of stories pass by without comment.

First,  Udo Shroeder has posted Email, Not Worth It? – another rebuttal to all these recent articles published predicting email’s death:

"[Email is] easy to archive, searchable, can be filtered, topics can easily be
scaled to additional people, it doesn’t take a lot of time to bring
some points across. Everything is documented, for eternity. And the
most important aspect: email doesn’t interrupt me."

Well said!

Also, the Radicati Group has posted the results to an email usage survey
(have I mentioned before that I love a good email survey?) that finds
that nearly 25% of email at work is considered personal in
nature.  Coupled with spam, the study indicates that more than 50% of "business" email is not related to business at all.
Interesting.