E-mailing for work during the weekend

I strongly resent getting work-related emails at the weekend, unless it’s an emergency, and I try very hard not to send them then either (again, it would have to be an emergency). For all the reasons you suggest. Our lives are bigger than our jobs.

As someone who spent much of my career working weekends, nights, etc, I think it’s clear that “emailing on weekends” is definitely something that should be frowned-up, technologically-blocked, etc, outside of the few sectors where it’s actually necessary: in short, safety-critical sectors. Most businesses (and specifically, managers) should be able to plan ahead enough that they do not need their workers to donate their weekend time. When a worker is not “on the clock” they shouldn’t be receiving work-related emails.

Every worker who can do this excess labor eventually becomes a worker who cannot (for reasons of family, health, age). Every worker, including me. The young worker who says “well, I can do this, and I should be able to” is precisely in the same position as the young “invincible” who says “I’m healthy, I don’t need health insurance.” And in precisely the same way, prohibiting off-the-clock work, is a social insurance function: it ensures that the old, the weak, and the family-encumbered are not unfairly penalized for something over which they have no control. Of course, in the latter case, the “family-encumbered” are doing something that is socially-necessary, and so penalizing them for it is doubly wrong.

All of the above skips over the long-term bad effects of overwork on the worker themself, but those exist too.

OP seems that assume that one’s colleagues share a small set of time zones, but this is increasingly not the case. I work for a globally distributed company, and am actually on the “other side” of the international date line from many of my collaborators. It would be sub-optimal for us to adopt a “no emailing on weekends” rule because my Saturday is their Friday and my Monday is their Sunday.

Until proven otherwise we should expect that adults can protect their free time if they want to.

First, there are clearly roles where people need to be reachable at any time to react to some kind of safety, logistics, power outage, or public relations emergency.

Second, for those who are not in such a role there is an elegant solution: just don’t look at your work emails. Treat them like a letterbox that you will open on Monday morning. Problem solved.

Third, if the response to that is “but I am also using my work email account for private matters, so I have to look at it on the weekend” or “my boss is complaining that I don’t respond on a Sunday”, I think we have accidentally identified the real problem, and in neither case is it the original email being sent per se. In the former case the real problem is the staff member’s misuse of company / university / public service resources, in the latter case it is the boss’ expectation of people working in their off-time.

But again, an email being sent to the staff member is never itself a problem because they at least should have the option of not looking at their inbox.

Now retired, I taught my whole career in a heavy teaching-load institution (4/4), and so if I wanted any time for research–and I always wanted that–the weekends had to be included as work time. But one thing I always tried to do with emails is to indicate that recipients could (most often) reply at their leisure–to take pressure off them if at all possible. Now with some recipients that didn’t matter–some people just reply ASAP because of their personalities and work-style. But I tried in emails at all times to try and relieve people of pressure to reply.

If people have set their work week up so that they work M-F 9-5, and don’t want to respond to “work” emails the rest of the time, I suppose I don’t have any problem w/ that. Many email systems allow you to set up an “away” message that would send an auto-response on the weekend that would warn people not to expect a reply. That also doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. (There are cases where I depend on information or help from other people, though, in cases where I must do something and can’t do it w/o the other person’s input. These cases up in times other than M-F 9-5, of course, no matter what my desires, so a strong decision to only work these times would impact more than just the person making the choice.)

That said, I think there are some things at least suggested by the post that seem less clearly reasonable to me. First, I often enjoy doing my “leisure” activities during the week and during “normal” working hours, and then working on the weekend or evening, because things are less crowded during the week. (I suppose this helps people who want to do those things on the weekend, too.) Sometimes there is the expectation that everyone should (absent religious reasons) do things at the same time. This seems clearly wrong to me (even leaving aside the people who have to work to make that possible.) So long as I don’t expect people to respond right away on the weekend (and so long as people don’t let weekend emails get “lost”), it seems unreasonable to expect me to not email on the weekend, if I want to set up my work week differently.

Secondly, I think it’s a real mistake for academics to want their work lives treated as if they were 9-5 jobs. For one, lots of them don’t actually work like that, so it’s a bit phony anyway. But more importantly, if academics insist on working only “normal business hours”, it seems much more likely that academic employers will want to insist that academics work like “normal” people, and be “in the office” and “on the clock” during those times, perhaps with effort monitoring systems akin to billable hours for lawyers, or filling out activity reports and time sheets. That seems very unlikely to be a good tradeoff to me.

