is it OK to send work emails late at night?

by Alison Green on March 24, 2026

A reader writes:

As a manager, new parent, and generally busy person, I work some strange hours. For example, yesterday I was online at 2 am (as my daughter woke me up during the night and I decided to use some time to clear my work inbox ahead of a busy Monday) and 10 pm (as I finished early to play with my daughter but needed to meet a deadline). I don’t expect these kinds of hours from my team or want to encourage people to work outside of hours if it doesn’t suit them, but sometimes these are the hours that suit me!

What can and should I do to make it clear that what I do isn’t what I expect from the team and that following my example won’t have any impact on my opinion of them or their performance? Working hours is part of my “welcome to the team” conversation and I do talk to each person about it periodically using phrasing like, “You may see some emails from me at strange times. This is because I don’t have a set working pattern and sometimes work early or late to allow me flexibility. I absolutely don’t expect anyone to reply to me or be checking their emails outside of their normal working hours so please work whatever hours suit you.” I feel like that’s clear but I just keep having “actions speak louder than words” going round my head.

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

  • I’ve been over-sharing at work — how do I reset?
  • How to tell a computer-illiterate coworker I can’t keep helping her
{ 207 comments }

{ 207 comments… read them below }

  1. genusalice*

    I work at a company of about 1600, we have offices for people to go into as needed but 98% of people work almost completely remote. We also have flexible working hours. A common email signature here includes a version of the line “We work flexibly at [Company ] which means I may respond to emails outside of traditional working hours. Please feel free to respond at a time that works best for you.” I kind of love it, I’ve never had this sort of environment before and it still entertains me 3 years on. TBH I barely even notice what time an email came in.

    1. A. Lab Rabbit*

      This. People need to normalize getting emails at all different hours. The workplace is becoming increasingly global and this is just a thing that happens.

      That said, if you’re a boss and you say “you don’t have to worry responding to my emails outside of your normal working hours” then you need to mean it. If you ever worked for a toxic boss who would say “X is okay” when it really wasn’t, that’s one of those weird expectations you can normalize from a toxic workplace.

      1. Thomas*

        What I’d like to see normalised is Email Is Not Instant Messaging. Someone who wants a reply ASAP should use something else.

    2. Bathyphysa Conifera*

      I really want to normalize this approach.

      Especially when it’s so common to work across international teams. Or to work with flexible hours or schedules, for so many reasons, which might be true all the time or a special adaptation for this week that everyone in my in-box doesn’t know about.

      If I’m up early trying to knock out some work before a medical appointment that will eat the whole morning, it’s great if someone sent me the files I need in the middle of the night my time. Because they are there the next time I want to work with them, not just in The One True 9 To 5, which might not even be the 9 to 5 for myself or the emailer.

      1. Spencer Hastings*

        I totally agree. I feel like I say this in the comments on every post that talks about different working schedules, but I have colleagues who are functionally in a time zone two hours ahead of me even though we literally work in the same building. So if I’m online late at night*, and I know Bob is going to be here at 6 AM, I don’t see any reason to delay answering his question until tomorrow morning when I’ve rolled out of bed to get here at 8 and he’s been here since 6. If I send it right away, then he can see it as soon as he gets in!

        *it’s a CPA firm, so everybody’s working outside of the normal 8-5 at least a little bit at this time of year

        1. AthenaC*

          Same – I’m in public accounting and I have teams / clients across time zones and across the globe. There’s so much to be done that the best way to be flexible to everyone’s needs is just to work when you need to and send emails whenever you want. Talk to each other and coordinate if there’s a scheduling / workflow / delivery problem, none of which is aggravated / solved by delaying emails. My team members in India aren’t holding their emails until 8 am my time, nor would I expect them to.

    3. 2 Cents*

      +1 to this. I freelance for various distributed companies, one global, and they all have variations of this line in their signature — “My working hours may look different than yours.” But +1,000 to backing it up with action. If you email someone and they don’t respond until their working hours, they shouldn’t be dinged for it.

    4. Another Kristin*

      Meh, unless you work in a multi-time-zone organization, I wouldn’t bother, I’d just delay delivery until something approximating normal working hours. There’s no reason to tell me you’re sending the email at midnight unless you’re trying to humblebrag about how much you work!

      1. Dulcinea47*

        except the entire point is that LW is *not* working extra. People that think we’re bragging are the exact reason we can’t just send email when we want to and have to think about shit like this.

        1. M*

          They’re not saying don’t send it, they’re saying schedule when it arrives in someone’s inbox.

      2. Bathyphysa Conifera*

        But… people aren’t telling you they are sending the email at midnight. They are not bragging, humble or otherwise. They are just sending an email.

        I must conclude that someone out there is laughing maniacally as they set all their emails to send at 1:37 am, to look like they were awake and working at that point, and the recipients are sitting down when they themselves start work, opening email, and thinking “Did Sam send the semifreddo estimates yet? Oh yes, there they are.” Without even glancing a the time stamp, much less attaching nefarious (or laudatory) intent to it.

