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After only two or three weeks in office, we discovered we had a backlog of 100,000 emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country - and all over the world, for that matter.

People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking, and it's slow, distracting, and inefficient. It's almost a counterproductivity tool.

I'm not really a computer man, to be honest. I check my emails every couple of weeks.

I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.

Our Web sites and our e-mail lists are the two things that we control.

The evidence that things are changing fast can be seen in the dramatic increase in the influence of blogging. We should be collecting emails as we used to collect telephone numbers and using them to better communicate our message to key voters.

It's more important to me to get an e-mail that says, 'I saw your page and it changed my life,' than how many hits the page got.