Drowning in Email

I read a bunch of things on my blog and the Internet yesterday that I didn’t like but the thing that bothered me the most was this comment from Simon:

and other times you never reply to their emails … 🙁

Most stuff rolls off of my back but the truth hurts.  And Simon is right.  I don’t always reply to emails.

And while some people have figured out how to deal with that fact, I haven’t.  I still want to reply to every email I get that requests a reply.  I am good at it, but not great.  And far from perfect.

I went back over the past 24 hours.  I recieved ~250 emails that got through various spam filters.  About 2/3 of them were from people, the rest being subscriptions of one sort or another.  So that’s about 150 emails that I need to respond to.

Of those 150, about 120 are still in my inbox awaiting a reply.  That’s what I am up at 5am working on.  And that’s what I am up at 5am working on every day. 

But its not enough.

And it gets worse.

I cleaned up my inbox on the way back from LA.  That was just over two weeks ago.  I now have 526 unanswered emails in my inbox.  That is 37 emails per day that aren’t getting answered.

I am not entirely sure what to do about this.  I could just give up and hit the delete button and stop trying to reply to every email.  At least that would be fair to everyone.  But I don’t want to do that.  So any suggestions that people have on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.

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