I was never an academic, but I did end up after many years as a carefree field biologist working in an office that had e-mail. This was the regulatory part of my agency, where phone calls and thoughtfully crafted yet brutal letters and memos were important, and where e-mails were starting to consume a lot of time.

I noticed right away that everyone was very serious and committed, the opposite of what government workers are supposed to be. They worked long unpaid hours, most of them, hardly ever stopping for lunch, and almost everyone would give up a few days to several weeks of vacation, use-or-lose, at the end of the year. I myself sort of fell into it and although I never gave up vacation time I would compose memos excoriating corporate water hogs at home late into the night.

It felt like, if you didn’t keep at it your enemies would win and your favorite critters would die out, but in reality they were going to win no matter what, progress is progress and the river Seine itself is paved from the edges in Paris and it’s not so bad. You’re not going to win, even if by some twist of fate a thousand more people were hired to write your memos and letters and to dicker with lobbyists and politicians and underfunded environmentalists and other “stakeholders.”

Just saying. Relax and wait a while. A lot of these problems are going to turn out to not have been problems.

Oh, the point is not that the bad guys win, but that people probably shouldn’t get so involved in their causes or jobs that they can’t relax. Even if your cause is just to make a billion dollars or promote “apps”, you’d probably breathe easier and possibly live longer and be better at it if you didn’t have it on your mind all the time. So my vote is for no weekend e-mails. No week-end nothing, no phones no pools no pets. Let these poor people unwind a little bit, they work too hard and they’re going to break something inside if they don’t slow down.

I realize that this post is about work, but this is a perspective from not work. Toward the end I was a gros-légume cog on several important committees and wheeling and sometimes even dealing on important matters and sending out trenchant e-mails daily, with a lot of bite and import to them, and getting e-mails back, but all sent to and from a .gov address that I couldn’t figure out how to get to on week-ends.

When I pulled the plug I thought it would be hard to leave behind, but it wasn’t. It turned out that “work” had been mostly doing what you do in meetings and saying what you say in e-mails, and although I tried to keep a hand in the business and the politics and the exquisite detail it all went away in a few months and I was just a guy in the woods splitting firewood and shoveling snow. I still cared, but I sure didn’t care enough to fret about week-end e-mails, or any work e-mails at all. Which is good because the minute you go out the door your .gov account is gone.

I’m guessing that it would be the same for a retiring academic. What’s left after “work”, such as it was, is some of the people you worked with, and what were apparently difficult problems will fade out quickly. And if you are lucky you won’t remember them, although you will remember some happy encounter over free doughnuts at some meeting that you don’t remember what it was supposed to be about. That’s almost a state of grace.

Working more hours than you are paid for really needs to be separated in the discussion from which hours one works.

Both in what I say and do, I try to show that a full-time academic job should fit in roughly 40 h/w (in engineering, in northern-Europe), but that scheduling is entirely flexible. I arrive ‘late’ to drop off kids at school, leave ‘early’ to pick them up, and work on evenings and weekends. So I agree with comment #11

But that also means that the evening/weekend email actually demonstrate that I compensate for arriving late and leaving early.

(I thus also have the following statement in my email “I might email at odd hours, as a result of compensating for having taken family time during regular hours.
Please, in no way let this pressure you into answering outside your own working hours.” But nobody has ever said anything about it. Not sure people actually read email signatures)

I must admit to sending work emails to administrative staff over the weekend, but always with a request not to deal with it until Monday. Mostly that happens, but some respond. OTOH, I sometimes get admin emails on the weekend, and deal with or not, as it suits me.

(I thus also have the following statement in my email “I might email at odd hours, as a result of compensating for having taken family time during regular hours.
Please, in no way let this pressure you into answering outside your own working hours.” But nobody has ever said anything about it. Not sure people actually read email signatures)

I’ve seen similar statements in people’s email signatures. (So, yes, at least one person does read email signatures, at least some of the time.)

