As a partial response to this people have invented a new plage: out of office emails for when I email outside of 9-5 weekdays.
I already know that people don't work 24/7, I even understand timezones. If I fire off an email, I'm totally cool if they pick pick it up in the morning. But then I get prematurely excited by an "immediate" response which turns out to be just a bot telling me what I already know.
I've found that sending emails when you know they'll be at work (so they'll notice it) is tremendously useful -- say 9am, 2pm, 5pm. People will tend to answer immediately incoming messages before a long queue of messages from the previous day that need attention.
A little shameless self-promotion, that's exactly one of the use-cases we envisioned for our company's product, Momentomail ( http://www.momentomail.com ).
My co-founder and I actually do this with each other, schedule messages so they'll be received sometime in the morning when we're both likely to be working through our mail queue from the end of the day and night before.
i agree. send emails/chats whenever you want and it's up to the recipient to manage their notifications to prevent them from getting sucked in after hours.
- i'd rather log in at 9am and see a bunch of late night emails than logging in at 9am and then seeing a deluge of auto-sent messages flood my inbox at 9:01.
- there needs to be some 'core' working hours, but people may be in different time zones or may do their best work in different parts of the day. if you're a night owl, we shouldn't do anything to stop/discourage you from doing work at 1am.
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.
I really, _really_ don't understand the constant fuss about after-hours email. It's not a phone call or an IM, it's mail. It's expected to be an asynchronous and a somewhat slow medium, and I've never encountered a workplace that expected immediate responses, let alone after hours responses at all. Maybe this is some US/Anglo specific issue?
Personally, I work at silly hours, from the afternoon til 2-4 AM. If I had to delay sending emails because of such odd sensitivity, I'd never be able to contact anyone in time. When I'm not at work, I'm not touching my work mail, IMs etc - don't even have them configured on my personal devices, so I don't get any notifications. Pretty simple IMHO.
I'm someone who occasionally sends an after hours email, but I don't expect them answered or even received until work-hours. They usually result from starting some very long process (e.g. full rebuilds, expensive tests, automated bisections, etc) that can take 30m+ near the end of the day, so I walk away to go cook and clean. I'll check on them and fire off relevant messages before I lose the mental context with sleep.
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.
The unfortunate part of this is that once people start responding to e-mails at 12AM, suddenly everybody is expected to respond at 12AM. It's a race to the bottom when separation from work and home life isn't really mandated.
I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.
Disagree, if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays and I’m getting back an out of office notification literally every time I email them, I want to know what’s going on.
> when they're starting their workday they'll see it
Well… I often don’t check my email till after lunch or later. This has never been a problem since anybody who needs an answer to something in less than 24 hours uses slack or text messaging.
>Research slated for publication in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that co-workers significantly overestimate how quickly senders expect replies to non-urgent emails -- especially those sent outside "normative" hours like nights or weekends.
The researchers call it "email urgency bias," a phenomenon caused at least in part by the fact that response speed has increasingly become a proxy for dedication and hard work. (The same way many managers see working long hours -- call it the "butts in seats" bias -- as a proxy for productivity.)
Another reason relates to closure. Sending that Saturday email gives you a sense of closure. You've thought outside the box. You've cracked the code. Boom: It's done.
Your head of shipping doesn't feel that sense of closure; in fact, receiving the email triggers her own desire for closure. Which means she has to respond.
The quicker the better, both because she thinks you expect it and also because then she, too, can try to put the matter aside until Monday.
A non-technical trick I learned was to try to send emails 10am local time of the recipient, Tuesday thru Thursday. I found this was the time I was most likely to get a response because most people don't like responding on the weekends to non-personal messages. On Monday they are digging out from the pile of messages from the weekend, on Friday they just want to get thru the day.
This kind of reminds me of clients who send emails late at night. My general policy is to just make myself unavailable, or simply send a polite reply telling them I will address it first thing in the morning. I figure if I do that enough, it will nudge them toward understanding which times are appropriate and which ones aren't.
I spend most of my time in Asia-Pacific timezones, so most of my automated emails arrive at awkward times. I'm glad that this one won't be staring at me from my inbox first thing in the morning -- helping me to produce first, consume second.
As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.
Unless you're actively involved in incident response, I find it hard to imagine a scenario that necessitates sending regular email at 3 in the morning.
Nothing necessitates it. But if I'm actively working, id rather draft and send the email while it's fresh.
Sometimes I'm working at 3 am, but mostly 90+hour weeks translate to 9am to 12 pm 7 days a week. Those aren't egregious hours to be communicating, they are egregious hours to expect an immediate response though.
I wondering if thats the default behaviour of users too. That they do prefer to reply to emails at 2 am.
It's anecdotal, but in one engineering team I talked about having culture of not sending emails after work hours. But consensus was that they have no problem with it, and some insisted that they are any way working late in nigt.
So, will-fully or forced, users are maybe performing this behaviour !
Honestly I feel the same way about email. I work in an office culture where rapid email replies are strongly encouraged. But as a project-based worker, that kills my momentum. I've generally gotten away with semi-ignoring it by checking email morning, mid-day, end of day, and strongly encouraging people to call me in the interim with anything truly urgent.
I already know that people don't work 24/7, I even understand timezones. If I fire off an email, I'm totally cool if they pick pick it up in the morning. But then I get prematurely excited by an "immediate" response which turns out to be just a bot telling me what I already know.
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