    5. happy red panda*

      My department started doing this a few years ago but I think the best teams add another layer or two to really make this meaningful. I would also add your general hours of availability and a list of PTO coming up in the next two months. This way, other teams know exactly when you can be reached and when to expect messages from you.

      Granted, this may not be ideal in all scenarios, especially if you wouldn’t want a certain client or vendor to know so much info about your work habits!

    6. Alanna*

      I also work for a huge global company with a lot of remote workers, including myself, so my email signature is: “Please note, my working hours may be different from yours. Please don’t feel obligated to respond outside of your normal business hours unless necessary.”

    7. Threatened by Brilliance and Youth*

      I think this needs to be normalised too – I do like scheduling to send during office hours, but one thing that worries me is that if OP is visibly Not Available at certain times during work hours, it could create the perception they are working less than they should be.
      When my kids were little, I’d be frantically running out the door before daycare closed, and one colleague would snarkily ask me, “Isn’t it nice to work mum hours?” until one day I said, “Funny, I don’t remember seeing you at 7.30 when I started,” and he shut up after that. Hopefully, things have changed with remote and flexible working, but some people seem to lack object permanence when others don’t work the same hours as them.

    8. allathian*

      We have flexible working hours. Our core hours are from 9 am to 3 pm, and that basically means that if we’re absent for any other reason than lunch during that period, the absence needs to be noted on our calendar. Private appointments are fine, and as long as our work gets done and we attend the meetings we’ve agreed to attend, we have a lot of autonomy to set our work schedules. That said, if someone’s consistently avoiding work during core hours and practically unreachable as a consequence, their manager will talk to them, and if they remain consistently unreachable they can get written up for it.

      We’re allowed to log working hours between 6 am and 11 pm, 7 days a week, although our collective agreement stipulates a mandatory rest period of 36 hours at some point during the week. This applies to specialists and most managers. Even customer service employees can do this if they’re working on cases that come in via our online portal, but not on the days they’re scheduled to work in the call center or at the customer service desk.

      But the most important thing is to communicate availability.

    9. EllenD*

      I had a boss’s boss who included a similar line in all his e-mails. He had shared custody of his children and needed to leave the office early on certain days and would deal with work after they’d gone to bed. I thought it was good practice and re-assuring that you could respond in normal hours.

    10. Kelly*

      I don’t pay attention to the time an email is sent. However, she can write the email and schedule it to send during normal work times.

    11. Little Miss Sunshine*

      I have seen the same in a company of 50,ooo. Especially where people are working in different time zones, my middle of the night could be someone else’s start of day. If everyone is working in the same time zone (or at least the same country scheduling emails makes sense. For everyone else, adding the signature line, reinforced with regular verbal/in-person reminders is a great strategy.

    1. The Rural Juror*

      Yup, same. I was on a project trip in Europe last year and everything I sent was scheduled to send at 8:30am local time at my home office.

      1. singlo*

        I do this strategically when I want get my email to the top of my boss’s inbox – schedule send sometime before 9AM.

        1. Yet Another Traffic Engineer*

          I do this strategically when I want people to not know how long the ~4 evaluations I did took* – I schedule them all to arrive at the exact same time.

          * it’s often suspiciously quick because we do a lot of prep work in advance of the actual evaluation

    2. umami*

      Yes, agree. It might sound nice to say you are working strange hours and therefore sending messages when it is convenient for you, but a lot of people will see an alert for when a message comes in, and then can’t help but end up thinking about it!

        3. Little Miss Sunshine*

          Agreed! Turn off those alert tones and set your “Do Not Disturb” hours.

      2. Cmdrshprd*

        Imo with technology it is very easy to set DND setting on your phone with various apps.

        You can set your work email/messenger to DND between 5:01 pm and 8:59 am, so that you do not get any notices/alerts, you can still manually check them if needed.

        I’ve seen this with friends/family, your text at 11pm woke me up, I don’t really factor time when sending texts/messages because I assume people will ignore/see/receive them when it is convenient for them.

    3. Starbuck*

      Yup, I’ve done this plenty of times. Super easy. Sometimes I’m emailing teachers and want it to show up early in the morning (when they’re often emailing me) so if it’s already 6pm I’ll schedule it to send like 6:45am the next day.

    4. Another Kristin*

      yes, please if you do this, delay send until at least 8 AM the next morning. Ideally your employees turn off notifications for their work emails if they have them on their phone, or use DND/Sleep mode at night…but in case they don’t, you really don’t want to blow your employees’ phones up at 2 AM!

      1. jess*

        I disagree– the recipient might also be working odd hours and appreciate having the information sooner so they can address it and check that task off their to do list.

        It should be up to the user to adjust their phone settings as needed to silence email notifications when sleeping– the sender shouldn’t need to plan around that.

