ClearContext Corporate Blog

CNN has posted excerpts from former FEMA director’s Mike Brown’s email during the Katrina crisis.  Though I am certain that you could pull selected messages from my email history and make me look like a bungling idiot, some of this stuff would be laugh out loud funny it if wasn’t so sad.  For example, the day of the storm, Brown writes:

"If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god."

Why am I linking to this?  Whether you’re an effective leader or not, make sure that you never put anything in email that you wouldn’t want to be made public.  It could come back to bite you in a big way.  See Top Five Ways to Improve Email Etiquette:

5.  Don’t send confidential information.
It is very easy to forward email and consequently very easy to break confidentiality expectations. Don’t send anything that couldn’t be published in a newspaper or posted by the water cooler.

Maybe if Mike had been a ClearContext user he could have avoided some of the problems he’s had!  😉

…and apparently a lot of other folks do, too.  ZDNet cites research that indicates that 65% of workers are spending 1 – 3 hours per day in email.  This jives with our findings earlier in the year.  The spin on the results is that the problem is the result of poorly written communication, with 40% of the respondents spending 1/2 to 3 hours/ day wasting time on poorly written email.  IMO this is a chicken and egg problem.  Are people spending too much time in email because the messages are poorly written, or are the messages poorly written because they get too much email to deal with effectively on a daily basis?

43Folders is running their own informal poll on how many actionable messages a user receives in a given day.  Here’s what we found in our survey: 56% of our respondents received between 15 and 100 emails/day, with 62% reporting that 50% or more of that email was work related.  See our graphs on email volumes for more detail.

There’s some interesting conversations going on today about
attention crisis – the way I read it, the scarcity of attention due to
too much information.  From Fred Wilson’s blog:

"Most
of us have day jobs.  Many of us have families.  So we have a
limited amount of attention left.  And I suspect we are consuming
most of it with what we’ve got on our plates today."

This is too true.  As Clive Thompson wrote in his N.Y. Times article a couple of weeks ago (Meet the Lifehackers),
it is becoming increasingly difficult for an individual to consume
information available to them in a useful manner while still
maintaining focus on the task at hand.  No exaggeration, I have
been interrupted 8 times while trying to write this paragraph!

Along these lines, Stacey Douglas has posted some tips on how to cope with this problem.  The advice is sound, but even better is the reasoning on why this should be important:

"Why
should you care about taking in more information effectively? It’s how
you learn and grow. If information is a tool in your business, it’s a
survival skill. Understanding how to take in information effectively is
also a stepping stone to understanding how to help others take in
information more effectively."

Back in my project
management days, one of the five or six key competencies we reviewed
our employees on was good time management skills.  Today, I think
that has broader implications.  The employee who exercises good information management
skills has a huge advantage over those who allow themselves to become
mired in too much data.  They still both have a leg up on the guy
who has no interest in the outside world, though…

After reading Michael Gartenberg’s blog at Jupiter Research, we’d like to revisit the ClearContext vs. Outlook rules discussion.  At
first blush it could appear that ClearContext simply repackages some
basic Outlook rules.  This understates ClearContext’s
prioritization algorithm and email management
functionality.   Outlook rules are effective at doing fixed,
pre-defined actions on individual message criteria, such as flagging
email from your boss.  In contrast, ClearContext scores all
incoming messages on multiple priority levels; based on criteria
developed from your email history and contacts, accounting for
individual preferences and exceptions.  In addition,
ClearContext’s conversation management functionality
makes it easy to organize, categorize, and archive email threads once you receive
them, greatly reducing the time required to process email.

For a more detailed analysis, please see our weblog post ClearContext vs. Outlook Rules.

The irony is that I have been trying to get through this article for a couple of days, but I keep getting interrupted…

The New York Times published Meet the Life Hackers this weekend; detailing the plethora of distractions in the modern workplace and people’s tricks for avoiding them.  Using multiple monitors, turning off email notifications, and putting prioritization technology in place were included as tips.  It’s worth a read if you can get yourself a few minutes, distraction free.

Hat tip to Robert Scoble for the link to this article.  BTW – Robert took his email from 500 to 5 using our product and Omar is on the verge of achieving email Zen with ClearContext’s help.   With all the ClearContext love going around, we’re gushing like proud parents today!