This is the first time I’ve replied to one of these. I switched from a no-email on the weekend job to one that emails all the time, and my stress levels have jumped considerably. My job, and lots of jobs, require emotional separation between a tough working environment and home. Seeing emails flash up on your phone ruins that (and there are two or three a month I need to see so I can’t dodge it).

The worst part is that this is easily preventable. Most email clients have a schedule send button. If you have a thought you want to get off that doesn’t need an immediate reply, schedule send it for whenever the workday starts.

Up until about 2018 I would respond to emails at any time of the day or night, weekends included. I rarely initiated any on weekends but would definitely respond to any I received.

For a number of reasons, starting in 2018 I adopted a new approach which set very strict rules around when I’d look at devices and how I would respond. After the end of my work day I will look at my email one time (often around 10pm) and if I see something that is truly urgent or where its beneficial to me to respond, then I will. Otherwise I wait until workhours.

On the weekend I from about 6pm Friday through around 3pm Sunday I absolutely refuse to engage with any work device. I put it on a charger on silent and ignore it entirely. At 3pm Sunday I engage with it again the same way I do for a worknight and only respond if urgent or beneficial. I’ve yet to encounter an instance where I regretted not responding following these rules and the resulting stress reduction has been a big positive.

I’ve actually to the greatest extent possible adopted a “no device Saturday” standard where I keep my personal phone on silent as well and only engage with it if I want to (like to get directions or look something up or if actively texting someone to plan something or meet-up). I use little social media, but that’s a hard ‘ignore’ on weekends and same for emails, texts, chats etc. Its been incredibly liberating to just go about a Saturday with no rings, chimes or buzzes. You might not think you can do it but I’ll bet if you try it, you’ll love it.

I started sending emails on weekends during the pandemic. This is mostly because of pandemic-induced loss of productivity, so I seldom get the job done during the week. Usually I’ll schedule these to send on the recipient’s Monday morning, to avoid inflicting them on anyone else during the weekend.

Once a month I get to work a 12 day week, on call on the weekend bracketed by the usual work weeks. Emails then are usually urgent and have to go out immediately.

It frequently occurs to me that men and women bled and died to get a 40 hour work week. Offhand I can’t think of anyone I know who has a work week that short. We’re going to have to start again I guess..

… an attempt to contain the working week to Monday to Friday.

I have nothing of substance to add to the numerous comments on the main topic of OP, but this one dependent clause jumped out at me. I think about this in the context of leisure time and working hours expectations sometimes, and I think broad rules about limiting economic activity to even 6 days a week are asking an awful lot. It seems like somebody will have to work weekends, for the rest of us to have the lifestyle we’re accustomed to.

“Until proven otherwise we should expect that adults can protect their free time if they want to.”

Yeah it a good thing there are no power differentials between employees and their employers!

In an earlier comment I observed that I wasn’t sure how much relevance my personal response would have to the original question because I’m not an academic.

In my job, I receive a high volume of emails about tasks I am being requested to perform–I am nearly constantly switching between checking carrying out these requests and checking what the latest email requests are–but the fraction of these emails which come from a hierarchical superior or anybody with any kind of supervisory or managerial responsibility for me is almost negligible.

I would hazard the guess that for a typical academic there are, among work-related emails, only a small number that come from hierarchical superiors with supervisory or managerial responsibility (maybe one day I’ll ask one or two of the academics I know).

In this specific respect, therefore, my experience has little applicability to the experience of somebody who is regularly emailed about work by a supervisor, manager, or other hierarchical superior. The same would be true of the typical academic’s experience, if my guess about what it’s like is correct.

So it’s different for people in different situations.

(I can imagine a situation where people I deal with started contacting my supervisor and my manager to complain that I wasn’t responding to emails on the weekend, but given my personal knowledge of the specific individuals who are currently my supervisor and my manager I am confident that such complaints would cut no ice. Again, I can easily imagine a different situation–that is, I can imagine people who are under pressure from hierarchical superiors to respond on the weekend to emails from others, and again my experience is not applicable to theirs.)

the nicest luxury in life –
I have –
is NOT to respond to any e-mails or telephone calls when I’m ‘private’ –
or in Italy –
(like right now)

Aardvark Cheeselog: “It seems like somebody will have to work weekends, for the rest of us to have the lifestyle we’re accustomed to.”

