Gui Cremerius

Who doesn’t suffer from email overload these days? Even my 75 year old mother sometimes claims she’s getting too much email!

Some time last year, I found this nice add-in for Outlook (yes, that’s what I have to use at work) that does and incredible job in prioritizing and organizing my email. It has even the right name: Clear Context It does a lot of other nice things too, like scheduling something out from an email into my calendar with the push of a button, or creates a task from a message.

The feature I like the most and use all the time is something very simple but very timeconsuming: filing messages. IMS implements a nice way of doing it by keeping track of the folder/topic you assign for the very first message in a thread, and then it just remembers it. You could either press the File Message or the File thread to get them out of you inbox and into the right folder. Your replys are also filed in the same folders if you whish, so you keep the whole conversation together. This is something I really like!

You could also defer messages and get them out of the way until sometime in the future, where they pop-up again as a new message. Isn’t that something nice?

Another powerfull functionality is a set of views for your inbox that puts the real important stuff right at the top. You could tweak this quite a bit, so all those powerusers out there would love this. By pressing the Related View button you get a powerfull view of all items related to that specific email you’re looking at. All this makes it a snap to find that important emial buried deep in some folder.

If you have to concentrate on your really important tasks instead of working your email all the time, the Alert function comes in really handy. Once set up, it will  only notify you if there are messages that need your immediate attention. That is a productivity booster!

As you know, I’m also experimenting with GTD and yes, Clear Context helps with this too. They even have a guide explaining how to use their product with David Allen’s methodology.

I’ve used Clear Context since version 2 and they have recently released version 4 of this marvel. Here’s a demo you might enjoy while getting the opportunity to appreciate all the new stuff they are putting into this version.