Do you have more than one e-mail address? I have three – one for my blog and writing acquaintances, one for family and close friends (and some of you are on both lists), and one for on-line shopping and bill-paying. That third one is because, as you know, any time you place an order or set up a payment, your address is immediately shared with dozens of associated businesses. Actually, I rarely check that one because it’s just spam messages.

So on one of these unexpected vacation days that I took the last couple weeks (translate: snowed/iced-in) I decided to take care of a long neglected chore.  Cleaning out my mailboxes.

Okay, so I’m lazy. No surprise there. But sheesh! That shopping mailbox contained…drum roll…over 7,000 messages, most of them unread. Note to self – check to see if this is a record. Oh my – I did not realize I had neglected it that long. It took me over an hour to delete all of them. I could have done ‘delete all’ but was afraid there was something I should have, so page by page I scanned them. Nope. Nothing I needed.

The other two weren’t quite that bad, but did contain a couple hundred, that I lightly screened before deleting.  That took time, too.

Resolution – NEVER let that happen again. Now I am determined to check the e-mails EVERY DAY.

I plan to devote no more than an hour to correspondence and Facebook each night.  Less most – some of my free time SHOULD go to writing, don’t you think? Another note to self: re-think the necessity of that Netflix subscription… Alas, there’s housework. Oh, yeah. Weekends.

But I do other things on weekends. Sigh.

How many of you face this quandary?   Tell me  – what’s your schedule?

I  just found out that one of my ‘waving’ neighbors down the road (you know, the ones you don’t know well, but wave at when you see them) has a cleaning service.  Hmmmm….let me check my budget.

This is my new mantra