Yes, so for instance, people will work Sat-Wed, with Thu/Fri off, and on those days, they should receive no work-related emails except for truly exceptional circumstances. The idea isn’t that there is a fixed and specific weekend (“Sat/Sun”) just as there isn’t a fixed and specific workday: some people will work day shift, others night shift, and other the graveyard shift. But the hours and days of one’s work should be sufficiently known-in-advance, and and work outside those hours and days should be sufficiently rare, that people can plan their lives with some certainty that they get to actually live them.

That they can work to live, not live to work.

P.S. I feel compelled to note that this entire discussion is so much discussion about whether we get to eat cake or bread; the true injustices are those people on “zero hours contracts”, or (in the US) with on-call scheduling, where they can be called into work basically anytime, for any amount of time. They basically have no certainty at all about any sort of free time, and hence can’t actually plan anything for themselves or their families.

It frequently occurs to me that men and women bled and died to get a 40 hour work week. Offhand I can’t think of anyone I know who has a work week that short.

I can easily believe that. But you don’t know me, do you? I don’t work more than 40 hours a week (as a continuing full-time employee being paid a full-time salary).

I don’t mean to suggest that the fight is over. It continues, you’re absolutely right about that. I just wanted to suggest that you should be careful about over-generalising.

GG: “is there any work activity that is non-coercive”

The degree of coerciveness depends on the circumstances. But let’s take a step back. Work activity is governed by labour laws and regulations, and by contracts between workers and employers (including union contracts that cover all or some of the workers). At issue in this discussion is weekend work. If laws and regulations and contracts say for example that you have a 40 hour week and are entiteld to have the weekend off, then employer pressure to work on the weekend is clearly abusive. Many work contracts have specific provisions that allow weekend work in certain circumstances, often with special compensation. There is also a group of workers who have sufficient autonomy to arrange their own work time, and who may voluntarily choose to work on the weekend, although in many cases it is questionable how voluntary this really is.

What is near absent from the whole discussion so far is any mention of laws and regulations and contracts. Why is that?

Tm: “What is near absent from the whole discussion so far is any mention of laws and regulations and contracts. Why is that?”

Matt: “that somehow it’s desirable that everyone work the same hours and have the same hours off, and that variations from that need justification or extra compensation. Why want that?”

(1) I understand that in the EU, it is much more common to have contracts (for instance, that employees must give several months’ notice when they quit). In the US, much/most employment is at-will. That means that you can be fired for nothing at all. Indeed, getting fired for cause is harder to do, than getting fired for nothing at all, b/c the former can be contested in court, where the latter cannot. Even where there are laws, they are difficult-to-enforce, and violations are difficult-to-prove.

I don’t even know if there really are laws about employers demanding work outside of “standard hours” for salaried (that is, not hourly) workers: I know that this was discussed in France some number of years ago, but don’t know if it went anywhere. In the US, haha, what ludicrous ideas! We’re all Alexey Stakhanov here, comrade!

(2) I agree that some of the comments have been phrased as if everybody “works a M-F standard day shift.” But nothing is lost from the discussion by replacing that with “works a standardized and mostly-unchanging shift consisting of certain days of the week, and certain hours each day (to not change from day-to-day)”.

“I really don’t get the assumption, in the original post and in many of the comments, that somehow it’s desirable that everyone work the same hours and have the same hours off, and that variations from that need justification or extra compensation. Why want that?”

I have no wish to speak for anyone else, but I would say it is not desirable for everyone to work in the same way – but it may be quite desirable to have “standard work model(s)” for working behaviours, deviation from which should be examined (and may well should engender an expectation of justification or recompense).

i) Social impact

J-D has covered this, so I won’t belabour the point, but there is a reason why “unsocial work hours” are called that. I would be wary of overgeneralising, but I think it not unreasonable to suggest that if you are being called upon to work in a way which can alienate you from society, that is something which should not go without at least discussion about the appropriateness of those conditions – and I would further suggest that many people might well consider that there is some form of opportunity cost associated.

ii) Potential for abuse

I live in a capitalist society, and a “standard work model” represents a point of negotiable defence against working in a way I don’t wish to. For example, I am currently working a set period of hours per week, distributed over Monday to Friday. It is easy to recognise that were my employers to request I work much more than that, this would be an unusual state of affairs with a default presumption that I should be able to refuse without consequence (at least in principle – the theory is rather different from the practice, after all).

