My Geekdom

Keeping up with email can be a difficult task. Assuming that you have a good spam filtering mechanism in place, many people get hundreds of emails a day; either at the office, because of mailing lists they are on at home, or both. On my office email reader I filter many emails out never to be read (typically ones sent to large distribution lists that I know that I won't need) and still get just under 200 emails a day. So the question is what to do.

I've previously discussed GTD methodologies and their application for email management. That's half the philosophy behind the Clear Context Information Management System(CCIMS). Before I can describe the second half of the philosophy, let me make an aside into some of my mother's advice on organizing a house (one glimpse of my room when I was a teenager would show that I obviously paid more attention to her words than I did in following them). Her advice, like most good advice, was simple yet brilliant. She advised "As you organize, try to touch each item only once or, at least, minimize the number of times you must handle each item as best you can." In practice this means that once you've figured up what to do with something, do it. Don't make piles that you have to sort through a second time or third time. I view it like doing laundry. One strategy is to take the clean clothes out of the dryer and put it into a basket, carry that basket to your work area, take the clothes out of the basket and fold them, put the folded clothes back into the basket, carry the basket to each dresser, sort through the basket for clothes that belong in that dresser, and then proceed to the next dresser. Another strategy is to take the clean clothes out of the dryer, fold them as you remove them, put them into baskets arranged by the dresser they belong to, and then move each basket to the corresponding dresser and unpack it. Assuming you have the room, laundry baskets, and other tools to do the latter mechanism, it seems clearly more efficient. CCIMS is just those tools you need to implement the second laundry strategy within Outlook.

GTD tools such as GTDGmail provide some sorting, labeling, and archiving abilities for email. They perhaps even allow you to touch each email once. But, CCIMS is designed, not on sorting individual pieces of email, but rather on sorting entire threads. And while tools such as GTDGmail require you to follow ritualistic behaviors such as examining the list of deferred items and determining whether each one can be enacted upon or not, CCIMS automates all of this for you. Some of its more exciting features include:

• Once you've labeled a thread, all subsequent email in that thread, whether it arrives in a minute or a year, is automatically labeled. Furthermore, with a weak built-in rules engine and a strong engine weekly connected to Outlook rules (i.e.: neither is great but each is useful and has a different range of functionality), you can automate the labeling of threads. For example, you can say that any email that comes in from MyImportantCustomer.com should go into the Customer/MyImportantCustomer topic.
  
• When you defer a mail message, you specify how long you wish it deferred and, when the time arrives, it will magically appear in your inbox awaiting your attention.
• When responding to an email message you can specify that you wish, by means of an Outlook task with a due date and alarm, be notified that there has been no response and that you should take follow-up action. If a reply comes back, the task is marked as completed. This gets setup with the click of a button.
• Should you receive a mail message that will take more than the 2 minutes of response time recommended by the GTD methodology, a simple click of a button will turn it into an Outlook task for you to deal with at a later time.
• Even with Outlook 2007 and Windows Desktop Search, finding related items in email is greatly simplified with the use of CCIMS. At a button click, all related items will be shown. Besides showing related items, CCIMS can show related actions, alerts, and the history of the individual item.
  
• Should an email thread arrive and you just don't care (say it is an argument about what color to paint the walls of the janitor's closet, you can "unsubscribe" from the topic. After that, you just never see another email on that topic again.
• While far from the last wonderful feature that CCIMS provides, one of the coolest is that besides automatically labeling each thread, it also prioritizes each thread. It prioritizes each thread into one of five priority buckets based on a multitude of factors including your participation in the thread, if the email is sent directly to you or a list you're on, who sent you the email, etc... The relative values of these factors can be individually configured. Of course, you can rank your boss as "Junk" and automatically prioritize their email to the bottom of your inbox. On the other hand, if your boss requires instant attention, you can set up an alert such that you are notified if email comes in from your boss and isn't read in two hours, you'll get a pop-up notifying you of the unhandled email.

All-in-all, CCIMS is a wonderful tool. I've used it for a couple of years and recently switched from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 and, much to my surprise, CCIMS configured itself for 2007 and had several features that were better or better integrated. I'm certain that it reduces the time I spend dealing with email to under 50% of my what it was without it. Between the ignoring of features, automatic categorization, push-button task creation, deferring items, and automatically prioritizing incoming mail, I can quickly view the most important emails and (don't tell anyone at my office) just file many complete email threads without even glancing at their subjects. If ClearContext gives a thread a priority 5 then the odds are that I'll never even see the subject. There is, of course, some setup to get the priorities right but ClearContext does a lot of it automatically (it begins with an initial scan of all of your email to determine what senders you consider most and least important) and allows simple adjustments such as marking a contact with priority of Junk or stating that having your name in the To or CC header is of great importance.