        1. Another Kristin*

          Sure, if you work for the kind of place where there are multiple different time zones and no one cares when you’re working. I work in an organization where everyone is in the same time zone and you’re expected to be available for core working hours.The risk that your colleague forgot to turn on DND or disable notifications last night is much higher than the chance that anyone will see your message before morning

      2. Morgan*

        I think this is very much the recipient’s responsibility to manage. If you’re woken up by a phone notification in the middle of the night… then you learn to change your notifications and it doesn’t happen again. It’s not something senders should be trying to anticipate for you.

    5. morethantired*

      yeah, I learned to do this with my evening Slack messages. Scheduling it for the morning just removes any weirdness of “why were you working so late” or “just seeing this now”

      1. Spencer Hastings*

        I feel like Slack is different. If I go to IM someone and they’re not online, I usually just email them instead (or, if I want a synchronous conversation, I’ll wait until we’re both online again).

      2. Rum Do*

        OTOH, I started doing this when my company encouraged it. I’m west coast, many of my colleagues were east and I am NOT an early bird. So I’d set messages to be delivered at 9a their time (6a my time) and would, hours later, log in to replies of “wow you’re up early”.

    6. Ansteve*

      For me I only use delay send when someone is weird about email or someone I know jumps on work stuff off hours when they shouldn’t cough cough my boss.

    7. AAM fan*

      This. As a manager, your behavior sets an expectation. So, in this specific situation, I think she should be delaying sends to go out at the beginning of normal working hours for her office or company. It is different if you’re in a multi-national organization, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

    8. mreasy*

      I do this with Slack because it has more implied urgency. But it really doesn’t feel necessary for emails. If someone wants to scrutinize when I’m sending things, I guess that is their prerogative? The only time I schedule emails is when I want to send it now, but want them to receive it closer to a deadline or event.

    9. Technically Australien*

      Doesn’t that hurt when your “reasonable” is someone else’s “sleepytime”?

      I work with people who keep erratic hours, or work different schedules to me even if they’re in the same timeszone. So it’s entirely possible for someone to delay send an email so it arrives in my inbox at 9am my time, only to discover that I started earlier than 7am today because I have a 9:30am appointment and won’t be around from 9am-11am. I *could* have answered their email at 5am local time, but instead I won’t get to it until after 11am.

    10. Sara k*

      Either you support people working flexibly (which may mean they can flex their hours) or you don’t. But if you do then don’t set expectations that email only be sent between your understanding of work hours. If your organisation supports flexible work, make it clear to people (through signatures, conversations in the team, coded messages in weather balloons, or however you communicate with your colleagues) that people will be working hours that may not be the same as yours and that there is no expectation that emails be immediately responded to.

      For all the people saying “but the notifications!!” please, for the love of all the little gods, work out how to use your technology to support you getting proper downtime away from work.

      1. Allonge*

        Except if I get five emails from the same person at 8am, I will not have any difficulty figuring out that they in fact sent these earlier, AND I will still get them about an hour before I start work on an average day.

        Don’t lie to me to make me feel better about things that may not be bothering me at all, or are my problem to figure out. Anxiety is for the person themselves to manage.

        If my boss / company tells me to answer when I am at my working hours and I cannot trust that, then this smokescreen will not help; the issue is not the timing of the email, the issue is that my management is unreliable. Don’t solve a lie with another lie.

        1. Vitalis*

          When I delay an email I’m not lying about when I wrote it; I’m telling the truth about when I want it to hit your inbox.

  3. duck duck*

    delay delivery!!!!!! outlook and google both have good functions to schedule emails. If you remember to think of it, your colleagues will thank you for scheduling your email to arrive at 9am and not 10pm. Even when I know your hours are flexible, it’s so demoralising to log in and see a ton of emails that have already collected, or actions that are already pending. If you can, using the delay delivery function will save you.

    1. Not a Real Giraffe*

      Agree! If I see an email at 10pm, I can’t help but to craft a response in my head and then my brain refuses to let that go until it’s been put into writing. It immediately puts me into “work mode” and I can’t relax even if I truly know deep down that no one is expecting me to have read or responded to their email. (Before folks suggest it, I cannot turn off my notifications in my “off” hours as there are sometimes urgent emails that do actually require my attention.)

      I recognize this is a “me” problem but I would be so grateful to anyone who employed the delay delivery feature on non-urgent emails.

      1. Butch Ado About Nothing*

        Why are you looking at work emails at Silly O’Clock, then?

        If for some godforsaken reason you must have work emails on your personal(!) phone, just mute the app when you’re done for the day.

        1. darlin’*

          Agreed – my phone locks work apps overnight so I can’t reflexively open them. If I had to have notifications on the apps, they’d absolutely be muted outside of my working hours.

        2. Not a Real Giraffe*

          I literally said in my post that I needed to keep an eye on emails in off hours because there ARE sometimes urgent emails that need my attention…

    2. Anonym*

      Yep! This is the entire answer. Nothing else needed.

      Do your thing at your time, they’ll receive it at the appropriate time.