By way of contrast, let’s consider zero-hour contracts (I will now abbreviate as ZHC) within the context of the society with which I am familiar (yours may well differ, but this merely is to illustrate a point). To simplify considerably (there isn’t a standard definition), these are generally contracts in which an individual has no set hours but is “on call” and can be contacted to work if required, receiving payment only for the hours worked. The worker has the right to refuse to work a shift (if, for example, they have other commitments or there was insufficient notice). This mode of working can make sense and be rather useful for some people who wish flexibility in their working hours (for example, some students working part time). There is nothing inherently wrong with ZHCs per se, and I’m sure one can find cases where people benefit from and enjoy working under such conditions.

However, many ZHCs contain exclusivity clauses, making you entirely dependent on one employer for income even though there is no guarantee of working hours. This offers employers considerable additional power on the part of the employer which they can (and in some cases do) exploit – if you are in the position where you have a fixed expenditure every month (because you require shelter, food, clothing, etc.), but you income can be reduced to zero entirely on your employers whim (and you cannot seek any other form of remuneration), then I would hope it is not necessary for me to emphasise the ways in which this can be used as leverage over the worker (consider, for example, some of the events leading to the London Dock strike of 1889).

In a system where there is a “standard work model”, and that ZHCs are considered the exception rather than the norm, ZHCs could undergo more scrutiny when implemented. In my society, this did not happen – indeed, some people were moved from their “default contracts” onto ZHCs against their wishes, and much of the implementation has been rather disastrous for those so employed (for example, some are now no longer considered “normal workers”, and so lack much of the protections they would otherwise be eligible for – weakening their positions much further).

This is, of course, just one example – consider also the way in which many shift workers see their expected role expand far beyond that to which they agreed without recompense or protection. For someone working in a restaurant who can see their “9 to 5” expand to “6 to 6”, because they are expected to come early to prepare things and leave late after cleaning up – even though they are not being paid for that. Or consider the senior professor who expects their PhD students and postdocs to work 80h per week, including weekends. Depending on the situation it may be that the student is equally motivated, signed up with a full understanding of that expectation, and there is no issue per se (more on this later). However, this is not always the case – I for one am aware of people who found the expectations of their supervisor far exceeded their contractual obligations, and what had been communicated to them before accepting the role. While in principle one might refuse, in practice there can be a considerable power differential (consider the potential impact a supervisor can inflict on your future career) and this can (and, in fact, does) get exploited to the detriment of the students / postdocs. And so on and so forth.

In short, in a system without expectations as to what hours you should be working, it is far easier for someone to be exploited.

iii) Other

Let’s consider working in an environment which necessitates working with other people. As alluded to in the OP (and in my previous comment), your actions can impact others – particularly if you are in a position of authority or power. But even otherwise, you can still set an “expectation”. If, for example, you happily work 80h a week despite only being obliged to work 40h, you may well have raised the expectation for others in a similar role to do the same even if they don’t wish to. Is it necessary to explain why this can be a bad thing?

There are other particular concerns which may arise. For example, I work in a laboratory environment – were we not to have standard working hours, it could represent an incredible safety risk (people have died as a result of having an accident when others are not around).

I’m sure other points might also be raised, but this is only a mere blog comment and not a thesis.

Summary

I would say that the discussion is less about it being desirable that everyone work the same hours and have the same time off, and more about the way in which power dynamics can lead to exploitation of labour. Given the history of capitalism, I think that not an unreasonable concern.

I should emphasise that this does not mean that “non-standard work models” should be regarded as inherently wrong (after all, many people can and do benefit from these). If someone is desirous of working in a non-standard way, it may well be a good thing for them to do so (certainly I can envision situations where that which suits one person is unsuitable for another). Society should examine, and perhaps develop additional “standard work models” to cover such situations, but I wouldn’t say there should be a prohibition – after all, one size does not fit all.

However, in societies where employers frequently have more leverage than employees, “non-standard work models” may well be things which should not go unimplemented without forethought or examination given the potential deleterious effects.

This is just my perspective though.