In my introduction post, I mentioned that the inspiration for starting this blog came to me after a self-evaluation of my time management. This evaluation brought me to quite an unsurprising realization. I’m an addict. More specifically, I’m addicted to my inboxes.

My inboxes are not solely related to email. They are all the online services I use each day that are collecting data and beckoning me to check them. I can easily spend hours simply catching up with my twitter followers and reading blogs in Google Reader.

Shawn Blanc had this to say in a recent post about overcoming his inbox problem:

To be addicted to our inboxes is the path towards errors of omission. Or, to paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson: Inboxes are good enough in their own right, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for work.

Those of you who don’t know me very well may not realize that I am a very compulsive person. Back in college, I wore a phone cord around my neck because I liked the way it clicked. I would fidget with that thing ALL day long. This compulsion quickly turns to anxiety when I feel that I may be missing something. This is why my wife finds me staring into the glass screen of my iPhone constantly. I’m always checking twitter, reading my Instapaper articles, reading blogs from my RSS reader, or checking my email. These are my inboxes.

My inboxes: Reeder (RSS), Instapaper, Facebook, email, twitter.

My goal this week is to reduce the amount of time I’m spending on my inboxes. The best way to do this is to reduce the amount of information flowing into them. Since I spend most of my time in twitter and Instapaper (reading articles I found on twitter), I’m starting there.

This morning, my twitter account was following 332 users, but after the first pass it is down to 211. The act of un-following over 100 accounts is actually quite liberating. This must be what it feels like when you throw away that last pack of cigarettes…until the withdrawals kick in.

For me to have time to write for this blog and not have it cut into family time and other commitments, I’ve got to do a better job controlling my inboxes. Twitter was today. Tomorrow will be some blogs in Google Reader. I look forward to seeing what I can do with this extra time.