Forgot to answer an email. Is it better to reply late or pretend I never received it?

NoI didn’t immediately respond to an email from a co-worker and ended up forgetting. What’s better: responding late or pretending I never received it?

The option to pretend you didn’t receive it is the worst. Since no one will believe this, you will only be replicating the rudeness. E-mail etiquette is elastic but implacable: the ideal is to respond on the same day, but 24 hours is fine and some consider 72 hours politically acceptable. Not replying, however, means that you don’t give a shit about the sender or that you’re a totally disorganized person. Both interpretations can be embarrassing. If you received an email at night, it’s perfectly fine to respond to it the next morning. The same goes for weekends (which, by the way, should be kindly avoided by senders, except in an emergency). If your case has expired the three or more protocol days, you have two alternatives:

1) A telephone contact apologizing for the carelessness (here, the trick of having deleted it by mistake and only now finding it in the trash or in your spam box, it works…);

2) A new e-mail that starts with a brief “sorry for the delay…” and goes on a somewhat sly line, as if nothing happened. In this case, compensation must come from the consistency of the response, which can redeem it.

Important 1: both hypotheses are only possible if the sender’s subject has not yet expired.

Important 2: You don’t have to be a slave to your electronic communication. All you have to do is send an automatic message to that effect and people will filter the messages according to their relevance or try another way of contacting them (in this case, take care of your cell phone, it could be worse).

Important 3: Just because you forgot to reply to an email doesn’t make you a bad person. Making it a habit can be unsympathetic.

Cynthia de Almeida is a career columnist and writes for CLAUDIA every Tuesday. Do you have any doubt? Write to her!