I Threw My Fucking Back Out, And Also Cut Your Crap.

{Photo unrelated but awesome.}

You guys…am I 100 years old? How the hell did I get old enough to throw my fucking back out? Oh that’s right. When my kid started weighing more than like 10 lbs and starting insisting that I pick her up all the time. And the girl has no mercy. She doesn’t care that when I sneezed today my back spasm’d (how do you spell spaz-um-ed?) so badly that I can’t use my voice at full volume – she’d like me to pick her up, and NOW please. Grumble. Thank Moses for pain killers.

Anyway – this week I thought we’d tackle a little pile of crap I like to call my email inbox. On any given day it may have 100-400 unread messages in it. We’ll attribute this to my being on a lot of spam lists and having very poor email management systems in place that were effective pre-iphone in my early assistant days just after college. That was like a universe ago, and those habits have no business in my current crazy tech-addled life. I can’t get ahead of this email nightmare, and it leaves important emails hanging – often unviewed – longer than I’d like to admit. So I asked Chris Brogan, Social Media Star and Internet Super-User, how he manages what I can only assume is a much higher volume of emails than mine.

Okay that’s a total lie. Okay it’s not a TOTAL lie. I did ask Chris Brogan that question, but not in relation to this post. But it ties in so beautifully that I’m going to take some editorial license here and connect the two. (The two being my not-that-recent twitter exchange with Chris Brogan, and this installment of Cut Your Crap. Stay with me.)

Whatever. Here’s the gem (turns out I didn’t need to bother him – he’s blogged about it as well):

Have three email addresses. One for business, one for signing up for web apps, and one for personal or more important conversations.

I know, right? So simple. And yet – I totally managed to fuck it up, Chris Brogan. See…I have all those types of email. I even have a fourth kind: Blog mail. But dude…the problem is, once I had all those emails coming in to my one inbox, [and my one iPhone, and my one iPad…and so on and so forth…oh, actually just those three…] I started not noticing that I was initiating conversations from whichever email I had replied to last…and now I can’t even tell you how often I get an email titled a) “Have you been getting my emails?” and b) “Which email address should I use for you?” I notoriously read things on my iPhone and then save for later…which never comes because those emails are buried in other emails before I even finish clicking “mark as unread.” Trust me, I’m not bragging.

So, now I’m thinking of doing something drastic. What is your guys stance on email bankruptsy? Is that totally fucked up? I feel like I should just start fresh before I lose friends and alienate [more] people, you know? So…I guess I’m more asking for advice than sharing advice, unless you like that inbox advice from Chris Brogan, in which case, you’re welcome.

Help?