A Comprehensive Ranking of Every Absolutely Unhinged Thing You've Done Instead of Sending That Email

The email exists. It has existed, in draft form, for somewhere between two hours and eleven business days depending on which version of you we're dealing with today. It is not a complicated email. It might be three sentences. It might literally be a single question. And yet.

And yet here we are.

There is something about a Pending Important Email that activates a very specific kind of avoidance energy — not the lazy kind, but the industrious kind. The kind where you don't do the thing, but you do approximately forty-seven other things with the focused urgency of someone who is definitely not avoiding the thing. You know this version of yourself. We all do.

In the spirit of celebrating the elaborate, ridiculous, deeply relatable ways we avoid sending emails, here is a definitive ranking — from mildly understandable to completely unhinged — of everything you've ever done instead.

Tier One: Honestly, Fine. This Is Fine.

Refilling your water bottle. Classic opener. Hydration is important. You need to be at full capacity to write a professional email. This is a completely reasonable three-minute delay and we will not be judging it. You get a pass.

Reading the draft one more time. Also fine. Proofreading is responsible. The fact that you've now read it fourteen times and changed the word "please" to "kindly" and back to "please" three times is a little concerning, but we're still in acceptable territory.

Checking to make sure the recipient's email address is correct. Reasonable! One time someone sent an important email to the wrong person and it was a whole thing. You're being careful. This is not avoidance. This is due diligence. (It is a little avoidance.)

Tier Two: You're Stalling, But At Least You're Productive

Reorganizing your entire email inbox before sending. Ah. Here we go. You can't send a new email into a chaotic inbox, obviously. That would be madness. So first you need to archive everything from 2021, create three new folders, unsubscribe from the Williams-Sonoma newsletter you've been meaning to unsubscribe from since 2019, and flag six things you'll never actually follow up on. The inbox is now immaculate. The draft is still sitting there.

Cleaning your desk. You can't think clearly in a cluttered environment. The email requires focus. The focus requires a clear workspace. The clear workspace requires relocating a truly impressive number of items and also wiping down the surface with a Clorox wipe. Twenty-five minutes later, your desk looks great and you've sent nothing.

Reorganizing your computer's desktop files. This one has layers. You open your desktop to find the email draft you saved there and notice that your files are kind of everywhere. Fifteen minutes later you have created a folder called "Misc 2024" that contains 340 items and solved exactly nothing, but your desktop wallpaper is now visible for the first time since March.

Responding to three other, less intimidating emails first. You're warming up. Stretching. Getting into email mode. The fact that the three emails you chose to respond to first were all incredibly low-stakes and one of them was just a newsletter reply is immaterial. You're in the groove now. Almost ready.

Tier Three: This Is Getting Away From You

Deep-cleaning the kitchen. You work from home. The kitchen is right there. And it's bothering you — the crumbs, the dish in the sink, the sticky spot on the counter that's been there since the Super Bowl. You can't possibly concentrate on composing a professional email while that's happening. So you clean the kitchen. The full clean. Including the inside of the microwave. You return to your desk 40 minutes later feeling accomplished and vaguely guilty.

Taking up a new hobby mid-avoidance. This is where things escalate. You open a new tab to look something up — something tangentially related to the email, maybe — and somehow end up watching a tutorial on how to make sourdough bread. Or hand-letter envelopes. Or build a raised garden bed. You don't bake. You live in an apartment. None of this is relevant. And yet you've now watched 22 minutes of someone explaining hydration ratios and you feel genuinely interested.

Texting someone about the email instead of sending the email. A fascinating maneuver. You describe the email to a friend. You read them the draft. You ask if it sounds okay. They say it sounds fine. You say "okay, sending it now." You do not send it. You continue the conversation for another fifteen minutes discussing why the email feels weird even though it isn't weird. This is not progress. This is just outsourcing your anxiety.

Googling the person you're emailing. You just want to make sure you have the right tone. So you look them up. LinkedIn first, then their company bio, then maybe their Twitter if they have one. Forty minutes later you know their entire professional history, have read a panel discussion they participated in at a conference in 2018, and have somehow ended up on a completely unrelated Wikipedia page about the history of fax machines. The email remains unsent.

Tier Four: Completely Unhinged, Full Respect

Reorganizing your phone's photo library. How did you even get here. You were at your computer. You had the email open. And now you're on your couch sorting photos into albums by year, deleting seventeen near-identical pictures of a sunset from 2022, and texting yourself a photo you found of your old apartment because it made you feel nostalgic. The email is on a different device. You are very far from it.

Making a pros and cons list about sending the email. The email is not a major life decision. It's a follow-up to a meeting. And yet you have opened your notes app and are genuinely weighing the pros and cons of pressing send as if this is a mortgage refinancing situation. The "cons" column has somehow gotten longer than the "pros" column. You're not sure how. You close the app.

Starting a completely unrelated organizational project. You have decided that now, today, is the day you finally organize the junk drawer. Or the closet. Or the cabinet under the bathroom sink. The email will still be there when you're done. The junk drawer has been a problem for longer than this email has existed. It feels like the right priority. It is not the right priority. You know this. You open the drawer anyway.

Drafting the email again from scratch. The original draft was fine. You knew it was fine. But after three days of looking at it, it no longer looks fine — it looks wrong in a way you can't articulate. So you delete it and start over. The new draft is almost identical to the original draft. You read it fourteen times. You change "please" to "kindly."

The Unsatisfying Truth

Here is what every person who has ever done any of these things already knows: the email takes 90 seconds to send. The dread of sending it lasts approximately 40 times longer than the actual act. The moment you hit send, it's over, and you feel an almost physical release of tension that makes you wonder why you spent four hours reorganizing your digital files instead of just doing this on Monday.

But that's not really the point, is it? The point is that the brain, when faced with something that carries even a tiny bit of social stakes or professional weight, would rather do literally anything else. It's not laziness. It's an elaborate self-protection mechanism that has gotten completely out of hand.

The kitchen is very clean, though. That part was worth it.