Update: There’s a good NPR interview of the author, Clive Thompson, posted at NPR.org.

We had the pleasure of dining with productivity guru David Allen last night.  I have not been to a Getting Things Done seminar (yet), so it was fascinating to see exactly how passionate David is in his mission to help people get a handle on their information overloaded lives.  I now understand exactly why legions of people rave about the GTD experience.

I was curious to hear how David felt about our inbox prioritization engine.  In GTD, one of the key concepts is to get your inbox to empty.  IMO, that doesn’t negate the need for our product, as many of us experience times when there is more email to review than time to process it, making prioritization a useful concept.  Apparently, David sees the value.

As we continue to develop ClearContext, I think you will find that our product becomes increasingly applicable to the GTD way of doing things.  In the meantime, here’s a link to a post I wrote several months ago on implementing a GTD-like structure in Outlook using ClearContext.  Enjoy!

Buzz’s interview with John Furrier inspired the creation of the ActiveWords ClearContext flash demonstration.  The demo shows how to use the ActiveWords/ClearContext combo to manage Microsoft Outlook.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

Phil Sassen posted a review of ClearContext on his blog Tales from the Geekside:

"Der ClearContext Inbox Manager schafft Abhilfe im Kampf gegen die Mailflut."

Now, I don’t speak German, but according to Google, this translates to:

"The ClearContext Inbox manager creates remedy in the fight against the Mailflut."

I think that remedying the fight against the Mailflut is exactly what we expect Inbox Manager to do!

We were happy to send Phil a ClearContext registration key as part of our free license program.  Dankeschön, Phil!

Thanks to everyone who has asked about the status of product plans.  FYI – We continue to rapidly move towards our next major release (ClearContext v2.0).  Our initial announcement provides a good overview of the feature set; we will talk more about the final feature list shortly. 

Beta testing will start in Q4.  If you are interested in participating in the Beta, please send an email to beta@clearcontext.com.

A number of people have begun to ask about v2 upgrade pricing.  We have not finalized 2.0 pricing yet, but we will provide discounts to registered 1.x users that make it cheaper to upgrade then to buy the new product outright.

Thanks again and we look forward to hearing your feedback on the product when we get it out there!

BusinessWeek has an interesting article in this week’s edition titled The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard.
The basic premise is that, while the information revolution has boosted
productivity by 70% in the last 25 years, companies that are holding on
to now archaic corporate organizational structures are overloading
their employees with internal inefficiency.  Read this:

Globalization and the
Internet create great new opportunities, but they also ratchet up the
intensity of competition and generate more work — especially with the
existing corporate structure still hanging on tightly. "Nobody wants to
give up their territory or their control," says Shoshana Zuboff, a
former professor at Harvard Business School. Adds Lowell Bryan, a
McKinsey & Co. director: "Professionals are still being managed as
if they were in factories, in organizations designed to keep everybody
siloed. At less well-run companies, you’re struck by how frustrated
people are. They work like dogs and are wasting time."

Make that lots of time. Fully 25% of executives at large companies say
their communications — voice mail, e-mail, and meetings — are nearly
or completely unmanageable. That’s according to a new McKinsey survey
of more than 7,800 managers around the world. Nearly 40% spend a half
to a full day per week on communications that are not valuable. Other
surveys echo similar results. "We’re making our people compete with
sandbags strapped to their legs," says Zuboff.

One only has to look at the popularity of David Allen’s Getting Things Done Methodology
to verify that this is exactly right – millions of workers are
struggling to cope with overly efficient distribution of information
within an inherently broken internal system.  And while there are
lots of companies who provide tools and methodologies to cope with this
problem (ourselves included), there is a real need for big corporations to rethink the way that they manage their people and their business.

When I was in the consulting world, it was these types of
inefficiencies that opened the window for some of our largest and most
successful projects.  One of my clients had all the skills in
house to implement the enterprise systems we were building, but their
employees weren’t empowered to cross departmental lines to get it
done.  They ultimately spent millions in services fees to 3rd
parties who could work outside the corporate bureaucracy.  And
while the project was a huge success (we were inducted into the
company’s "Project Hall of Fame"!) they were paying us as much (or
more) for our skills at crossing organizational boundaries as they were
for our development and implementation work.

For more detail, read the BusinessWeek article The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard.