The After-Work Email Quandry | Hacker News Reader

The After-Work Email Quandry

theatlantic.com

51 pointsjodyribton56 comments

I've been working remotely for the past fifteen years, five of the most recent being a full-time employee for a large company. Because of this I've grown very accustomed to sending emails that start with "Don't read this until morning". Eventually my coworkers learn that they're going to get late-night emails from me, and that I don't expect an immediate reply - nor should they. After all, email is meant to be asynchronous.

I personally recommend not checking work emails when not working. I certainly don't. It allows for a clear head when I sit at my desk ready to work. It also allows me to work at whatever hour I'm most productive without worrying whether my colleagues are going to jump out of bed to answer one of my off-hour work emails.

Outlook 'delay delivery' option (or whatever your email client supports) is an even better way. If you don't intend someone to read and act on it until morning, you can enforce that trivially!

I work from home sometimes, and its a baseline assumption that my emails are being read by my employer. Therefore, his email serves two purposes, 1. it communicates to any line manager that he is in fact working, and 2. Letting his Coworkers know that he's expecting them to work odd hours like himself.

1) I've worked IT or IT/operations at a handful of small to large companies over the past 15 years where I've been directly in control of email and any "snooping" requests needed to go through me. I can count on one hand the number of times a manager has asked to read their employee's email. It's either been due to some HR related issue (harassment, misuse of resources, etc.) or because the employee was unreachable and some critical info had been sitting in their inbox. Employers snooping on email in a business environment is super rare.

2) My experience managing and being managed has led me to believe that most managers want their employees to work less, and most people believe that their manager wants them to work crazy hours. Frequently these people are the same people. eg. a middle manager wants his employees to go home and not work after hours, but they assume that their manager expects them to work from home between 7 and 11 PM every night. the GP of your comment even said this - he tells his employees to not work odd hours, but he does so anyway.

I have been working remotely for about 2 years now and have taken on a very similar approach. We communicate with HipChat more than email though. I have irregular working hours and sometimes I'll be online in the middle of the night, which might be the middle of the day in the office.

Write me a message or receive a message from me anytime, if I don't respond right now, that's ok.

Just another symptom of dehumanizing work-life balance as promoted in the US companies. People feel like they need to get a leg up on each other in order to retain jobs and be promoted within jobs, so they make themselves available for work purposes when they are not being paid. Effectively, people compensate for the wriggling anxiety of an "unfulfilled" work obligation (an unanswered email received after hours) by giving away their labor for free (answering the email despite not being paid during that time period to do so). I think this is also why people may claim that they enjoy or don't mind answering work emails after work; the reduction of anxiety after tying up an email provides a tangible upward delta for emotion. I am of the opinion that 99% of after-work emails would be eliminated if employers had to pay for the hour-block during which employees are answering emails.

"But when asked what aspects have the most negative impact on work-life balance, work emails ranked rather low at 18 percent—topping the list were bad bosses, working after hours, and employers being inflexible about vacation."

Ah, the article is pretending that answering emails after hours isn't working after hours. They're the same thing, because thought and communication about details of work equals work. Bad bosses will tend to email after hours as well. Employers not respecting the majority of their employee's time (which is spent outside of work) is also closely related to being "inflexible" (not respecting the contract) about vacation. I think the article could have easily said that working conditions and labor rights in the US are extremely poor rather than pretend there is something magical about answering emails after hours.

I know it isn't the core of the article, but complaining about an out of office message is missing the point of out of office messages. They do not really mean that I won't see your email for a week. But they do mean that if you just sent me an urgent problem, which normally would invoke an immediate response, you won't get that response. It lets people know that the normal communication patterns will differ, and leaves it up to them to decide whether they need to contact someone other than me.

That's what email is for already. An out-of-office message just reiterates the fact that email is not reliable and not time-sensitive anyway. There's no point. Every single email could have an out-of-office message, saying if you need urgent help to call/text/send something else.

Why does texting or calling have a different "urgency" level? Historical? (Email not historically being pushed to you wherever you might be). Cultural? In the microcosm of my work life they are on similar planes (especially given Google Voice), perhaps because they do the same thing: make my phone vibrate.

