Too many inputs, can't keep up.

I have been writing emails for essentially the last two and half hours non-stop. What I try to do each weekend is to sort out my emails (personal, not work one - work I have a different system). With my personal email account, sometimes I don't have time to reply to all the emails during the week so I leave it to the weekend. I get a lot of bills to the email account now as well, and these take awhile to sort.

Today, the inbox was getting a bit too out of my control for my liking though. Because gmail isn't that sophisticated, I find I need to keep a quite condensed or else I can't see which ones need urgent attention. Thus I went from the top dealing with each email (replying, deleting, transferring relevant info, etc).

The problem was... I couldn't keep up!! Before finishing one, I would get a new email! This went for a few emails, and two and a half hours later, I have finally finished. I did this exercise just a few days ago, I really didn't expect it to take this long, but it's really showing to me that I don't know what's going on, but since the beginning of this year, it's been getting a lot longer to manage. Even the last 5 minutes of writing this I have received another email...

The purpose of writing this is really do communicate my amazement at this phenomena. I consider myself someone that types fairly quickly and don't really have this problem. But it gets difficult when you've got to keep track of emails, SMS's, phone calls, etc.

I think it makes it harder for the mind to stop because unconsciously I'm worried I forgot something - e.g. today, I remembered I forgot to reply an SMS that was sent to me yesterday as I was busy dealing with another piece of technology at the time.

There has got to be a better system. I am a fan of systems, because good systems make things easy, and a lot of things are already hard enough, so where possible, go with the easy option.