Do I owe you an email?

I'm over-committed and overstretched. I'm trying to change this, and I may succeed, but I've been trying for years without succeeding. In the meantime, here's a kind of generic apology --for which I apologize.

My blog and newsletter are my top priorities. Consulting clients come third. Email not related to the first three jobs comes fourth, and unfortunately most of my email, most of it very important to me, falls into this category. I used to reply to all my email within a day of its arrival. But that's impossible now, even if I made it my top priority. On a good day, I'll do a day's worth of work on my first three priorities and respond to about half of the waiting emails, old and new. On a bad day, I won't even finish the first three jobs.

If you send me an email that needs a reply and I don't reply right away, then I'm trying to find time to reply. If I don't reply in a couple of weeks, don't hesitate to send me a query. Sometimes old mail gets buried in the avalanche of new mail and sometimes valuable email is trapped in spam filters. Sometimes I'm still trying to find time to reply.

If your email is a suggestion for an item to cover in my blog, then my response is on the blog. If your item is blogworthy and new to me, I'll blog it; otherwise I won't. Please bear in mind that the growing volume of OA-related news forces me to narrow the scope of the blog and now, unfortunately, I must deliberately omit many items I would have previously have included.

Very often I'm hundreds of non-spam emails behind. Very often I have no idea how I'll ever catch up, even with the primary messages. Under the circumstances, I can't promise that I'll be able to respond "real soon now". All I can do is apologize.

Thanks for understanding,
Peter Suber

Last revised, December 7, 2006