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I think a lot of this starts in school. In elementary school, kids are taught that it's okay (and even expected) for teachers to give them homework that they have to do in the evenings and on the weekends. In college, students take those habits to an extreme, as they send email and even text messages to professors late at night and on weekends, and a lot of professors respond. We shouldn't be surprised that they bring those habits into the workforce.

So, as a CEO, if you have an employee who wakes up early and wishes to put in a few hours early, you're OK with making that difficult by restricting the hours during which emails can be sent? What about the employee who likes to work for a while after putting his kids to bed?

I've had both kinds of employees, and I'm happy to facilitate their unusual work hours. The employee with young kids would often leave in the afternoon, and I was totally OK with that. His wife was a doctor and did not have flexible hours. He took the kids to soccer games. And he was the most awesome employee I’ve ever had the honor of managing.

Nothing prevents you from composing an email outside of business hours, but not sending it.

In an actual emergency email is a terrible communication medium, thus no email should ever be of a time critical nature.

Then what is the problem with sending it? The sender should know email is not for time sensitive things, it's for posterity and referencing. If you have an urgent matter, then call.

As a manager, answering emails in my off hours enables others to do useful work during their unusual hours. What you really want to attack is the expectation for employees to respond when they are not working— something that I do not expect.

I accommodate them and reply and respond, and we set clear expectations that I may not respond in my off hours, and I don't expect them to respond in theirs.

To be fair, the parent did provide a solution to this problem by suggesting emails be saved in the drafts folder until regular work hours resume.

Also, there's the argument that by implicitly encouraging out of hours work you may unknowingly be creating an expectation to some observers.

How is it a solution to handicap both manager and unusual worker by prohibiting emails during their preferred work hours? The real problem is elsewhere. And yes, I actively manage the expectation of who should quickly respond to an email— frequently I will say it is not an emergency and can wait for their normal workday.

Ah, right, fair enough. I see your perspective now.

Reliable 9-5 hours are also very difficult for narcoleptics.

This is important to consider in matters of law, because it’s a disability and must be accommodated. E.g. if they’re in a managerial position.

Unless we’re suggesting narcoleptics may not email anyone outside of 9-5. Which leads to the situation you pointed out.

It seems silly to apply a blanket law that "no work emails can be sent between X and Y hours".

If it's not a critical emergency, then it doesn't really matter if someone sends an email to another employee at 3AM because the recipient will just get to it whenever they come in to work the next day. There's plenty of instances where people may send emails to each outside of the standard 9AM-5PM working hours: traveling, in a different timezone, a shift-work schedule, the person is a night owl or very early riser and they like to work when they are most productive. I think people just need to accept and anticipate some lag time between communications when they send after hours email. Unless something is super important (which should be rare), there's really no need to expect someone to answer immediately, and the recipient doesn't need to feel compelled to answer immediately either. Even managers don't work 24 hours/day and sleep too. If they are being a hard-ass about always replying in a timely manner, then just email them at an inconvenient time for them to respond as a lesson.

Sometimes if I'm working on the weekend, I'll save the emails in drafts and send them out Monday morning, because while it's ok for me to work on my company on the weekends, I want to make sure my employees know that they are allowed to have a life too.

It’s hard to imagine sama saving emails in drafts solely for image rather than being responsive immediately.

What if a law forced him to?

Like I said, I'm not a fan of new regulations. I think each company should get to do their own thing. But I also see why workers need protection -- because when given the choice, many companies won't do the right thing unless it's also the cheapest thing.

It seems the underlying problem is that people who generally produce reasonable work productivity using email also likely are employed as salaried, overtime-exempt.

I don't think it is reasonable to craft a law saying you cannot communicate with your employees after hours. I do think it is reasonable to update the overtime exemption rules to allow for reasonable "time off" and that after-hour emails need to be compensated somehow, if the reading and responding to that email is required as part of your job. EDIT: And such regulation should also require disclosing to the employee that they are not required to read and respond to emails if they are not being so compensated.

I am also an executive, but definitely not to the level of your profile.

Such regulation has to be sufficiently unambiguous that companies don’t find loopholes around it.

There as rather simple technological solutions to achieve this company-wide:

Configure your SMTP server so that any email sent after 8pm is only sent to the other party at 7am; with a similar rule during weekend. [I am not sure how to perform this in practice with common SMTP servers, but there is not technological barrier here]

So employees can still "get work done" after hours, but they don't receive new tasks. In case of emergency, use the phone.

NYState could implement this in law. Emails sent at night to employees that are off-duty (i.e., not explicitly paid for night hours) should be blocked until the next morning. Much easier to implement than GDPR :)

Wouldn't that create it's own sort of tyranny in that it becomes about who can be a position to read and reply to email at 7AM?

I don't think so; (though I would set emails to be sent at 8am just to make sure :)

The whole issue comes from an implicit expectation that employees read their email after hours because (1) they are likely awake until 11pm-12pm and (2) they always carry their smartphones with email capabilities (3) the task has to be done before the next morning.

At 7am, employees are asleep so hopefully this implicit expectation of reading ones email will not transform into morning tyranny. Also, if the emails are received at 7am or 8am, the sender cannot expect the task to be completed before the morning but morning is already here. So managers will organize accordingly and stop feeling that it's OK to send tasks at 10pm to be completed by the morning.

I believe there's some requirements in Europe around this - companies need to be able to turn off access to corp email outside of work hours, to enforce that they're not incurring work. Is it France that does this? It's also why there's a quick settings toggle in Android to turn your managed corp profile on and off - there's an API that lets the MDM do it, so they provide similar functionality for the user.