I caught up (read -- scanned through and deleted and responded to important items as needed) on e-mail today and had just fewer than 4,000 when I started and am at 1,775. There were lots of great and important messages in my box and I am still getting to the more important messages.

If you let e-mail get away from you I feel you will never catch up. I don't know how we live without e-mail and more importantly how we are supposed to live with it. You can eat up so much time just catching up each day with your e-mail from coworkers, PR people, colleagues, etc.

I hope for more intelligent agents in the future that help us with the deluge of e-mail. I have noticed a dramatic increase in messages this past year and I don't expect it to slow any time soon. If I owe you a message, please be patient or better yet send me a copy just to be sure. I am not blowing you off... I promise. But I am trying desperately to get this inbox of mine down to a manageable size of a few hundred messages or so.

PS: While I was going through old messages, my daughter Priscilla (22 months old tomorrow) came into my room with an Elmo DVD and asked me to open it. I am not sure why she wanted it open except for the fact that she seems to like to open and close things. Anyway I opened it and decided I could play it for her while I worked. I have 2 monitors at home and she watched on one monitor while sitting on my lap as I typed. Sure, it isn't the best family quality time but she seemed happy and I got lots done. The hidden point is that I may have deleted an important message or two so please resend anything you really want me to see.

Have a great weekend!