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 still don't think Android has a nice feature for this. I'd like to have a group of apps muted by a specific schedule, with the option to flip between states. None of the similar features do this in a simple way.

Android has work profiles that can be activated/deactivated on a schedule.

There is something like that but I'm looking for silencing two work apps on non-work time. This inverted way of configuration doesn't seem to exist.

If you really didn't want employees to answer email in the middle of their night, you would configure the company mail server to not deliver things in the middle of their night. Some companies actually do this.

Sometimes emergencies happen. Having random IT systems do this means it is guaranteed to go wrong several times a year.

This is true of literally all automation. We put in place automation all the time that saves like 5 minutes a month, and this is something that would directly benefit the mental health of all employees. Seems like a fair tradeoff unless you value ALL employees' mental health at less then 5m of an engineer's time per month.

how do you handle multi-timezone teams or international companies with people spread around the world?

it would be counterproductive to tell a team in london team that they can't message each other because the the email server server only sends things during california working hours.

Don't deliver mail to a London recipient if it is midnight in London. If it's noon on a weekday for another recipient, go ahead and deliver it to them. Also, there would be no need to have restrictions on sending -- email is store-and-forward already. Send all you want, it will get delivered when the receiving party is available.

These used to be the default expectations around email: your recipient will see it during business hours, when they next dial in. Broadband and always-on internet creeped up without us really examining this, so Outlook is now just a chat client with a weird UI.

Could be solved with a simple expectation for reading emails during work hours company wide. Btw, I don’t check my email when outside workhours and don’t care what anyone thinks... There’s an emergency path directly to my phone but that isn’t to be abused or gets banned away. It hasn’t happened in years…

Right. Article is from 2012 as well. The communication landscape arguably has evolved a lot since then.

With Slack, for example, you have so much fine grained control. I don't know if it makes sense to implement a blanket "shut off communications after hours" policy