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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I have coworkers and managers who will email or instant message me at all hours of the day or night. I simply don't have company email or instant messenger on my phone, and if I'm not "at work" then I don't read, answer, or even see them. I personally have never had a problem with replying to people when I am actually working rather than whenever they've messaged me. It's actually often useful because very often they'll figure things out for themselves rather and the delay means I actually have less work to do.

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There’s a good quote in the recent Increment issue on remote work, of a manager’s email signature:

    Received this email outside of my standard working hours (ET)? That means I’ve chosen to do some work at this time; it’s not an expectation that you do the same.

As someone prone to working odd or odd hours, I’ll often preface slack or email messages I send with a bold ‘not urgent’ or similar, in the hope that the recipient will feel comfortable ignoring it until their working hours.

I think if more people clearly set response time expectations, off hours messages would read as less of an intrusion, even to people with fewer firm boundaries.

Some German company, I believe the Deutsche Post/DHL, was changing their email servers to not deliver emails outside of working hours. Granted this works because all folks are in the same Timezone, but it is such an elegant solution. Just not deliver the mails until the next day. If it is super urgent you can still call. Would be cool if that was a mail client feature.

I have no work mail or chat on my private devices and actually move all incoming mail to a temp imap folder which I don’t sync to my phone or laptop. Then a cron job moves it to my inbox between 8 and 8.

I need a button in slack that does this.

Yes, it’s 2am in India. Yes, I want the whole thread to be in one tool. No, I don’t want to notify the person until they’re at their desk.

Slack does have a suppress notifications setting that the recipient can set. That doesn’t help when they haven’t set it.

90% of the emails I send are because this feature is missing.

By default, a user's Slack notifications are paused at night, unless I am misremembering.

I also see a lot of people who feel overworked are mistaking async for sync. At our company, we harp on the fact that slack is async.

While I have it pretty good as programmer, especially in covid times I get lots of calls from clients. I suspect they do so in part because they're going crazy isolating. The pressure to pick up the phone knowing it'll significantly impact my productivity is strong.

I think it's a phenomenon similar to the whole 'panopticon' idea: I'm pretty sure not picking up the phone will be fine, but because of the not knowing for sure I still often end up letting the interruption happen. We humans prefer removing uncertainty to an irrational degree, I guess?

I use the same method - don't install things at home that allow me to work from home. If I need to I'll bring a laptop home, but I dont do that daily either.

On a couple occasions I came in at a reasonable time only to have missed an extra-early meeting or call that someone scheduled at 7:00pm the night before. A polite "yeah I didn't see the email until 8 this morning" seems to send the message "what the fuck were you thinking" without any complaints from anyone. They learn, and hopefully question they own constant availability.

Report them to HR for creating a hostile work environment.

Don't! That's creating a paper trail AGAINST yourself.

It sounds like what ALittleLight does is working. Often times people who set boundaries have their boundaries respected. They may get more respect in general.

There's no need to involve anyone else.

HR represents the company's interests, not the employees'.

I've heard it said that in the U.S., the only reliable way for a non-union worker to get real protection from abuse is to personally hire a labor attorney.

Unless you have a case so egregious there is a high likelihood of punitive damages or a class action, no labor attorney is going to take a typical non union individual’s case. 30% of the actual damages alone aren’t even close to being enough to get an attorney to take a case that will take years to resolve and will cap out with a low 5 figures payout for the attorney.

Depends on the HR department. If you can communicate why "bad for employees" is bad for the company, then they'll help. Same with the legal department. And yeah, sometimes lawyering up is necessary to demonstrate that bad for employee is about to be bad for company.

Why make a false report to HR? Someone can send me an inbound message anytime they like. I'll respond to it when it's convenient for me. I don't need to restrict their message sending to times that are convenient for me (how would they even know, especially if they are working in a very different timezone and holiday schedule than my own?)

Wouldn't you be perpetuating this hostile work environment by not managing your notifications?

I don't see it as a hostile work environment at all. People can message me whenever is convenient for them and I'll read and respond whenever it's convenient for me.

I work with people from different time zones and people who like to keep different schedules, some waking up very early or working very late, and I myself wake up pretty late. It just doesn't make sense that I should demand people message according to my schedule, but I'm also not going to wake up early or work late to match theirs.

Are you serious? You would report coworkers to HR because they messaged you?

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