I spend five or ten every few days to unsubscribe from 'bacon' emails, and if it's more than 5 seconds to unsubscribe, I mark it as spam. Still get a flood coming in, but it helps hold back the wave.

Oh, and also, for all those things I want to read? Forget it! If I can't finish in the current sssion, it's gone.. All those save it for later sites are just more passwords to remember lol.

Anyway, cutting don the email saves SO much time for sorting out the other stuff... I'm responding because your post sounds like me, you gotta pick the best services and delete the ' maybe' and bad services- simplify and commit!

Wow, how do you keep your numbers so manageable? Mine are actually out of control.
You should write a book

I agree you are not alone in this world.
More options does not automatically lead to personal business improvements!

So one needs to make decisions on how far he wants to be engaged in the Technology Mess we are putting ourself into.

Simplicity is the answer.
Making and sticking to a preferred list of the technology platforms will help!!

Ed:

You're not alone - just as you suspected. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that it was impossib le to read every alert, every news-related email, every RSS feed. I tend to do my filing on a monthly basis - and purging also.

Dealing with Twitter's firehose was intuitive - I dip into the streams periodically and have lists for the most interesting. And I agree with you - who wants one more "how to"? Finally, I find the "unsubscribe" feature to be one of my favorites...

Best of luck in finding balance!

Just hit delete. You don't need it all.

I vote you pull the plug, shut off the monitor, and go outside and play in the sprinklers. It's not your computer that needs cleaning out, it's your mind! Get outside and gaze at the clouds. :-)

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Maria, I like yours a lot. It's finally warm here in Portland, Oregon and the sprinklers are beckoning.

You're not alone...people see me with 57 applications open and 3 IE sessions each with 20 tabs and they wonder how I manage it all. I do, for the most part, but you've got to focus on what's urgent some days. As for me, my Windows 7 stays up just fine for a month at a time, and even my XP machine can go two weeks.

in a much less extent than yours, I was almost in the same situation. Too much to read and unable to catch on. then I started to sort out things: is it important to my job? Is it related to hobbies? Is it related to health? Basically, I started to sort things based on how really important they are to make my job and my life better. I learned to discard funny videos and al sort of distractions without even opening the messages. Took time to organize gmail filters and created a filter "ok to delete" where I put all emails that are to be discarded. Every week, I read some of them, then select all and delete. Peace of mind, my life is better now. I do not need to open each one to check, because they are already sorted and if I do not read them, nothing bad will happen. Trust me.
RSS feeds are sorted the same way... when I'm in the mood, I read some.
Also, my life is much better because I do not have msn, facebook and others, only LinkedIn and I already think its too much.
You should really spend some time organizing your browser bookmarks. Define your own criteria to sort them, and open them when you need. It's time well spent, you will be more focused and happy.
And yes, there's life out there. Never forget this.

Postini - Junk mail filter owned by Google... best thing on the planet for reducing the actual amount of spam you get... It just works period!

You have my sympathies. As a NOC operator/engineer veteran I can pretty much certify the validity of your status. Yes, a reboot was a traumatic 20 minute 'down time' issue to bring back multiple browsers with multiple tabs and untold numerous passwords etc. Yes, each of the operators had 2 computers A/B'd into 2 wide screens. Isn't contract multi-tasking wonderful ! Heck, I still had my 'day-job' on top of it. --HEY, have a really great weekend !!

I stopped caring, every so often i go a few pages back in my email history to verify i didn't miss anything "important" then mark all as unread (usually in the thousands.)

I use gmail more like a news RSS than email. I also don't feel obliged to keep up with any of my rss feeds anymore. just check them out whenever. I only log in to facebook every week to check for events and birthdays, and the same with twitter, just to see what is trending.

I think the idea of "keeping up" with your emails, et al, is just insane. Relax. Play outside, play some video games, cook a meal or 3... delete or mark as read everything that comes in during that period of downtime, and see what the repercussions are. Probably none.

To John who posted above - I use the same junk mail filter but find I often go in and sift through them to make sure nothing important got trapped. Overall it doesn't save me much time.