Overwhelmed

Everytime I open my Blogger dashboard I am overwhelmed. I am following tons of great blogs and I always feel like I'm going to miss something because I can't keep up with them all. This all started because I was the winner of a giveaway a few weeks ago and I hadn't heard anything about it even though I remember reading that she would email me about it. So, after a week or so I decided to go back to the post and see if maybe I read it incorrectly and in fact I was supposed to email her. Here's the embarassing part. I can't remember which blog it was! So I thought, "I'll just look through all the blogs I'm following and see if I recognize it." I thought I had a pretty good idea of the color scheme. Well what I didn't have a pretty good idea about was the number of blogs I'm actually following. Let's just say it was 200+.  Yes, I said "was," I'll get to that in a moment.

I hadn't even gotten to the blogs that started with "A" when I gave up on that endeavor. It took me hours just to get through the blogs starting with special characters. So I decided, "maybe she DID email me and it went to my spam filter." Let's just say that wading through weeks of spam isn't much easier than opening up 200+ blogs one by one. I didn't see anything that didn't belong there so now I'm back to the 200+ blogs problem.

It's not even about the giveaway at this point. Now I've realized what a complete mess my Blogger Reading List is and I'm fixating on it. If Blogger has a better way to unfollow blogs, I couldn't find it. I spent the past few hours opening up every single blog and deciding if I really need to follow it. My criteria was the date of the last post. If I opened up your page and the last post was 6 months ago, or had "2011" in the date I said farewell to you. I know, I'm cut-throat. Like a pirate. Arrrgh!

Logic says that if someone hasn't posted anything in 6 months, there wouldn't be anything to miss in my Reading List anyway, so it doesn't really cut down on the amount of material I'll be reading. But looking at the list of 120ish blogs I'm now following just seems a lot more manageable.

If you are the blogger I mentioned in the giveaway, please know that I'm not trying to put you down or complain. I'm still working on pairs of shoes for my giveaway winner and an order that was placed an embarrassingly long time ago. I'm working on them I promise! When I was trying to figure out if I was being a ditz (which I often am) I realized I had been ignoring the big disorganized mess of my blogging life. I've read a few posts about  how other people keep up with the blogs they follow and it seems that others are having the same issues I am. I didn't see many magic instant fixes either. If you have the secret please let me in on it!