Matthew AI describes how delaying email replies to craft the perfect message backfires: senders assume you don't care, and the pressure to write something elaborate grows. Send a quick acknowledgment immediately instead, even if you'll write more later. Brief replies keep conversations alive and stop people from filling silence with negative assumptions.
Quick life tip. Today I'm gonna give you a bad habit of mine which is really poisonous to my life and my relationships that is affecting me every single day. And I believe that for many of you it's also affecting your life and being poisonous to your relationships. On a daily basis. I will get an email from somebody and it could be a staff member, it could be an acquaintance, it could be a follower, it might be an email that requires some thought or it might be like a long thank you email for something that I've done and I'll read that email and I will have a lot of respect for it. And in respecting it, I think I want to take the time to respond to this properly. I don't want to just rush a response to this, especially if that person has written me a long email. I think, let me take time to get back to this properly. The problem with this is that it might be 24 hours later or 48 hours later and it's now buried in my inbox. And then when I get five minutes I think, oh, I. What should I do with this five minutes? Well, I don't want to respond to that email because I have the same problem I did yesterday. I'm not going to be able to get back to it with enough depth and consideration. So let me prolong it further. So it might get to one week or two weeks in and I still haven't responded to that person, by which time they may even have sent a follow up email asking if I got their email. If I'm really dumb, I might end up doing the same thing with that email because I go, well, I need to explain myself here and explain why I haven't had time and you know, I need to really think about what I'm going to say to this email. So then put that off as well. And it might be that two weeks later that person just now hates me. What it looks like is I've just completely ignored it and I don't care at all. Now it couldn't be more the opposite. In actual fact, it's that I care that much that I don't want to rush a response to them. I want to take time over it. But that ends up becoming its own form of procrastination. It doesn't matter that my intention is good. On the other side of it, what someone sees is, well, this person didn't even care enough to get back to me. What I have begun to retrain myself to do is in the moment get back to that person. Even if in My own mind. I'm gonna get back to them in a bigger way. You know, a day from now, four days from now, try and get back to that person today and be like, hey, I really appreciate this, or thank you so much, or you know, one consideration I have is da da da da da. And I'm going to think more about that over the next few days. Just because someone sends you an essay in an email, it doesn't mean that they don't appreciate a few sentences back to show that you've acknowledged that email. I think sometimes the mistake I make, and perhaps you do too, is that when you get a very long email, you feel like you have to respond in kind. You feel like you have to respond with an email that's just as long winded. And that is, is that thought, that overwhelm that stops you from emailing back in the moment in the first place. And of course, the great irony of all of this is that the quicker you respond to someone, the less you have to put into that response. In other words, if you leave something for a day, you already start to feel a bit more pressure about what you have to respond. Like if I leave it a week, I now feel the pressure of, well, now I have to have an even better response. Because if I've left it a week or two weeks or a month to get back to this person and then their long winded email, I get back with one or two sentences, I now feel like I've disrespected their email and the thought and that they're going to be on the other end thinking, oh my God, after all of that, this is what I get back. People will construct ideas in their head and if you don't help them understand the reality of the situation. So I think this is an interesting one. It's an interesting one on a practical level because maybe you do the same with your emails. But it's also interesting, I think, on a more psychological level, which is that you know, even though you intend for someone to feel something, if you don't actually show that in reality, if you don't give them something to, to get rid of those negative thoughts, then they may come to the worst conclusion on their own and you're the one who will end up paying the price for it. I have over the years lost a lot of opportunities with people where I've harmed relationships because I've left it longer and longer and longer to get back to someone. So yeah, that's it. That was an interesting little topic. Sam.