      1. Bathyphysa Conifera*

        Sincere question: How do you know what is the appropriate time for everyone with whom you exchange work emails?

        1. Tio*

          The main focus shoudl eb on what would be an appropriate time for you tos end and receive emails. So if you’re working with US people, I would delay delivery until say 7am. If you’re working with someone in China, probably you don’t need to care as much, but doing this also help normalize them not expecting an out of cycle response from a US colleague in general

          1. AthenaC*

            But then that begs the question – why is it important to work around your US colleagues presumed (because you don’t know, you’re just assuming) standard working hours but it’s okay to send your Chinese colleagues emails at Silly O’Clock their time? There’s no solution to this that doesn’t imply that some types of people are more important than other types of people.

          2. Potion Seller*

            China has regular work hours too, you know…if you’re already using a “send later” function it’s not that hard to schedule it for a decent hour on their end.

        2. Anonym*

          Within my own standard working hours – 9-5, unless it’s urgent and to someone senior. I work at a global company, so it’s totally normal to receive emails from people in their hours but not yours, and that doesn’t create a perception of people working extra hours or expecting responses outside of their own. But if I send emails at 10pm my time, it can contribute to two problematic elements of culture: 1) people junior to me may perceive that this is normal and *expected of them*, and 2) people senior to me may perceive that this is normal and they should *expect it of others*. I don’t want that for anyone.

          I’m a senior subject matter expert (non-manager), and I’ve definitely seen #1 in action from both sides. I also work in a fairly high pressure industry in which the general pressure to do more with less has only increased. It’s important to me to hold the line where I can on not making life harder for my colleagues, either explicitly or implicitly. Thus my higher than average engagement on this post!

          1. On Eagle's Wings*

            Creating expectations up and down the line is an interesting perspective.
            Thanks for that.

        3. WhatWasMyNameAgain?*

          I think this is a key question, because the default schedule send assumption is that everyone else is strictly working 9-5. My manager and I both flex our hours around because of our kids. We regularly message each other early in the morning and get things done, but usually neither of us are available 3-5.

          1. Rum Do*

            I’m strongly Team Manage Your Own Hours And Notifications, and this is a big reason why. If I delay message until 9a, which was the default start time of my last office, I remove the ability for those who flex time to review it late night or early morning when they are fitting in some work. It feels like gatekeeping, when having all the info as soon as it’s available allows people to more efficiently schedule their work and prioritize. Especially since our time zones and schedules were all over the place.

        4. YetAnotherAnalyst*

          Our office has “core hours” 10-4, Monday through Friday, where the assumption is most folks in a given timezone will be available for meetings. If I’m not sure what someone’s working hours are I’ll schedule an email or a Slack message for an hour before core hours start, in whatever timezone Outlook indicates they’re in. If you’re in at 10 you’re hitting eight hours at 6, so anything that’s not immediate urgency I’ll try to schedule if recipients will get it past about 6:30 their time.

    3. Analyst*

      Outlooks is awful- you have to be signed in for it to send the scheduled email! That does not work for me, I’m writing an email at 2am and want it to send at 8am, I’m sleeping in from working late and my computer is off!

      1. MM3891*

        Yeah, some people at my company have tried doing the schedule send thing in Outlook and the messages never send when they are supposed to. It’s great in theory but in the real world it usually doesn’t work, at least for us.

      2. Just Me*

        I’ve found that I can leave it open on a different screen (like my laptop that’s not generally used) to get around this problem. It’s worked for me, but yeah, I found that annoying too!

      3. Orora*

        Don’t know if they have an add on for Outlook, but I use Boomerang for Gmail and it works perfectly, even when I schedule emails months in advance.

      4. Sillysaurus*

        Scheduled send works in Teams even if you don’t sign in, so I usually use that instead. But Teams definitely isn’t the right platform for everything! It’s annoying that Outlook hasn’t solved this yet.

    4. Thinking*

      I do this with emails to family and friends also, both in and outside my own time zone. people have different bed times no matter their age, location or work ethic. give everyone’s brain a break by scheduling for a time they would probably be available. they can thank you later.

    5. A. Lab Rabbit*

      How is it demoralizing to log in and see a bunch of new emails? This is how every job I’ve ever had for the last 30 years has worked.

      1. duck duck*

        You have correctly identified that some people’s jobs and experiences are different :)

        1. A. Lab Rabbit*

          I am well aware of that. What I am asking here is how it is demoralizing, because it has never ever occurred to me that there are jobs out there where the expectation is to start each day with an empty inbox. End the day with an empty inbox, yes. But start the day? I’ve never seen that.

          1. MendraMarie*

            For me, it’s a little bit overwhelm and a little bit mindset-jarring. I often start work with a plan or at least a target of what I’m going to get done that day – what my deadlines are, today’s the day I’m going to work on project, etc. Coming in to a fuller inbox than I expect throws off that plan and makes me feel less on top of my workload. (I sometimes feel the same way after lunch: “I was only gone for an hour and now I have 15 emails and 20 IMs – what did I forget to do?”)

