I am drowning in an ocean of stuff to do. All sorts of people want to talk to me one-on-one and ... I cannot keep up.
So every day dozens of emails go unread.
And the PM stuff in the forums is far more time consuming than email. So I usually just end up thinking "I should get to that soon" and I rarely do.
I have figured out that if I completely ignore my email and the forums all day, and focus on new videos,
podcasts or articles, I end up reaching about 12,000 new people. If I spend all day with email, I will have helped about 100 people.
If people ask their questions in the forum, chances are that somebody else will help them in a way that I like and they like and everybody likes. And then hundreds/thousands of people will also see it and lots more people get helped.
If people want to hear specifically from me on a
permaculture topic, please post to the forums. It is possible that somebody will say "paul would say ____" and they are probably right. If there has been 48 hours of silence on the
thread and you still want more info, email me and send me a link to the thread.
Sometimes in the river of email I get, such a request gets buried - like when I have been away from computers for a few days. But I really think this type of email is my highest priority. So if another 48 hours have passed and I still have not replied, please send me another email. You could also post to the thread to say "I've emailed paul to ask him to comment." I know that a lot of people want more videos and podcasts from me, so they might try to answer you so that I might focus more on other stuff (they are just really cool that way).
The moral of the story is this: never send me "private messages" (PMs) via the forum software. I want to make sure that everybody gets all of the information they are looking for, but keep in mind that I don't get paid for this and I am just one guy with thousands of people wanting to talk to me.