Maybe every text or call should autorespond saying if you need urgent help to come find me in person!

I'm not sure about texting, but calling is both synchronous and verbose. These are incredibly relevant criteria for determining whether something is immediate. While email can be verbose, it seldom is, and if anything critical is going on when multiple people are involved, a phone call is still the best way to communicate real-time. If you disagree, see whether you do or do not adjust what you are saying on the phone vs what you would type. I know that I favor fast-to-type sentence structure when emailing, which isn't always the most illuminating/explanatory.

Right now, I think the pendulum has swung away from phone calls and too far toward emails. Maybe this is because minutes on phones used to cost money, maybe it is because conference call spam devalued the speed of communication too far. But I think a one on one call is hard to beat and can often accomplish what a whole thread of email can in a fraction of the time. Phone calls are good for communicating fast and figuring out what to do. Emails are good for having a written record and working asynchronously.

Come 17:30 work ceases to exist to me and my normal life takes over. I work to live, not vice versa.

It saddens me this isn't the way for most.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

Unfortunately, most companies think that they own you 24/7 as soon as they put you on salary. To them, you are getting paid for it.

A guy at my job got written up for not responding to emails on vacation, even though he had an autoresponder directing people to his boss, and told everyone ahead of time that he'd be dark for a few days. Management's excuse is that you are 24/7 unless it's otherwise defined in your employment contract, and they won't ever put set hours into an employment contract.

what? If that was my job, I'd be looking for a new job faster than you can say "check your mail". In my holidays (2 weeks in summer usually) I dont respond for the whole time. No once-a-day mail checking, nothing. Never had problems so far luckily

I would look for a new job, and as a matter of fact, I did. When they found out I was looking (saw my resume on a job board), they compensated me to the point where I don't mind checking my email at odd hours. I was ready to leave, and I wasn't going to tell them or hold them hostage for an increase, so it worked out well for me, and I didn't feel like a salary blackmailer. It's a cushy job, and I've been here for over a decade, so I was relieved in a way (I don't like change).

Screw that. Unless I've specifically negotiated otherwise - and trust me, you'd be paying me handsomely for it - my work day starts upon arrival and ends upon departure.

Now, that's not a hard and fast rule. If something breaks at 2AM, call me. If there's an upcoming hard deadline, count on me. I've come up with plenty of work solutions while taking a shower at home. I pitch in extra because I believe in my company, enjoy my work, and want it to be successful. But if you want the right to my out-of-office hours, break out the checkbook. And frankly, you can't (or won't want to) afford that sort of arrangement.

I work for a defense contractor, and pretty much the only good thing about our (government-mandated) insanely bureaucratic timekeeping policies is that you will never see something like this happen at my employer.

Edit: Giving some details about defense contractor billing.

For those not aware of defense contractor timekeeping, every single paid hour has to be billed to exactly one thing, and each employee needs to explicitly bill the hours themselves on their timesheets.

If you're on vacation, you bill your hours to vacation. If you're working on a project, you bill your hours to the contract that funds the project. If you're sick, you bill the hours to sick leave. If you're working on a purely-internal project, you bill the hours to internal projects.

Billing hours to the wrong project is legally considered fraud, and it can get the company in serious hot water. Besides, no defense contractor would want to bill working hours to vacation: the company makes no money from hours billed to vacation, while the company makes money for each hour billed to a contract. Now, if they want to interrupt your vacation by making you bill hours to a contract, they can, but that eats into the amount of available hours they're allowed to bill for that contract (hours which would be much better being billed when you're in the office and are able to sit down at a work computer and do real work), and you get to keep your vacation hours, so you can prolong your vacation.

That's grounds for job-search in my book.

Vacation is a form of compensation and if a company can't respect that then they aren't worth working for.

It's grounds for a lawsuit, as I'm fairly sure it violates labor laws. Find the relevant statutes, print them out, highlight them, and watch HR squirm.

