Draft Purgatory · also called the unsent message
why can I not just hit send on this message
Draft purgatory is where a finished message, pitch, or ask goes to die — rewritten, polished, never sent — because sending it turns an imagined maybe into a real answer that might be no. A draft feels safe because it cannot fail yet; every day it sits unsent, it is already costing you the answer you feared.
A draft cannot reject you. That is exactly why it has been sitting there for three weeks doing nothing for either of you.
What to do about it
Find the message you have rewritten the most times, stop editing it, and send the version that already exists right now.
Books that work on this
Each is a 90-day programme. Start with the first — later books assume the work in the earlier ones.
The Warrior Blueprint$6.99
Absorb The Blow$6.99
Grief Is Job$6.99
Rejected Rebuild Manual$6.99
Betrayal Math$6.99
Mental Armor$6.99
Train The Fear$6.99
Forge The Armor$6.99Part of the Warrior series.
How people say it
Nobody looks this up by its clinical name. These are the ways it actually gets said.
- why can I not just hit send on this message
- I have a text or an email I have rewritten twenty times
- I keep a draft sitting unsent for weeks at a time
- I am afraid of the reply so I never send the message
- how do I stop overthinking messages before I send them
- I would rather not know than get told no
- unsent drafts piling up because I am scared of the answer
Written by Brian Spiker, who has run Spiker Carpet and Tile Care since 2013 — the receipts. More terms in the encyclopedia.