Annual Review of Email Draft Residue
There are sixty-three unsent drafts in the folder. Many of them should not be sent. All of them are still there.
Annual Review: Email Draft Folder Inventory, Q4 2022 Progress Report, Year Three of Known Issue
Current Status
The email draft folder contains sixty-three items. This represents an increase of seventeen items from the prior year review. In the same period, zero items were deleted and four items were sent. The four sent items represent 6 percent of the folder's production output for the year.
The remaining fifty-nine items from last year are still present, along with the seventeen new ones.
Category Analysis
Manual review of a representative sample identified the following categories:
Correspondence that became unnecessary. The situation that prompted the draft was resolved through other means before the draft was sent. The draft remains. Sending it would re-open a closed matter. Not sending it would be passive. Deleting it would require acknowledging that the correspondence will not be sent.
Correspondence that is still timely but uncomfortable. The email was drafted because the issue warranted documentation. The issue was not urgent enough to overcome the friction of sending a documented complaint. It has been seventeen months. The issue is technically still open.
Correspondence drafted under conditions of strong feeling that no longer fully apply. These drafts are identifiable by their subject lines. The subject lines were written in a different emotional register than the one currently available. Several use punctuation.
The Governing Rule
The unsent email exists in a state of permanent optionality that is indistinguishable from passive storage. It can be sent at any time. It is sent at almost no time. The draft folder is a record of the moments when communication was considered and then reconsidered and then not deleted.
Deleting a draft requires a decision that communication will not occur. This is a harder decision than it appears. It forecloses the option. The folder keeps the option open at the cost of accumulation.
Consequence
The draft folder has become a secondary record of unresolved matters, staffed by sixty-three documents that are not exactly kept and not exactly discarded. A few of them are good drafts that will eventually be sent. Most of them are documentation of things that have already resolved or will never be raised.
Eventually email draft residue acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. The folder is now searched when a related matter arises, to check whether a prior draft is relevant. This turns the accumulation into a reference archive. This is not what it was designed for. It functions adequately in that role.
Assessment
The folder will reach eighty items before the next review. No corrective action is planned.