☄️ Thanks For Your Patience

I typically steer away from productivity “hacks.” Even when they work, the gains are ephemeral. You get some type of boost for a day, maybe a week, and then you’re back to your old ways.

But from time to time, there really is that one weird thing that works. And here’s one:

When you’re responding to something later than you’d like or you show up behind schedule, try replacing “sorry for the delay” with “thanks for your patience.”

It’s a simple, yet powerful, shift. Here’s why:

First: it starts the conversation on a positive note.

Rather than one party opening by apologizing for doing something “wrong” (causing a delay), this framework opens with gratitude towards the other party (thanks for your patience).

Second: it resets the implicit expectation that every response should be immediate.

Above, I deliberately put “wrong” in quotes. Take email, for example. People have different expectations and standards for how they respond. If you’re in an email exchange with someone who always responds quickly, but you take four days to respond to them, did you do something “wrong”? Unless there’s something urgent or some type of company policy dictating a specific timeline to respond, there’s nothing inherently wrong with responding a few days later.

The underlying framework here is prioritization. Sticking with the example of email, is everything in the inbox that requests your time or response equally deserving of your attention and capacity?

No. An update request from a supervisor on an important project should rightly be treated as higher priority than a solicitation from an outsider requesting a call so they can pitch you a product.

If you implicitly assign the same priority to every inbound communication, you’re in trouble. You’ll be able to respond immediately to some and you’ll be delayed on others, leading to feelings of guilt for the ones where your response was “late.”

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Third: it contributes to a more holistic version of communication, acknowledging that there is life outside of emails, slacks, and so on.

Are you less productive if you don’t respond to everything with inhuman immediacy? It depends on your definition of productivity.

Readers of this blog know my take here. I’m a strong advocate for what I refer to as three-dimensional productivity, a model of reliably getting stuff done without losing sight of one’s identity and the unpredictable world around you.

Even if you miss a deadline, it’s worth considering why you missed it and the priority of the deadline itself. If life is life-ing and there are meaningful reasons to reprioritize your time and attention, that’s highly relevant. This is what effectively happens in an emergency scenario. No matter what you had planned, if you suddenly have to rush off to the ER, that trumps everything else you had in motion.

Priorities are a foundational component of three-dimensional productivity, so I’ll come back to them again soon on this blog. And yes, for you productivity nerds out there, Eisenhower is involved.

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There can be genuine reasons to apologize for being late. Taking ownership when you miss something is important, as is respecting other peoples’ time. Don’t take this post as license to be late with reckless abandon.

My argument is that the default shouldn’t be to apologize, especially if there hasn’t been some sort of explicit expectation set that you failed to meet.

Start with gratitude. Keep it simple. The next time you’re behind, open with “thank you for your patience” and move the heck on. Life is too short to spend the whole thing apologizing.