I now declare e-mail bankruptcy every month or two. Things are that bad.
The last time I did this was September 26th. Things were fine for a few days. I stayed on top of things. Then earlier this week, my life all of a sudden went into busy mode again. Monday was busy at Custom Box. Yesterday I spent several hours trying to write a pair of essays for Get Rich Slowly. Today I had to make a sales call, and that took all morning.
The net effect of this is that I’m now behind on e-mail again. I started the evening with more than 100 messages in my inbox. These are not spam messages. These are not blog comments. These are actual messages that merit a reply of some sort. I’ve already filtered out the other stuff. I spent two hours tonight acting on the messages, and I’ve managed to whittle the total down to 58. But that’s still 58 messages that need some sort of action. Even if each message only takes an average of three minutes, that’s three hours I still need to find to work on e-mail.
I need a secretary.
You need a personal assistant.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-assistme30sep30,0,1261484,full.story?coll=la-home-business
I assume that many of these e-mails are GRS-related rather than personal e-mails. This might be a slap in your readers’ faces, but have you considered posting a disclaimer to GRS that states something like: I read and appreciate all e-mails, however, I’m not always able to respond to each and every one of them.” I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this, but I don’t know that their blogs are money generating . . .