A quick administrative note…
With the release of v4 and the IMS Daily Workflow, I have made a concerted effort to tag posts by category. To support that, this week we added a tag cloud to the weblog. Use the cloud to drill down on product announcements, process oriented posts, individual steps in the IMS process, etc..
Our friend Robert Scoble weighs in on the future of email in the BusinessWeek Debate Room on a piece titled Email Faces Deletion; his premise being that “e-mail isn’t a good way to share knowledge.” ClearContext CEO Deva Hazarika has posted his rebuttal of Robert’s points on his newly revitalized blog, Email Dashboard. Check it out.
“Free email day” makes me sad.
The WSJ posts about companies who designate “Free Email Days” for their organization – entire days where employees are forbidden from using email to get their work done:
“While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.
The limits aim to encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide.”
If you’re a reader of this blog then you likely already understand the issues that too much email presents. From a USA Today article on the same subject, Fridays go from casual to e-mail-free:
“E-mail overload is caused by the sheer volume of messages zipping around the globe. Each day, about 39.7 billion person-to-person e-mails, 17.1 billion automated alerts, and 40.5 billion pieces of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) are sent worldwide, researcher IDC says. White-collar workers often receive 140 messages a day, executive coach Marsha Egan says.”
But honestly, free email day sounds a bit like the ostrich putting his head in the sand. It’s like admitting that bad email management is sapping your employee’s productivity, but rather than addressing the issue you’re OK with them being completely unproductive 4 days out of the week. Hey, at least your organization gets some work done on Fridays!
I have said it time and again, if you aren’t efficiently managing your email, you aren’t being fair to your customers, your co-workers, or yourself. These companies need to be putting their efforts into giving their employees the tools they need to effectively manage the flow of information. And I’m not ranting because I want everyone to buy site licenses to our product (but you should!); teach your employees how to identify what’s important in email, how to efficiently manage those messages and how to succeed at their jobs rather than putting arbitrary restraints on their workflow because they can’t focus on the task at hand. The result will be happier co-workers, satisfied customers and a more productive, creative work environment.
And I won’t be sad anymore.
We’re getting close to final release of the next version of IMS Pro. Those of you who have previously contacted us about the beta program will be hearing from us soon. We’re keeping details on new functionality under wraps for now, but there’s a lot of exciting new stuff in this release. We’re expanding our current group of beta testers, so if you’re interested in participating in our private beta (participants must agree to keep information about the release confidential until launch) to get an early preview of all of the new functionality, please send an email to beta@clearcontext.com and we will get back to you with more information. Thanks for your assistance – we’re really excited to show you what’s coming and hear your feedback!
I have written about this before, but last week the Microsoft Outlook team blog posted, in great detail, one of my favorite Outlook 2007 features – collapsible folder list and To-Do bars…
As the problem of information overload continues to grow in the workplace, we’re seeing more entrants into this space with their own twist. One example is Seriosity, a recent entrant with a novel concept for the enterprise. They have created a system of email credits that people use to signify the importance of emails and compel recipients to pay attention. Multi-player gaming for email! Today we welcome another entrant to the space as the guys over at Xobni (a Y Combinator company) launched today at TechCrunch40.
Xobni is focused on contact-based organization, analytics and search within email. They utilize a number of concepts similar to that in a product from Microsoft Research, SNARF, to rank the importance of contacts and provide analytics about your email traffic with each individual. They also provide threaded views of email conversations, something we also do in both our Inbox views and RelatedView. Another focus of their product is search, though with indexed search in Outlook 2007 as well as free desktop search tools we’re not sure how important that area is for further independent development. Overall Xobni looks like an interesting product, sort of a slicker, updated version of Nelson Email Organizer integrated within Outlook to provide some interesting statistics about your email to help you be more efficient.
There are two main differences between our take on the solution to email overload and Xobni’s. While we share their passion for analytics and organization, more of our focus with ClearContext IMS is on effective ways to process incoming email. Secondly, their organization capabilities revolve around the contact. While we do a lot of things based around the contact, a key area of focus for us is relating and viewing information on a complete project basis, encompassing multiple to-dos, appointments, and emails from various contacts.