Probably not. It's been a few years since I took the in-house Employment Law class, but in the US I do not believe that you must be offered vacation time. I remember that you have to have to be able to take at least one morning and one afternoon break, but that's it as far as the law goes.

"Sense" aside, some of us were conditioned this way from Day 1, unfortunately. I think it's also pretty contextual, as I spent the first 10 years of my career at a marketing agency and everything was done in the name of client service. I knew no other way and it took me several years to unlearn that approach to work management. It's also important to note all the (admittedly ridiculous) perceptual games going on inside offices, where regardless of actual output you're being judged on hours spent inside that room.

I don't "check" my email, it comes over push notifications. So it doesn't discriminate between personal/work emails.

Best move I ever made was turning off every single push notification other than the messaging app my GF and I use with each other (she's wonderful at not abusing it). That's personal choice, obviously.

This is the right approach.

Nail. Head. I'm a contractor, you pay for my time. Want more work? Pay me.

I find permy types to be the ones that can't shut off from work.

Mostly because I also do personal stuff during work hours.

Hell yes. I don't answer the phone (not that anyone at work has my phone number, unless they copied it from my initial job application), I don't even have the capability to check my work eMail account; from the moment I step off company premises until the moment I step back in, they don't exist.

The workplace started this game of paying for my time and they're getting what they paid for and not one second more.

I must say, it's worked out rather well. The suckers who make themselves available all the time at the drop of a hat get abused and certainly don't get any respect or extra thanks for it.

> there's at least some anecdotal evidence that workers are not always working at work

This made me go look up whether hypobole (dramatic understatement) is a word yet.

I email after hours and on weekends/PTO voluntarily and I do rather enjoy it. I certainly enjoy it more than coming back to 1000 emails to deal with on my first day back.

>> there's at least some anecdotal evidence that workers are not always working at work

>This made me go look up whether hypobole (dramatic understatement) is a word yet.

Well... Is it?

No - http://dictionary.reference.com/misspelling?term=hypobole&s=...

Yes - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Hypobole

No - http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/spellcheck/english/?q=hypo...

You're looking for "litotes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes

In my opinion people do this because they don't know what else to fill their lives with, so they fill it with work.

This is my opinion as well.

There are a few sides to this.

One is, yes, a lack of imagination.

But too: it's exceedingly difficult to find something that you can devote yourself to given the demands of work. A 9-5, 40-hour week is bad enough, but the norm for many, particularly in the tech world, is 50-60 hours or more. Commute, sleep, and other activities tie up yet more time. If you're following guidelines to stay fit, that's other hour, or several hours per week (though time I consider well spent). Obligations to a partner, children, or elder parents can be extensive. If you're in a high cost-of-living city such as San Francisco, New York, or London, you've got very little space to call your own.

The time and space it takes to cultivate a meaningful alternative activity is difficult to come by.

We're awash with messages from advertising and media which further pollute our heads and distract.

And the work many of us do is itself largely mental -- it requires prolonged exposure and deep understanding, and tends to follow you around. Inspiration is as likely to strike in the shower as at your desk.

Given all of this, you're far more likely to be primed to be in "work mode", to understand a quick query or email, and even quite possibly appreciate its distraction from whatever it is that surrounds you.

I'm not saying this is a good thing at all. I don't believe that for a second. Unless your work is exceptionally gratifying and you're the very rare soul who's doing something actually useful for the world, you're far better off with downtime and the ability to get away from it.

But it does explain much of the psychology behind why the behavior is so appealing, and why creating more compelling alternatives so difficult.

My away from computer hobby is cycling, I get to combine staying fit with something I love doing and occasionally ride with a local club which fits the social side as well (coffee,cake and a chat after 60 miles is awesome).

It is hard to find time to do stuff sometimes though.

A good and valuable occupation, though I'd classify it as fitness actvity principally.

I'm referring more to engagement which occupies your mind. My experience, with employment in tech, is that exploring other technically complex issues is difficult -- there's only so much intellectual capacity a person's got. My own interests are the complex set of topics associated with sustainability: ennergy, climate change, human institutions from economics to politics to psychology to education and more.

