The decision
You've got the argument and the method. What's left is to decide, and I'd like the decision to fit in one sentence.
I say sorry when I've done something wrong, fully and once, and for everything else I say what I mean.
Three parts.
The first is the sort. Fault, softener, weather. Three days of columns, until the sorting happens in the half-second.
The second is the swap. Quick one, excuse me, thanks for waiting, that sounds rough, the thing itself. Three sentences on a card.
The third is the real one. Acknowledge, take responsibility, offer repair. Once. No but, no story.
There's a form of planning that helps with rules like this, and it's been tested many times. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed ninety-four studies of it in 2006. You decide in advance what you'll do and when, in the form "when this happens, I'll do that", and people who plan that way follow through much more often than people who only hold the intention. So write three.
When I'm about to ask a colleague a question, I'll say "quick one" and then the question.
When I catch "sorry" arriving for something nobody did, I'll leave the half-second and say nothing or "excuse me".
When I've done something wrong, I'll say what I did, that it's mine, and how I'll put it right, once.
What to expect. This is my expectation and not a finding. The first two days the sorry will be out before you've caught it, and you'll notice after, and the noticing after is the beginning. By the end of the first week you'll be catching about half, and the half-seconds will feel strange, and the other person won't have noticed anything. Around the second week "quick one" will arrive on its own in an email, and you'll reread it and it'll look like Dev's. In the third week someone who's known you for years will say "you've stopped apologising all the time", and it'll be said with something like relief, because they'd been paying the tax in chapter 18. By a month you'll have said one real sorry, for a real fault, and it'll have landed in a way that your sorries haven't landed in years, and the person will have said "thank you" back, which is what a real apology gets. The day's sorries will be under five. And you'll notice, in a meeting, that you said the thing about the north figures without a preamble, and that the room weighed it as a thing.