For all practical purposes, I declared email bankruptcy today. That is the act of acknowledging you have so many emails to respond to you’ll never get around to them, so you just up and delete them. It also means if you had sent me an email and were awaiting a response (in some cases such an email may have been sent a month or more ago), don’t hold your breath.

I have used many of my recent, dwindling number of posts to note things are busy here — a new relationship, a new book project and loads of new work for the Boston Globe (highlight of today was interviewing/hanging out with Jim koch of Samuel Adams beer fame — more on that later). But a bigger reason was I want to be better about responding to email in a timely fashion in the future.

Part of the reason why I took this rather drastic step is that I read this article and decided to consolidate most of my email accounts into a central gmail account. At last count I had a dozen, five of which I use on a regular basis. As the article notes, this is deadly for productivity.

So now all of my emai accounts (with the exception of my Bridgewater account, which I’m working on fixing) filter through my gmail address. That amounts to better organization but it also means I can respond via Blackberry during my down time

The reason for all this is that it’s rather liberating, and the new system also forces me to deal with email as it comes in — not let it get buried in Thunderbird. I’d suggest trying it if you’re an email junkie like me.