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by mikro2nd 1632 days ago
How and why do you even know there's an email in your "work" inbox? Have your devices switch off notifications outside of work hours and you're done. If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.

eta: If you keep yourself on the hook, that's on you.

3 comments

If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.

Come review time you will be dinged for not being a "team player".

Meanwhile the employee that does quickly respond to these messages will get ahead and eventually become your boss.

TBH if something is important enough, I have no problem with responding to it "After work hours", whether it's on the weekend or after work. In the same way, I have no problem taking a long lunch or sleeping in because I know it's a push/pull relationship with work. This is of course much easier to do when you're permanently remote so YMMV

If these impact your performance then you work in a shitty place and there’s little you can do about it. Just don’t aim for a promotion or change job.
Stuff like this impacts people at almost every job I've seen (and I've been contracted out a lot of different places and watched what employees do).

It turns out that it is typical for these behaviors to occur in workplaces, hence laws to prevent it.

Or even simpler: Don't use your own device for work related stuff.

I can get work email on my device with appropriate software and configuration by my employer.

But why on earth should I ever do that?

I want my work calendar to be on my personal device, because I don't want to have two devices. Email comes packaged with the calendar.
My iPhone only downloads email when I tell it too, even when it does it sits in the background. If I’m not working why would I read it?

If I’m on call like I’ve been over Christmas, I’ll be called by a manager sufficiently high up enough, with a charge code for me answering the phone (4 hours at time and a half), and explain why it was so important to do so.

depending on your calendar tooling, you may be able to have calendar events shared between multiple calendars. And I do understand the whole "not wanting more devices", although it can lead to having a harder time separating work from not-work.

Personally, I have accepted that the only way I can get a decent-enough separation between "work" and "not-work" is to, as far as possible, separating work devices from personal devices. I have a me-phone, and a work-phone. Unless I am on-call, the work-phone tends to not be near me during not-work-hours, it sometimes gets shut off on weekends (unless, again, on-call). I have a work laptop, and a me-laptop (currently about 80 mm apart), the me-laptop stays closed during work, the work-laptop stays closed outside work.

I do some time sensitive work with clients. It's time sensitive because there are often hard deadlines or deadlines that are created and set 25-48 hours out. Clients are often in different time zones.

This is the first time in my career where I have had push notifications for work email on my phone. I don't love it. Mostly because while many of the emails are not time sensitive once I got in the habit of answering things when they come in instead of batching emails (what i've previously done) then every email seems more important and its easier to answer than to know I've got a non urgent email I need to answer at some point in the next 24-48 hours.

I write all of this to say... Not everyone can turn off work email after 5pm.