The Curse of Off-Hours Email

The Wall Street Journal

Imagine it’s the end of the workday and you have a non-urgent work question to ask a colleague. You know this colleague has already gone home for the day, but you send off an email to them anyway.

Now ask yourself this: Do you expect a response from your colleague right away?

Probably not. But does your colleague understand that?

Research that we’ve just published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes suggests that the answer is “no.” Worse, our inability to recognize this fact when we shoot off an email often makes us complicit in an “always on” work culture that contributes to burnout.

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