Sometimes you don't have a day to wait, even just an hour or two can help your cooler-self prevail. I also draft immediately. The facts are fresh and you're pa

Sometimes you don't have a day to wait, even just an hour or two can help your cooler-self prevail. I also draft immediately. The facts are fresh and you're passionate, get it all down so you can sift through it later. I try to make this the "final" draft even though I'm committed to reviewing it later. Later when I return to the draft the first thing I do is delete everything which can be removed without loss of context. This usually removes a lot of the pissed-off "Let me tell YOU something about YOU that YOU don't know!"* stuff. If it isn't directly substantive it's probably inflammatory. After it has been boiled down to relevant content take a step back and try to reflect humanely. Think about every lesson in compassion you've experienced in your life. Look the text over; how would you react to this e-mail if it were sent to you? Is even it really productive? Is it necessary? If so, try to think of a couple genuinely positive aspects of the situation— insincerity is only going to cause more discomfort. If there's nothing positive it might be important to do some reflection about why that's the case. Remove accusatory tone; if you're not the boss (and even so...) then you should almost certainly be using more instances of "we" than "you" both literally and figuratively. Find the unresolved issues and recommend solution, try to supply the beginning of a solution as a token of your good faith despite whatever issues have arisen. Review the whole message from the perspective of the recipient once more, a bit later if time permits. This has worked really well for me, sometimes surprisingly so; people have gone from completely irate to "Okay, I'll take care of A and B!" It's pretty crazy. * Ron White reference