Stevea Robbins here and welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work lesson do more.

A reader writes,

When you come back from vacation should you try to answer the backlog of non-urgent email.

Ha ha, welcome to the future.

Email was going to make our lives heaven on earth and provide easy

communication that would bring us closer to our loved ones. And it did. Mom now sends us, quote

unquote, funny jokes, daily. Ha ha. And she forwards chain letters from little boy's dying of

cancer who just need one more postcard to break the world's

record. Craig Shergold, the little boy, is now fully cured at age 27. He has received 350 million

postcards. He has his own postal code and he really, really wants people to stop with the

postcards.

Then the business world got email.

Well, spam was a problem for a while, but now it's our well-intentioned colleagues, our clients and customers who are filling our inboxes and quietly selling us into email slavery.

First, recognize that email overload isn't your fault, and it doesn't mean you're a bad person.

You don't control how much arrives each day. So the more people who know and respect you,

the more you'll be flooded with email. So be flattered. Be flattered and then face the truth.

It's just too much to deal with. So save yourself by declaring a mini email bankruptcy for the week.

It's based on an idea by Lawrence Lessing of Wired Magazine. You delete it all. Then send a form letter

to everyone who wrote and you say, my backlog was too big to manage. To cope, I've deleted everything.

Please resend anything important. If you're afraid you'd seem less manly man by

admitting weakness, you can skip the reason and use flattery instead. Your emails are so very important

to me. Would you be a dear and rescind any important email? Of course, that has its own manly man

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