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I try to reply to every personal (i.e. from a human, not an automated service, not not including spam) email, unless it very-clearly doesn’t need one: e.g. it’s the end of a conversation or was the response to my query. I suppose that I’m trying to say is that an initial contact with me – a new conversation – should always get a response, because that reassures you that it arrived.

But I see the trend, and I’ve been part of it. Thanks to my many points of presence on the Web, I receive messages on a great number of subjects. Sometimes, if – say – one arrives while I’m travelling, and then when I get around to properly reading it I think it deserves a well-thought out and researched and reasoned answer… I’ll save it for later. And that’s when the trouble starts.

Drifting down my Inbox, it falls out of sight and mind. Whenever I see it, I’m back to square one: having not yet made the time and space to give it the consideration it deserves. The longer it remains there, the more the pressure builds: if it took me three weeks to reply to this email, my reply has to be really good, right? Just firing off a “thanks for your email, sorry I haven’t given it a proper reply yet” now would just be awkward. So it sits longer and stagnates. Eventually, crushed under the weight of the emails above it and of my growing awkwardness with the situation, it gets deleted.

Usually that takes about six months, but in one particularly terrible case – a friend shared with me a draft of some fiction they’d been writing – it took eight years. Eight years of a message sitting in my Inbox, begging me to write a proper response, and me not doing so because any reply I could by-that-point produce nothing that would possibility justify the time it took to respond.

(At some points in my past I’ve had the same problem with blogging: if I take a month without writing a post, it feels like the pressure to produce a real banger is so high that it makes me stagnate. That’s part of the reason that nowadays I semi-automate the inclusion of so much of my life into my blog: ad-hoc notes, checkins to geocaches, etc. Blogging more helps fight the pressure.)

I’d like to think I do better nowadays. I don’t think I’ve got any unanswered personal email in my Inbox (though now I mention it, I think there’s a mailing list I feel like I’m overdue to chip in on).

But on behalf of the people who don’t reliably reply because it feels like too much pressure if you missed the opportunity to do so immediately, I have some empathy. I’ve been there, and the struggle is real. It’s possible, like me, to come out the other side of a mindset of letting email stagnate because you can’t find the words to justify the time it took to respond.

(Anybody who’s got different reasons to mine for failing to respond to personal emails can speak for themselves. Though – possibly – not by email.)