Margen
Four weeks without opening it. You know that opening it today is worse than opening it two weeks ago, and that arithmetic sinks you for another half week. The four steps are:
1. Open the email from the last reply, not the first. You're going to answer the thread, not read fourteen messages in a row that now only serve to blame you.
2. In the «subject», replace the «Re:» with one concrete word: «August deal figures», «Riera budget». Less guilt for you, more of a hint for whoever's above.
3. First paragraph, two sentences: «Here it is» and the thing. No «sorry for the delay» or «it completely slipped my mind»: the long apology magnifies the laziness and fixes nothing.
4. The apology fits at the end, one line, in the past tense: «I know it took a while. Sorry for the wait». Don't promise deadlines you can't meet anymore.
Extra trick: when you send, put yourself in copy. If on Sunday night you open your inbox again and that thread is no longer red, you'll know that the debt sitting inside you for two weeks weighed more than the four minutes it took to reply. That exercise, done once, changes what you do the following week with the other fourteen emails that have been sitting open since before the summer.