I am guilty. Very very guilty. Do you work with people like me who do this? I am starting to think that it is very common in the software industry.

To explain the torture that I am providing people, the situation plays like this: You receive a question, you think quickly and realize that you have a clear and concise answer to the question. It may not be the answer you want to provide, you may be saying something to the likes of ‘this will be very difficult and time consuming‘, as you continue to write and explain why this will be difficult you start to realize that maybe just maybe there is a really smart solution to the problem. Before you know it you are starting to explain your solution and maybe just maybe things won’t be as painful as you originally estimated. Now you are rethinking and saying things along the lines of ‘if we can find an elegant way to solve this one issue…‘ but you start to realize that there may not be a good solution to that problem. Now you are wondering is my design flawed? and this starts to find its way into the email by way of perhaps a quick little refactoring exercise in this location. You realize that what you have said is starting to make less and less sense, and that you yourself are confused and you are worried about just how confused your reader is. You finish off the email by saying that you are pretty confident that you can complete the work in a week. This date means nothing and you just picked it because it sounded kind of safe. You end the email by saying that you are concerned that you have confused the issue further and to please phone you tomorrow if there are questions. There most certainly will be.

So. Do you have any questions? I do. Why do I write emails at the very end of the day?