I stayed home from work today because I’m sick with a cold. It’s a rotten time of year to be ill, but I’m hoping I can recover before heading home for Christmas. If not, my family is going to have to put up with a sniffling and sneezing son.

Even though I wasn’t supposed to be working, I actually found today to be quite productive in my peaceful and quiet home. I wrote my weekly column about cutbacks in the Office of Labor Management Standards budget, posted a few items to Heritage’s Omnibusting blog and spent the rest of day trying to empty my overflowing inbox.

No matter how hard I tried, however, the darn thing kept filling back up. It’s partly the fault of the omnibus listserv I joined this week, but the larger problem seems to be that several of my colleagues can’t stop themselves from hitting the “Reply All” button or forwarding me messages that I’ve already received at least three times.

What’s even worse is the abuse of the “All Staff” e-mail at Heritage. Fortunately, I’m not the only one who is annoyed by e-mail abuse. An message with the subject line, “Stop the all staff emails!” arrived in my inbox at 5:58 p.m. The sender shall remain nameless, but the message was perfect:

This is an all staff email to all staff to ask you to stop sending so many all staff emails!! I know this picks up during holiday season and you “must” share it, but if your box is anything like mine, it is getting flooded and it is getting difficult to find the important things in the clutter.

I don’t know about you, but I’m close to following in the footsteps of Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist who was profiled in the Washington Post earlier this year after declaring e-mail “bankruptcy.”

This is nothing new, of course. I’ve always had trouble getting a handle on my inbox. Things improved for a time after I read “Bit Literacy” by Mark Hurst. And while I now do a much better job of filing messages in folders, I have a hard time keeping the inbox empty for more than a week’s worth of time. (Keep in mind I’m referring only to my Heritage e-mail account. My Gmail, which is where most of my readers send me e-mail, is easier to manage because of great organizational features, but just as cluttered.)

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for compulsive e-mailers (excluding my family and close personal friends, of course): Before you hit “Reply All” or click “Forward,” think again. Do you really need to send it?