            Coming in to a full inbox (or fuller than expected) also means I can’t ease into the day at all – I’m instantly in admin mode as I triage everything that’s come in. It makes the mornings (or return from lunch) a little bit more frantic. It can absolutely be demoralising to start every day in mini-crisis mode, even if that only lasts half an hour each time.

            1. Allonge*

              Is this not just… life, though?

              Sure, I don’t love it when my plans need to change but they pay me for all this – including to say, to myself or others, that it’s nice to have your request but I cannot answer this until [date] due to other priorities.

              1. knitted feet*

                Yeah honestly, this is starting to feel a bit like…well, that’s what the money’s for. Do aspects of my job sometimes make me feel a bit frazzled or demoralised? Sure, but if the actual performance expectations are reasonable, I need to find a way to handle my feelings about my job. (Which are many! I’m a very anxious person and work can really push my buttons. But I really can’t expect people to plan their email sending patterns around my need for a relaxing start to the day.)

            2. A. Lab Rabbit*

              Interesting. Part of my morning plan is to check my email and see what’s actionable there and add that into what I need to get done that day. It’s not like email is some new technology that we’re all getting used to. Although I guess with the younger generations not really using email, maybe it is again. Everything old is new again.

          2. Turquoisecow*

            I’ve pretty much always had bosses who came in earlier and/or worked later than me, plus colleagues that did the same. Coming in to an inbox full of emails has always been pretty standard procedure to me even if my boss wasn’t working at 2AM.

            I also would come in to a pile of papers and a note saying “see me to discuss.” Is this stressful? Sometimes, sure, but so is work in general. Emails come in when you’re not working or looking for them. Tackle them when you see them. If it was supposed to be handled immediately, then it should have been a phone call.

            1. On Eagle's Wings*

              Complete tangent: TurquiseCow, how did you come by your name?
              Is it a riff on the purple cow?

          3. mreasy*

            I always work with a lot of Brits so this is the norm. I guess it would be irritating if you aren’t used to it?

      2. Bathyphysa Conifera*

        I sincerely don’t get protecting people from the asynchronous communication. It’s asynchronous!

        I’d much rather let people set up their own technological filters, than decide that I definitely know the correct time for them to look at communications.

        1. That Paralegal*

          The dynamic is different when the boss is sending you emails at all hours of the day and night. As the letter writer said, it can look like they are expecting everyone else to be working all hours, too. We all know bosses who say one thing and expect another. The message and the action have to be consistent when you are managing people.

          1. mreasy*

            But in this case, the expectation that you’ll reply off hours is the problem, not the actual email deploy time.

    6. Uniquely Unoriginal*

      Working hours are not the same if your receivers are across multiple time zones/countries. And Outlook (at least) requires you be logged in to send a delayed delivery email, which is also not conducive to multiple countries/time zones. It would be better to normalize asynchronous communication as part of company culture than trying to navigate time zones around the world or having to login to send an email at a time when you’re not working that is normal working hours for your receivers.

    7. Another One*

      I love using delay delivery for stuff when I’ve done it on the 5th but it’s not due to another department until the 15th. It’s something I send them every month. Some month, I’m less busy and it’s ready early. Some month I’m a chicken with it’s head cut off who on the 15th, I’m going crap that email.

      So I use delay delivery to make sure the other department never gets the email early so they don’t expect to receive it early.

    8. Zippity Doodah*

      this also allows you to hide the fact that you’re working outside normal hours, and thus protect your free time. Just because I occasionally work on Sunday (wfh) doesn’t mean I want people to start counting on it.

      2. knitted feet*

        This is my whole reason for scheduling emails. I don’t want anyone thinking they can count on me working over the weekend just because I chose to do so once or twice.

    9. Spencer Hastings*

      I have some colleagues who start their work day two hours before I do. Even if it were possible to schedule send in Outlook so that the email arrived at 6:01 am when they’ve just gotten in*, they know I’m not there, because I don’t start until 8! What is the point of pretending I also start work at 6?

      *(this is not actually possible, since Outlook schedule send requires the computer to be on, and our company policy requires computers to be turned off when not in use for security reasons)

    10. Winter*

      I’ve tried using this on Outlook when I work over the weekend but I’ve had enough experiences where emails didn’t send when they were supposed to and just sat in my drafts folder until I noticed them that I won’t risk it anymore.

      I let my team know I have no expectations that they will check emails outside of normal business hours and leave it at that. It’s not my job to manage people’s theoretical email anxiety beyond that.

    11. S M G*

      I delay send specifically to set boundaries with the executive team. I don’t want them to think I’m regularly working outside normal business hours and that I might be available to do that often. Usually if I’m working late it’s because I’m flexing time from earlier in the day or I just wanted to wrap up one thing that kept bugging me after work. So instead of over explaining why I’m working late, I delay send until first thing the next morning.