As simply alternative mode operations, I've long found that some level of wrking with my hand -- physical manipulation though not necessarily hard physical work -- is quite rewarding. Woodwork, refinishing, building or repairing items, etc. Even cookking and household chores can fill this role.

It's a different headspace.

Physical work weather it's woodwork or a hill on a bike is a good way to get some distance from problems and think about them, I solve some of my toughest problems by going for a bike ride and deliberately focusing on the bike, view and riding style which I find clears my mind better than any other activity, usually a solution will present itself at that point.

Sometimes, works take such a big part of your life and stresses you so much that you might start to feel that you are better to put those few free hours into more work in a vain effort to get done with it.

People don't realize that they won't be done with it until their retirement.

Children help with this :)

> Why do we find ourselves reading emails during vacation or sick days, even when we don't have to?

Because we fear to get sacked?

I think it's way more than that. There's a number of ways to motivate people, such as involving them in the team mission and empowering them, compensation, and recognition. Motivated people will do what it takes, including thinking about work off hours.

I'm having trouble parsing that series of statements. How does your second sentence relate to your third sentence?

I was saying there's more than fear of getting sacked to motivate someone to work off hours. If you set up the right environment, they'll be doing it without anyone asking.

I'm on holiday visiting family, and travelling back home at the moment. I need something to do for the 9 hours or so in travelling for, and work emails are one of the things I use to kill the time.

Whenever I've done this in the past it was because of a desire to do a good job.

Whenever I find myself working for someone where the majority of what I do is because I fear retribution I've also found that I've generally grown unhappy with the situation and should move on.

Work isn't 100% fun, and it probably shouldn't be. There are going to be tedious things that you HAVE to do because it is your job. However, if you're doing everything because you HAVE to, not because you want to do a good job, there is a problem somewhere and you should examine it.

9/10 times for me it's because I'm filtering them out. It's not a good feeling to go back to work after a few days being out to a full inbox.

The other 1/10 of the time is because I probably pushed something out last-minute before I left due to some deadline, and I want to make sure my coworkers have their questions answered. I don't necessarily look at it as a fear of being fired, more so as someone who has been on the opposite end of that scenario and it's frustrating. If spending 30 minutes answering an email from a coworker on my vacation prevents a day's worth of frustration on their end, yeah, I'll take one for the team.

I check (and sometimes respond to) business email during off hours, out of curiosity. Also, some of our customers and partners are in very different time zones, and it speeds things up to answer a question or open a ticket to solve a problem immediately rather than waiting 12 hours. My manager and I are both a little fanatical that way. It's not a requirement of the job but it does distinguish our lean, efficient little intrapreneurial unit from the stodgy, slow responsiveness of the rest of the company.

I see the connected nature of work and after-hours email as a "symptom" of the blurring nature of work vs. life. Gone are the days where one clocks in and clocks out. I fully expect to check work emails and do other work "after hours" (read: on my own schedule). I also fully expect to check personal emails, read HN, and do other non-work activities during "work hours".

I get my work done, and I do it well. If you want to impose artificial constraints on when and how I do that work, you're stuck in the dark ages. My managers and teams understand that. Sometimes I have email conversations at 11pm at night because we all happen to be up. Sometimes I send emails that people don't even read until the next day: no problem. Sometimes I don't read emails until the next day: similar story. If it's truly urgent, people know to call or text.

I think it's a personal choice, though. I read (and respond to) emails after hours to a) plan and organize my coming day and b) do an ongoing triage of the things on my plate. I could do all this at 9am the next day, but I'd be more stressed as a result.

I know it's not healthy (in terms of switching off from work) - but I do generally enjoy getting emails - receiving one more often than not will be a reply I've been waiting for, or even better, sometimes new opportunities/or customers I like catching up. The association with work makes it seem bad, but I think a nice email, regardless of time received is still a nice thing

But how to set up your inbox in such a way that it only allows reception of nice emails after work time?

I can remember one day rate contract I was arranging, where all the replies from the manager appeared to be happening after 6-7pm at night and became slightly concerned that their idea of a day was not the normal 9-5ish. Turns out he answered most emails late evening.

