Excuses for Not Replying to an Email

Email guilt is a compounding asset. The message that needed twenty minutes on Tuesday needs forty on Friday, because now it needs an answer and an apology, and by the following Wednesday it needs an answer, an apology, and an explanation of the apology. This is how a three-line question becomes a thing you think about in the shower. The mechanism is almost always the same and it is almost never malice. You read it on your phone, your brain logged that as having dealt with it, and the notification cleared. Or you moved it to a folder called 'follow up', which is now a folder with a hundred and forty items in it and the emotional character of a loft. Or you were waiting on legal, and you never said you were waiting on legal, so from the other side it looked like silence. That last one is the actually useful lesson. Most slow replies are forgiven instantly if you name the reason and answer the question in the same message. What isn't forgiven is a second week of nothing followed by a reply that is entirely apology and contains no answer. Below are ten excuses for not replying to an email, plus twenty in the generator.