Mind you, it’s wonderful, intelligent clutter. It has to be because it was created by the best writers, videographers, cooks, artists and photographers. However, there isn’t a way in the world that I will ever be able to look at it all.
I’m one of those Twitterers who like to share links to meaningful content. That endeavor requires me to read articles, watch videos and look at photographs – lots of them. So during the day if a couple (or a couple hundred) potentially interesting emails flows into my inbox. I don’t delete them. not I leave them there for that magic time when I ‘will have time’ to read them. Regularly Outlook locks down my account with it’s threatening dialogue box, ‘Get the party back under control or its email jail for you toots.”
The clutter doesn’t end there though. I have been a big fan of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us for a long time. It is a great way for me to keep track of my favorite topics, writers, artists, techies, cooks, political pendants, marketers, comedians etc. Since I finally ‘GOT’ Twitter last summer my Del.icio.us account has ballooned in size the way I imagine I might if I lived in New Orleans (crayfish pie anyone?). I have bookmarked thousands of pages and my tags list is frightening in length.
And then there is my RSS feed reader. It used to house the downloads of a few dozen blogs. It was a manageable list. Last time I looked there were fifty four. They are all nicely organized in neat well titled folders. However most of the bloggers write at least once a day. Some of them crank out up to ten well thought out, thought provoking posts a day. I confess, it is RSS gluttony at its worst.
“At least it is all digital”, you might say. “You’re not polluting the environment with all of that unread material”. Wrong! Printouts, all smartly stapled and stacked go with me to the grocery store (hey, there might be a line), on road trips and to restaurants when I go for lunch appointments just in case the person I’m meeting is late or gets a better offer.
It’s sad I know. I have learned to stop listening to the scratching-scratching voices of the Keepers-of-the-Undone. These are the voices that used to drive my stress level smack into the red zone. Now there are just too many zombie citizens in the land of the Undone for the Keepers to track. Yes, it is clutter but I don’t ever have to scratch my head and say, ‘What should I tweet about today.”