I had a new director starting a few years ago when my kids were 1 & 3. Literally the first email I sent to him was at 11 PM the evening before his first day, so I started with, "Don't pay any attention to the time of this email. I'm sending it now because the kids are asleep and I'm still awake; I have no expectations that you'll be online answering emails all hours of the day."

That was a rather nice touch. I will bet your new director appreciated it.

Was it really needed to send that email at that time, or it was something that could have been sent first time in the morning?* And, where you already committed to work on something else next morning so the only/most-convenient time slot available was late the night before?

I don't know you, so I cannot in good faith accuse you of anything. But maybe if you reflected on your ambivalence towards work-life balance, you'd find the kernels for personal growth in there. Let me explain myself.

Speaking in general terms, there is a psychological phenomenon called the double-bind. It happens when a parent or authority figure states some expectation verbally but then subtly undermine it with his/her actions. i.e. I can chastise my kids for spending "too much time in front of screens", but then never have time to take them to play outdoors, or come back home and either keep working or root myself in front of TV, or buy them a video-game to reward some special achievement.

The root cause of the problem in this case would be my own unresolved feelings towards electronic entertainment, which I enjoy a little too much and I am aware to be not quite healthy. But from the point of view of my children's psyche, the situation is much more destructive: each of them can either embrace the label of "coach potato", absorb all the guilt from my chastising, but keep enjoying screens as a hidden pleasure; or they can try to live up to the impossible ideals I've set up for them and embrace the label of "troublemaker", because enjoying some healthy outdoors activity inside the house will invariably end up causing a bunch of disruption, nuisance and the occasional accident.

What they cannot ever dare is to say: "Hey Dad, you always say we should play more outdoors. Turn that gadget off and take us to the park", because if they do I will burst in anger. We all face some of this while growing up, and most of us learn to turn a blind eye to some intractable problems. In the most pathological cases, though, the children can grow up with a shattered sense of reality and develop serious psychiatric problems when they face the correct triggers in their adult lives (I have read, though I have not the reference now, that the double bind was fist discovered by the military while investigating the clinic histories of veterans who had gone into full-fledged schizophrenia instead of the more common PTSD).

What I am trying to say while I have read about this phenomenon from the point of view of development psychology, I have observed the same patterns of interaction in the workplace a few times. In those cases, we are all adults, so there is probably no risk of anyone's mental health; but lot's of needless stress comes from the unspeakable hot buttons, the packs of elephants that dwell in corporate rooms all over the world.

Well, it was his "welcome to the company, here are a few things that will be helpful as you settle in, and here's the scoop on where to go for orientation" email, so it would ideally get to him before he arrived, and certainly before orientation started.

Having two kids 3 and under doesn't lend itself very well to methodically planning out a carefully choreographed morning with just enough time to dash off an important email.

(That said, I do have a comfortably blurred line between work and personal, because I genuinely enjoy both and don't see a need for a strong wall between the two. Other people make other choices and I do what I can to not project my preferences onto their behaviors and choices. It's not perfect, but nothing is.)

> Well, it was his "welcome to the company, here are a few things that will be helpful as you settle in, and here's the scoop on where to go for orientation" email...

You could have said welcome and provide helpful advice at any time during the first day, as long as there was someone ready to great him first time in the morning. The same person could have taken him to the place where orientation will take place. If you are big enough to have structured orientation, you are big enough to delegate the reception of new employees.

I want to say I am not judging you or your work style. I simply notice that you have shared candidly and think you may appreciate a comment with an outsider's perspective.

===

By the way, there was an asterisk in my first post. I was going to say that I am somewhat biased because my current boss prefers to write untimely emails first thing in the morning. I know he's a family guy and has to wake up pretty early to check and respond email before setting the kids up for school. I find his style very refreshing, specially in comparison with the archetypical past-midnight workaholic messages (which I confess to indulge in sometimes).

I appreciate the sharing of your point of view and didn't take any offense (nor anything else negative).

I understand the people working for me who don't ever answer email unless they're on-call. Nothing negative as 24x7 email SLA isn't part of the bargain.

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