      I also started doing this for inconsiderately last minute requests. Sure, I might be able to accomplish the request, but certain teams are less than organized and frequently make their lack of planning my emergency. I’d rather finish the task and move on, but I will delay the send an appropriate amount of time for the complexity and urgency of the request. Some might find this petty. I find it brilliant. Can you tell I’m in-house creative?

  4. Nancy*

    In all my years of working it has never once occurred to me to think anything about late night or weekend emails other than the sender happened to be online at that time, assuming I even notice the timestamp. If you are concerned, just tell them that you work odd hours sometimes.

    1. What's that in the road - a head?*

      I’m the same way. I’ve mostly worked with global or at least multinational companies, and don’t worry about emails hitting my inbox at 10 pm or midnight my time. To me, that means either the sender is 13 hours ahead of me, or just couldn’t sleep and got some work done.

      Now that I think of it, the only people I can recall getting concerned about “late-night” emails, or when emails were sent in general, were fairly new to multiple time zones. But they took it in stride pretty fast once they realized they weren’t expected to respond immediately.

      1. AthenaC*

        And I think that’s really the only solution – if the recipient is really anxious about their emails, coach them on their misunderstanding of expectations. We don’t rearrange the universe around the anxieties of a few, and we shouldn’t schedule-send emails just because people might incorrectly read unspoken expectations.

    2. FrivYeti*

      I think the key difference here is between people who have work email on their phones and people who don’t.

      I’ve got my phone set up so that I don’t get any email notifications if I’m not actively logged into my work email, so it does not matter in the slightest when someone sends something, I’m not seeing it until I’m at work.

      But part of the reason that I did that is because, as a lot of folks have said, once I see an email I’m thinking about work at home and I don’t want that. Not everyone is allowed to set up their work email to avoid notifications, and that’s going to change the situation.

      1. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

        Yeah, this is my approach. Not everyone can avoid having notifications turned on, but if you can keep them off, it helps SO MUCH.

      2. LadyMTL*

        I have a few work-related apps on my phone (Teams and Outlook) but I pretty much never log in unless it’s unavoidable. For example last year my laptop crashed out of the blue and I needed to advise my boss that I would be “away” until IT could fix it.

        Otherwise, it can all wait until the next day. I’m not so important that I have to check in all the time. :)

      3. Technically Australien*

        I set my phone to silent mode during my sleep-ish hours. People can still ring me, either if they’re whitelisted or they ring several times in quick succession. If they just send messages those don’t produce notifications except the little icon on the screen.

        I regularly wake up to those, and when I fire up the work computer there will be a bunch of emails and text messages.

        Very occasionally the phone will ring in the middle of the night with some urgent work thing, but in my job if it’s not worth a phone call it’s not worth waking up for.

      4. Spencer Hastings*

        There’s probably a difference between academia and non-academia too.

        My dad has basically had one email address his entire life: his university issued him an address in the 90s, and that’s been his main work email and personal email ever since. I think he has one or two throwaway/“sign up for mailing lists” sort of emails, but just one main one.

        When I went to college, I had a Gmail account, but my school email became my primary email for personal stuff too. Most of my social interactions were with other kids at my college, and we knew (or could look up) each other’s emails. But it’s also the address my parents used to email me and that I did hobby stuff under.

        I don’t work in academia, and I don’t check my work email account if I’m not at work (done for the day, weekend, on vacation, whatever). But I a lot of the people I know who are in academia do combine work and personal stuff on their university account. So if they want to check their personal email, there might be work stuff in there too.

    3. Tippy*

      Same. I can safely say that in the 30 years of having email and probably 25ish of having work email I’ve ever once paid attention to the time an email was sent to me unless I’ve had to reference it at a later date. Maybe this is industry/company specific, but I think this might be a bigger deal in the sender’s head that it is IRL.

    4. On Eagle's Wings*

      >never once occurred to me to think anything about late night or weekend email

      My manager notices. That’s the only person whose opinion matters, at this point.

    5. eb*

      yeah I think this is fine advice for companies where all workers are in the same or adjacent timezones. for multinationals and fields where you’re often working with people overseas/traveling, you’re better off just learning to ignore timestamps beyond how long the email has been sitting unanswered.

  5. I should really pick a name*

    I’m curious how many people even pay attention to the time stamp on an email.

      1. Do Not Pet the Squirrel*

        Why would you get work email notifications this late? There are ways to prevent it

      2. louvella*

        I guess I don’t understand why anyone is getting email notifications to their personal phones at 1:57 AM on a Sunday if their job doesn’t require responding to things 24/7?

        Even when I am on-call for my work I do not have email notifications turned on at 1:57 AM, people have to call me.

      3. Another One*

        I’m still curious why someone emailed me at 10pm about returned mail. I assume they work altered hours when they’re WFH, but when it popped up- my initial response was wtf?

        I did not respond. (My department’s position is unless you are management, you are not expected to be available after 5pm. And if you are management, you are expected to make sure nothing urgent has come up but unless it’s urgent, you don’t need to respond.)

