The Seventeen-Stage Pre-Launch Sequence Required to Send a Normal Work Email

The email is not complicated. You need to ask a colleague a question. The question is routine. The answer will probably be yes. There is no reason — none, zero, not a single defensible reason — why this should take any longer than the time it takes to type it.

And yet.

Stage One: The Draft That Sounds Completely Unhinged

You open a new compose window. You type what you actually want to say, which is direct and clear and exactly communicates your question. You read it back and immediately determine that it sounds aggressive, or curt, or somehow both at once — a tone-deaf little grenade that will land in your colleague's inbox and immediately alter how they perceive you as a professional and possibly as a human being.

You delete the whole thing. You start over.

Stage Two: The Draft That Sounds Like You're Running for Office

This version is warmer. Much warmer. You open with a pleasantry. You ask how they're doing, which — and you know this — neither of you actually expects to be answered. You ease into the question like you're approaching a nervous animal. By the time you get to the actual ask, it's buried in so many qualifiers and softening phrases that a reasonable person would have to read it twice to locate the point.

You read it back. It sounds like you are trying to sell them something or ask them to be in your wedding. You delete several sentences. You are now somewhere between Draft One and Draft Two, which is, technically, a third draft.

Stage Three: The Salutation Crisis

This is its own distinct phase and it deserves its own heading.

Hi versus Hey is, on paper, a trivial distinction. In practice, it is a complete characterization of the relationship between two people and your level of comfort within your workplace culture. Hi is professional but approachable. Hey is casual but could read as too casual depending on who you're emailing and what day it is and whether Mercury is in retrograde.

You spend four minutes on this. You land on Hi and feel approximately 60% settled about it.

Stage Four: The Punctuation Interrogation

Here is where the investigation gets granular.

An exclamation point after Thanks reads as cheerful and warm. It also reads, depending on context, as slightly unhinged enthusiasm about something that does not warrant enthusiasm. A period after Thanks is clean and professional. It also reads — and you have now read it eleven times to confirm this — like you are quietly furious about something and maintaining composure through sheer force of will.

You consider Thanks! with an exclamation point. You consider Thanks. with a period. You briefly consider Thank you, which feels formal in a way that doesn't match the rest of the email's tone and will now require you to revise the entire thing for consistency.

You go with Thanks! and immediately second-guess it.

Stage Five: The Word 'Just' Audit

At some point — and this is a sign of how deep you are now in the process — you Google whether you should stop using the word just in professional emails. You have read at least three articles about this. You know that just can undermine your authority. You also know that removing every just from an email can make it sound like you are issuing a formal decree rather than asking a simple question.

You remove two instances of just. You add one back. You close the browser tab.

Stage Six: The Final Read-Through (First of Three)

You read the email aloud, quietly, at your desk, which is a thing you are now doing. It sounds fine. It sounds normal. You are almost ready to send it.

You read it again and catch a typo that would have been fine but now that you've seen it cannot be unseen. You fix it. You read it a third time. Everything is in order. You hover over the send button with the energy of someone about to jump off a diving board.

You go back and change Hi to Hey.

Stage Seven: Sending

You send it. It's gone. It exists now in the world — or at least in your colleague's inbox — and there is nothing you can do about it. You experience a brief, clean moment of relief.

This lasts approximately ninety seconds.

The Post-Send Autopsy

The reply arrives fourteen minutes later. It is four words. Possibly five. It answers your question directly and contains no punctuation that could be interpreted as emotional subtext, which is either reassuring or suspicious depending on how you look at it.

You look at it for a while.

Was the reply shorter than usual? Is it normally longer? You try to remember the average length of this person's emails and realize you have, without meaning to, developed a working mental database of their communication style. The reply seems fine. The reply is probably fine.

You forward the thread to yourself for your records, which is something you do now, apparently.

Tomorrow, you will need to send a follow-up email. It will be two sentences. It will take nineteen minutes. You will change the salutation twice.