We’ve also been quite busy with new developments ourselves.
Having worked with thousands of customers over the past few years to help them be more productive in email, we’ve developed our own unique perspective on the best solution for the space. Like Xobni, our ClearContext IMS Pro product automatically identifies the highest priority contacts and your email relationship with then. We use that to prioritize incoming email messages, then provide functionality to take action on these messages and keep all of the information organized. While that is enough for many customers to love the product, we’ve also found that for many people the technology is just part of their whole solution. Productivity methodology gurus like David Allen (GTD), Michael Linenberger (Total Workday Control), and many others provide a structure for working with email that for many people goes hand-in-hand with the technology to provide a complete solution.
Over the past year, we’ve been working with a number of customers to distill the most high-impact techniques for managing their workday into a streamlined system that can instantly help anyone be more productive and get more done. We’re excited to show you how simple it can be to stay in control of email when, later in the year, we announce the next release of ClearContext IMS, a complete solution integrating best practices and software automation to help people be more productive and get more done with less stress. We’re in the midst of beta testing right now and will be expanding the beta group soon, so let us know if you’re interested in an early preview. It’s exciting to see more awareness building about the magnitude of the information overload in the enterprise, and we’re looking forward to seeing even more innovation in this space.
The ClearContext Team
Now the Wall Street Journal has got an article running on email overload. This one’s a hodgepodge of suggestions from the likes of David Allen, Merlin Mann and Mike Song (among others). I like this tip from Julie Morgenstern:
Another idea, if your job allows it: Ignore your in-box for the first
hour every morning, instead focusing on an important project. "Once you
open the email there are a million and one interruptions," Ms.
Morgenstern adds. "It’s very hard to settle your mind down and
concentrate."
Intel recently had their analysis of Infomania (“the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions”) published at firstmonday.org. The paper, Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer, is aptly titled; it shows that Intel stands to save almost a billion dollars annually by overcoming the inefficiencies due to information overload:
“The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge–intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.”
The paper hints that the calculation above, based almost solely on measurable employee efficiency losses, may only be the tip of the iceberg. The group also found that information overload had a very tangible, negative impact on intellectual property generation, work quality and employee satisfaction. For example:
“It is critical to understand this huge impact: because of Infomania, employees are not creating new ideas to the extent they could. New, significant inventions remain un–invented. Better solutions to major problems that may be hobbling an organization’s performance toward its goals are left undiscovered. The engineer who could have the “Aha!” insight leading to the next major product innovation is trying to find 30 minutes to think about it, and failing. The supervisor who could double a fabrication line’s efficiency can’t because they are nearly brain dead from staying up until one AM working on e–mail. Across the industry, knowledge workers and managers are thinking less, inventing less, producing less, succeeding less.”
If you think that your organization suffers from these same issues, please forward this paper to a technology buyer at your company and let them know how IMS Pro has helped you get on top of email and become more efficient. Send them my email address (brad at clearcontext dot com) and let them know that we would be happy to help them understand the scope of this issue and the solutions out there to help combat it. Thanks!
A final note – I found this via the IT@Intel blog. If you’re interested in the solutions they are implementing to solve the problem outlined in this paper, see http://blogs.intel.com/it/tags/infomania.
The Times reports on research that found that 61% of workers felt “stressed” or “driven” by email. The money quote from this article:
“E-mail is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It’s an amazing tool but it’s got out of hand.”
Somebody please tell these guys how IMS Pro can help! Thanks to Mike Koehler for the pointer.
NBC Nightly news ran a piece last night on email overload. From their website:
“As our society becomes more and more dependent on e-mail and text messaging, it’s easy for all that communication to get out of control. NBC’s John Yang reports on how some people are coping.”
Andrew Baron is featured in in the interview and is in the process of declaring email bankruptcy, but says he hasn’t figured out what he’s going to do to manage email more efficiently going forward. Sorry we can’t help you out, Andrew, but IMS Pro isn’t available for OS X yet. In the meantime, check out our tips for handling Email Overload.