Stop Apologising for the Delay in Replying to This Email

📖📖 My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

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Years ago I read the book, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s a powerful book, containing incredibly valuable ideas - I’ve written about many of them before (see Zone of Genius here and Upper Limit Problems here).

But these days, the time I think of it most is when I’m teaching my Meaningful Productivity framework (I’m doing it for the 93% Club next week, if you happen to be a member).

In it, I make the distinction between Time Management, which is impossible (you can’t manage time, it just ticks by and one day it’ll run out), and the things which you actually can manage: the things that if you manage them can make a meaningful difference to what you get done.

One of those things is managing the attitude you have towards time.

And when I teach that, I tell the story of what happened when I stepped up to Hendricks’ challenge to put myself on a two-week diet where I was not allowed to complain about time.

The shift was, to be quite honest, extraordinary.

Never before had I seen just how much I created my felt sense of reality.

And how by changing what I said and wrote I could change what I thought. And when I changed what I thought, how I felt was different. And when I felt different, I was more meaningfully productive.

(These are the kinds of ideas which I explore in great depth in my book, The Power to Choose - in a way it’s my complete guide to Attitude and Mindset Management.)

My favourite discovery when on my two-week diet, was just how often I wrote the sentence ‘I’m so sorry for the delay in replying to this email.’

It in, approximately, EVERY EMAIL AND MESSAGE I SENT.

When I caught this as a subtle complaint about time and stopped doing it, two things happened.

First, of course, I literally got my emails done slightly more quickly because I wasn’t typing that sentence 50 times a day.

Second, how I felt about my email changed.

By writing that sentence at the start of every email I was coding guilt and blame into myself. I was suggesting to myself and them that through some fault of mine, I could have replied earlier, but I hadn’t.

When I stopped writing that sentence, the guilt quite quickly shifted.

I suddenly realised I used to avoid my inbox in order to avoid the unpleasant feeling of that guilt.

When I stopped creating that sensation in me, I was more skilful in approaching my inbox when I should - I often replied more promptly, but crucially, when I arrived in my inbox I stopped replying to the messages I felt most guilty about, and started replying to the ones that really mattered.

The truth, of course, is that the reason I hadn’t replied to most of those emails earlier was because I had better things to do: not that I didn’t think the messages were important, just that other things were more important.

And I always trust the people who reply to my emails to live their life well: to do more important things, and reply to me when they can.

But they don’t trust themselves to do that - and I know that because I get that sentence written to me all the time.

I’m on a mission to stop this happening: to stop this unnecessary guilt messing with everyone’s emotional experience of life and with their productivity.

When someone says it to me, I usually tell a version of this story and point them towards somewhere I’d written about similar ideas.

When you see it - and you will after this article - it’s absurd.

I’ll take 14 days to reply to someone, who then apologises profusely for only getting back to me 24 hours later.

I don’t need that apology.

But when you give it, you are giving away your power.

You are telling yourself and me that you can’t cope with life.

And look, maybe that’s what it feels like.

The 21st Century is a hard era to live in.

But you’re doing your best.

You’re steering, dynamically, with great skill, through all the challenges the world is throwing at you.

And yes, if you didn’t have a challenging job, young children, old parents, and friends and loved-ones suffering… if you lived in the sun with no responsibilities, you might have replied to me sooner.

But you do have those things.

You live in the real world.

So it’s always a privilege for me to hear from you, just like it is for everyone else.

There’s no need to apologise. There’s no need to do the ‘thank you for your patience’ which sounds like it’s better, but gives away your power in just the same way.

Just stop doing that.

Let your system absorb how different it is when you acknowledge: you’re doing your best to do the most important things in the right order.

You are choosing how to live your life.

And you’re doing it well.

And for the love of all that matters to you, please stop apologising for the delay in replying to this email.

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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.