I played checkers with my dad all the time as a kid. It was friendly, but when I started to win he got serious, started playing with tempo to force me to move fast and make mistakes. Once I realized that the clock was self-imposed and slowed down, I started to reliably win again, and he stopped wanting to play me.

The point here is, I just realized work email is like that - the cadence of your responses in the conversation sets their expectations of the deliverables.

Slow down.