Thanks for your comments. Part of the reason we relate topics to folders is to help people easily organize and archive their email somewhere outside of their inbox. The topics we assign are distinct from Outlook categories, but we agree that there are potential additional benefits to be gained from having multiple tags per message and utilizing search folders. Obviously, there are tradeoffs in terms of usability, compatibility with different Outlook/Exchange setups, and technical/performance issues that also need to be taken into account. We have made some major enhancements to the product in our 2.0 release that will enter beta-testing in November. We hope you and others will have a chance to take a look and provide feedback.

I’ve been meaning to blog about a simply great article in the NY Times, Meet the Life Hackers, as I am a fan of the interruption tax, but I keep getting interrupted. When [Gloria] Mark [from UCI] crunched the data,…

TreeMaps and SmartMoney’s efforts at presenting what is happening in the stock market at any time is a first good step. http://www.smartmoney.com/maps/

However with companies collecting terabytes of sales, financial and process information, there should be easier ways to see how your organization is doing at any time!

Nari

Deva – your system is quite handy in that regard – the algorythmic search looks interesting – and the ability to assign importance characterisitics to contacts is great. I am highly puzzled that you setup actual folders for the topics in the rather rigid foldering system. It would seem a bit more elegant to have your system create search folders for the topics. Also – why make them “topics” instead of just “tags”? The categories feature in Outlook is terrible – you just might be laying the groundwork to replace that with a highly useful tag version.

Yes, the rules system is very antiquated and difficult to use and maintain, however, once you went through the initial setup time (which would have to be done in any system absent something like the Clear Context history search) this can be done with Outlook as it is today.

-just a thought

Would love to have you take a look at my company’s product, ClearContext Inbox Manager for Outlook. In a nutshell, we analyze your email history and activity and use that information to prioritize your incoming email in order of importance. We also provide functionality to help automate the categorization and filing process. We’re about to start beta-testing on our next product, which extends a lot of this functionality by integrating task/appointment creation and other email-based-workflow features – and starts touching on some of the more advanced functionality you mention.

Another related idea is around context- “caller id/subject lines” for everything- see for example Stowe Boyd’s comments about a speech I made on this in the IM space. The real point here is that prioritization is not fixed. Some things are easy- the children’s school during the day, or the CEO, are always going to the top of the list- but “Ed calling/IMing” is not really enough- why is he calling? Just because he is on the team for project du jour does not mean that he is not calling about a game of tennis next week.

Bottom line- you need a blend of rules and easy low-impact user interaction, but with that in place you can really use your “partial attention” to get more done

It’s amazing how well it does in showing me the next few things I really should be working on, while making sure I don’t miss deadlines or appointments.

It looks like we’re seeing the first few of these intermediary applications that can actually help us manage our lives.