        1. louvella*

          I mean, responding to an email at 10 pm when you are not working would be ridiculous. But sending an email at 10 pm when you are working seems fine to me. If someone has notifications for their work email on at 10 pm that’s an (odd) choice they’ve made for themselves.

    2. Tradd*

      I have clients and vendors all over the globe. I do pay attention to the time stamp when someone in Asia sends an email late Friday evening our time and then multiple follow-ups all weekend, upset they didn’t get a response to the original email. I have standard boilerplate I copy and paste that politely states my hours, time zone, and that emails are only responded to during my regular work hours.

    3. Hall monitor of the universe*

      It has been noted whether or not it is a big deal is determined by the culture of your work place.

      At my work place, it is a big deal for certain persons to send an email to be sent between 630 p.m. to 630 a.m. during the week and at any time on Saturday or Sunday.

    4. Bathyphysa Conifera*

      I learned here that it is a thing. Genuinely surprised.

      The norm for me is people in many time zones, and some people who work 9-5 while others work early, late, or weekends.

      1. Katie Impact*

        Yep. My workplace is very multinational and also full of freelancers who set their own hours, so sending and receiving email at any time of day is completely normal. I’m also fortunate enough to live in a jurisdiction where there’s a legally recognized right for employees to refrain from checking workplace communications outside of rostered work hours, so that helps mitigate the culture of pressure that other people are talking about. I can sort of imagine the kind of workplace where getting an email at 10 pm could create an unspoken expectation to respond at 10 pm, but it’s very different from my own experiences.

    5. Coverage Associate*

      I explain below that I have many clients 8 hours ahead of me. Maybe I don’t have to pay attention to the timestamp per se, but I do have to pay attention to respond to emails in the order sent, or before my clients in eastern time zones log off. But I think that my coworkers and I do consider whether the timestamp reflects a client working very late or early, which could indicate something urgent.

      When clients attend part of all day online meetings with us, but log off at the end of their day, we change our update emails to them to reflect that they are for the client to review the next morning and not for the client to urgently log back in.

      But I wonder if all this reading between the lines is because our clients are European, specifically British. An American client might be more willing to just say or mark something urgent. With the London clients, I feel there’s all kinds of subtext.

    6. Pay no attention...*

      I notice when a response was due by a specific and non-negotiable deadline — ex. end of business day on Friday — and they respond hours late.

    7. mreasy*

      I definitely don’t notice, but I work with an international team so I’m used to waking up to a full inbox. I have notifications turned off though, and I truly cannot recommend it enough.

  6. Dust Bunny*

    I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the timestamp on an email that didn’t arrive during work hours.

  7. AthenaC*

    I think there is far too much handwringing generally over when emails get sent. If we are all adults and we are all non-exempt and have some measure of autonomy to manage our time and workload – work when you want to work, send emails when you want to send them, and don’t worry about it. Email is asynchronous by design, so the recipient will see your email when it’s relevant to them (i.e. when their work hours begin).

    I’ll go further and say I would NOT recommend delaying the send until “normal” work hours. Firstly, I think it’s patronizing – it says I don’t trust you to manage your workload and your time so I’ll intentionally delay information / requests for you.

    Second – if your recipient ALSO works weird hours, it’s ineffective. A couple times I had a question that the client and I figured out around 6:45 in the morning because we saw each other’s emails, knew the other was up and working, and figured it out. Only for the clock to strike 8:00 am to then see my subordinate’s email (that she delayed) hit my inbox about the exact same question that had been figured out over an hour ago. If she had sent her email the night before (when she drafted it), client and I would both have had her email early that morning.

    1. Anonym*

      Hard disagree. Our actions create culture, and the more senior we are, the more our choices create expectations, whether we intend them or not.

      I’m a senior individual contributor, and I’ve seen it play out where more junior staff respond to me outside of business hours. I only send emails/messages outside of business hours to people more senior than me when I’m working on something urgent. For non-urgent items and anything to peer or junior staff, I schedule it, including Teams messages. Perhaps in some environments that pressure doesn’t exist, but it has in some form everywhere I’ve worked.

      1. Yallidarity*

        I am with you on this. I know it is not exactly the same, but my boss will respond to an email any time of the day or night, and any time he is on vacation too. There are still parts of his job he actively does every day on vacation. It almost makes you feel guilty for bothering him or taking your own time off… almost.

      2. Normal Rachel*

        I agree that senior people/managers should be mindful about the impact of when they send messages, but it’s also easy to indicate when something isn’t urgent — people at my job preface their messages with “For tomorrow” or “For the morning” to be clear that it is not urgent. Every so often I get a ping from someone very senior at a weird time but it will always start with “just so I don’t forget, I want to mention . Don’t think about it until Monday.” Instead of setting the expectation that everyone is always “on,” it indicates that our internal communications can be casual, and makes me feel *less* pressure.

