The notification arrives at 9.40 on a Tuesday night, and you feel your shoulders climb towards your ears before you have even read it. Nine times out of ten it could have waited until morning, yet because it pinged your phone it now owns your evening. Email is not the enemy here. The expectation that you are reachable at every hour is, and that expectation only holds because most of us quietly agree to it.
Switch off properly
The single most effective change is also the most uncomfortable: remove the work email app from your personal phone, or at minimum kill its notifications outside working hours. Half measures do not work, because a badge showing three unread messages will pull your attention whether you open them or not. If you genuinely need to be reachable for emergencies, agree a separate channel for true emergencies - a phone call, a specific message - so that email loses its false urgency. I deleted the app from my phone two years ago and have not missed a single thing that actually mattered, which tells you how much of the urgency was manufactured. The work does not stop because you stopped watching it at midnight; it simply waits, the way it always could have.
The right-to-disconnect question
Several European countries, including France and Belgium, have given workers a legal right to disconnect, and the UK has debated something similar without yet legislating it. Whether the law arrives or not, the underlying principle is sound: being contactable is not the same as being on duty, and unpaid availability is still a cost even when no one names it. You do not need to wait for Parliament to set your own line.
- Schedule emails written late to send the next morning, so you do not silently set a midnight norm for your team.
- Put your working hours in your signature and your out-of-office, and actually honour them.
- If you manage people, the boundary you keep matters far less than the one you model.
Set the norm out loud
Teams drift into always-on culture because nobody ever says the quiet rule aloud. So say it: "I don't expect replies outside working hours, and I won't think less of anyone who switches off." Then prove you mean it by not replying to your own boss at 11pm. This works - unless your senior leaders model the opposite, in which case the norm has to be set further up than you, and that is a conversation worth starting rather than a reason to give up.