Claritude Software was founded in 2005 with the mission
of helping busy people to increase their productivity, by
providing tools to manage their email, tasks and commitments
more effectively.
Itzy Sabo, Founder
Itzy
is a seasoned hi-tech manager with over 15 years experience in
developing and managing a diverse range of software products
at both technology start-ups and established companies,
including network security appliances and software, Internet
products, development tools and enterprise information systems. Itzy most recently served as Vice President of Product Management
at Finjan Software, a successful network security company.
Itzy has been practicing the art of Getting Things Done (GTD) since the beginning of 2004,
and he founded Claritude Software as a natural step in his
quest for productivity enhancing tools.
Read Itzy's email productivity
blog articles
The SpeedFiler Story
Battling to stay on top of literally hundreds of emails
every day in a vibrant company which rose with the sun in
Asia and turned off the lights late in the California evening,
Itzy looked around for tools to help him cope. After trying
a number of these products, and coming to the realization
that there was no magic cure, Itzy understood that he would
have to build his own tools.
Itzy realized that although he had a number of problems,
the single most significant contribution to his stress was
his email inbox, which contained thousands of messages.
He had read or at least scanned most of these, and even
acted upon the critical ones, so why were they still languishing
in his inbox and clouding his vision? Identifying the urgent
messages was not the problem — Itzy's highly customized
Outlook environment took care of this — it was in how they
were handled after being read. Or more accurately, how these
messages were not being handled.
Further analysis showed that most of these needed to
be filed in one of Itzy's few hundred folders (one for each
customer, project, product, version, and so on), and this
was not happening. It was not happening for a very simple
reason: Microsoft Outlook's user interface does not make
it easy to file messages when you have lots of folders.
Dragging and dropping requires a lot of patience while waiting
for the folder tree to scroll and the parent folders to
open. Filing via Outlook's Move to Folder window
is also tedious, having to scroll and manually open each
parent folder until the desired folder is visible. Predetermining
the final resting place of outgoing messages is even more
tedious, as this feature requires many clicks to reach,
and is just as cumbersome.
Itzy solved this usability problem by building an Outlook
add-in that replaced Outlook's user interface for filing
messages, with a much more ergonomical interface. It made
an immediate difference to his inbox! Itzy started offering
it to colleagues and friends who suffered from similar symptoms,
and before long, SpeedFiler, as it was dubbed, became a
standard part of Outlook for these people.
There are many other aspects to dealing with email overload,
not all of which can be solved by software. This is the
story of how a simple solution to a seemingly minor usability
issue, has significantly improved the work habits of many
users, without attempting to force them to change
the way they work. Claritude Software was formed
to continue this journey by developing additional tools
to help busy people cope with their ever-increasing workloads.
