CC your agent. Stop checking whether they wrote back.

There's a specific kind of unproductive that nobody counts, because it looks exactly like working. You're in your inbox. Your hands are on the keyboard. You are, technically, at your desk doing business.

What you're actually doing is checking whether a person you can't control has done a thing you can't make them do. Four times a day. For nine days.

And it's not idle. It's the opposite. You check because it matters. The deals you're relaxed about are the ones you forget entirely. The thread you reopen every few hours is always the one carrying real money.

Hand the waiting to something that doesn't get bored

When you send the email, CC your agent. That's it. The thread goes out, and something is now watching it that has no anxiety about the outcome and no reason to peek.

When the other side replies you get a text saying it landed, and a question: do you want it read to you, or do you want a reply drafted. Say read and it comes back with the short version of what they actually said, then asks again whether to draft. One word from you each time, and at no point do you open the thread.

It never sends anything on its own

This is the part I'm most stubborn about, and it costs us demos. The agent drafts. You approve. Nothing leaves your name without you saying so, in the text thread, first.

Every few weeks someone asks for a version that just handles the whole exchange while they sleep. I understand the appeal and I'm not building it. The moment an email goes out under your name that you never read, the product stops being leverage and becomes a liability you haven't discovered yet.

What happens when they don't reply at all

Which is most of the time, and is the actual problem. Silence doesn't arrive. Nothing lands in your inbox to tell you nine days have passed. That's why follow-up is the single most neglected activity in any business, and why the people who are merely organized beat people who are better at the job.

Where it fits

CC it on anything where the reply is worth money or worth worry. Proposals out. Contracts with a lawyer. A vendor who owes you a date. The contractor bid you need before Friday. Anything you'd otherwise be checking on, which is a pretty good test on its own: if you'd reopen the thread to look, CC it.

Your inbox goes back to being a place things arrive instead of a place you patrol.