Falling Behind

In my mind, I’m running down a path.  I think I’m making good time, covering a lot of ground.  Then I look up and see that the path is moving backwards.  No matter how fast I pump my legs to run forward, I’m actually slipping backwards.  It seems like no matter how much I do nowadays, there’s always more that needs to be done.  This applies to much in my life, but especially applies to my Twitter followers.

I never saw the point in auto-following people who followed you on Twitter.  Some might consider it rude, but I prefer to look at people’s tweets and evaluate if I’d like their tweets on my Twitter stream.  If I would, I follow the person.  If the person is just posting astrology readings or giveaway links, I’ll likely pass.  I don’t mean to offend (just like I wouldn’t be offended if I followed someone and they didn’t follow me back), it’s just how I manage my Twitter stream.

My process up until recently was to get the new e-mail from Twitter notifying me of a new follower.  I’d look at their tweets, decide if I should follow them back and mark that e-mail as read.  Rinse and repeat for each new follower.  At some point, though, I fell behind and now I fear I’ll never catch up.

As of this writing, I have 184 new follower e-mails to process.  Yes, some of those people will be spammers, I’m sure, but many more would be legitimate people.  Legitimate people whose tweets I would like to follow.  And yet, those e-mails sit there unread.  Every time I decide to go through them, the enormity of the task overwhelms me and I decide to do it later.  Maybe I’ll just code some sort of “New Follower Processor” page to help me with the task.

In the meantime, please don’t be offended if you followed me and I didn’t follow you back.  I’m probably just delayed by this backwards moving path.