A friend walks up to you on the street and says, "How's it going?" You respond that all is good but you are really busy.  Have you ever found yourself always plagued by how busy you are?  It's like the clock just speeds up and you have ten times the things you need to do and half the time to do them. This is never more present than when you decide to do the unmentionable (Evil Death Star Theme from Star Wars plays in background)...go on vacation! Who can even think of going on vacation? How will you respond to all those emails, voicemails, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, etc.? You bought a smart phone to help with this, but unless you were taking large amounts of your vacation time to clean these out, you will find yourself in the middle of a very stressful first day back that might continue, in some cases, until your next vacation. For every item you clear up, you find three more to replace it! No wonder it seems like we are always so busy. I recently was off for two weeks and now four weeks later I am still playing catch up.

The Midland Area Chamber ran an excellent program offered to our members a few months back about how to clean out your inbox, entitled Taming the Email Beast. I attended the program and felt like it offered me some great tips on how to deal with this and many other monsters that seem to suck a fair amount of time out of my day. I vowed to try it when I got back to the office and now eight months later I am still trying to find a chance to implement the concepts. I feel I need to be up-to-date with my current avalanche of emails so I keep putting it off.

So, as I am writing today's little ditty, I am imagining all of you out there in email world who have requested this little gem be sent to you. I see you starting to read this and I imagine and hope you are getting a little smile on your face as you do...So are you smiling?  If there are a few of you still reading on, thank you for your loyalty!

In the end, we all have just so many minutes in the day and need to find ways of being more productive, efficient, resourceful and, in the end, happier with ourselves. I wish you good luck at this and feel it's time for me to get back to my emails and work on taming that crazy beast. My apologies if you're waiting for my reply to an email, voicemail, text, tweet or Facebook post; I will get to you as soon as I can get the beast back in his cage.