Comment by jknz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jknz | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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