Re:gret

This is more than a simple case of procrastination, you truly wish you had – right now – the time to give the email your full attention, properly draft a response, revise it, and send an answer that makes a good impression.

Your regret grows as the email lingers in your inbox, apparently yet another unanswered message, but in reality something you wish you could have taken care of yesterday.

Precrastination would also not help in this case: answering the email will require to dedicate significant time and effort to get it done. This is not something you can do while checking your inbox right before boarding your flight. And if you’d send a half-backed answer mistyped on a phone chances are you will regret it later.

As your email debt grows, you will keep postponing sending your answer because of the growing embarassment between not wanting to send a quick acknowledgement (that would be too late) and not yet having done it (you have started several attempts but you are a perfectionist).

• You cheat yourself into responding by flagging the email as unread.
• You get a (friendly and timely, but still dreaded) reminder, which triggers a cascade of events that make you unable to keep deferring your answer (which you suspect may not be liked when they read it).
• You realize that the email was sent to a mailing list and everyone but you already answered it.
• If it’s that important, tell everyone to hold on while you work on it. Giving a timeframe for your reply may help, if you expect it will be a while.
• In the worst case, you wait until April 30th. Why? It’s the email forgiveness day, when you can reply to your re:grets without too much shame.