        It strikes me that this is specific to different company cultures. I work at a remote, global company, and our internal messaging system doesn’t have the ability to send later. Announcements can be scheduled but not pings. People just get used to it and develop their own ways to communicate politely.

        1. Anonym*

          It’s so helpful when people specify that something’s not urgent. At the same time, you have to be able to believe it. In my current environment, that trust is just not there. There’s definitely a wide variety of organizational cultures, and variety within organizations.

      3. Venus*

        This is my thought too! I’m not a manager so I don’t have to worry about employee expectations, yet I don’t want others to think that I’m normally online at 10pm. My workplace encourages strong work-life balance so I might get a “Why are you online that late?” response from a manager to remind me that I shouldn’t make it a habit. I only do it if something is bothering me and it’s easier to write up and send a response in the moment. I agree with your policy and have no issues with writing something to a manager or senior colleague and sending it at a late hour whereas I would wait until the next morning if the response wasn’t urgent and someone was new or junior.

        1. Orora*

          I agree. I work in higher ed and get emails from faculty and students at all hours of the day and night. I am only available 9-5. Even if I answer an email at 1am, it won’t send until 9am because I want to set the expectation that what they think is an emergency is not necessarily what I consider an emergency. (Very little of what I do could be considered a true emergency)

      4. AthenaC*

        “Our actions create culture.”

        Yes …. that’s exactly my point. A culture of flexibility and autonomy where no one polices each other’s work hours is a culture where people email whenever they want to and don’t worry about it.

        Which is exactly what I said. It sounds like perhaps you could remind your junior staff that email is intended to be asynchronous but why change your habits around their misunderstanding? Coach their habits rather than bend over backwards to what their unspoken expectations may or may not be.

        1. mreasy*

          Yeah, the culture where one thing is said (there isn’t an expectation of working late) and the opposite is meant (actually you are expected to answer messages all the time) is the problem, not the email timestamps. If I was in that type of culture and wanted to combat it, I would probably delay send my emails.

      5. Technically Australien*

        My boss has conveyed “you can bother me any time, I will only bother you outside your normal work hours in an emergency” very effectively. He’s explicit that he will send emails when it’s not urgent, and will ring (repeatedly!) if he wants an answer RIGHT NOW. It’s a system that works for us, even if it wouldn’t work for others.

        (I’m part of a team working on a 24/7 computer system)

      6. Sara k*

        So this is an opportunity to coach your junior staff about your expectations. It shouldn’t be the case that only non managers deserve flexible working arrangements.

    2. Matt*

      I second this. I dislike the “scheduled / delayed sending” idea, because it’s basically the ultimate surrender to the idea that email is synchronous / instant. Let email stay asynchronous as it was intended. Why would anyone have (audible) email notifications on while they’re sleeping? I don’t want to feed this absurd cultural norm any further, so I think succumbing to this and working around it is just the wrong way. You wouldn’t walk to your postal mailbox at night to check if the postman had brought new letters, there’s no reason to do so with your email inbox.

      1. Spencer Hastings*

        Absolutely. And Athena’s subordinate wasted a whole bunch of time by not just sending the email when she’d done the work. Since Athena and the client worked it out before they received her email, it was functionally the same as the subordinate not having done anything at all.

  8. Limozeen*

    Please don’t do this, yall. Please just wait until working hours to send an email. I get email notifications on my phone, and it is stressful to get an email from a coworker at 2 AM. There’s no reason to do this. Have some self respect, go to sleep!

    1. Saint Florinda of the Cinnamon Rolls*

      Do you have a job that makes the ability to get notified about 2 am emails critical? If not, perhaps consider enabling sleep mode on your phone if you find this stressful?

    3. Lee Plum*

      Phones have tools that allow one to control when and whether they receive notifications.
      The most important tool for me is the off button.

    4. A. Lab Rabbit*

      Why are you getting email notification on your phone? Is this an expectation of your job?

      Also, you might want to explore that “Do not disturb” function on your phone. It’s wonderful.

    5. Normal Rachel*

      At many jobs, people work in different time zones, and even within the same time zone people may have different hours! I work way later than my colleagues (and start the day later, too). It may be the culture at your company that “working hours” means one thing, but that’s just not true for many readers here. Both within my company and externally, I don’t know the schedules of everyone I’m writing to, so I assume that they will manage their notifications to reflect their own preferences. It’s not a lack of self-respect that has me emailing at 2AM; it’s that that is a time that works for me, and I trust my coworkers to handle their own schedules.

      Whether that’s the case for your office may vary… perhaps it’s rude where you work. But as a blanket statement for we the y’all, I don’t think it’s fair nor practical to say that it is fundamentally rude to send emails during your personal working hours.

      1. Bathyphysa Conifera*

        Both within my company and externally, I don’t know the schedules of everyone I’m writing to.
        I want to really underscore this. Even when I know someone physically lives in Virginia, I don’t usually know if they’re traveling, or working around some life stuff that will shift them out of their usual hours.

        It’s much more respectful for me to let Pamela in Virginia set up the tech filters and schedule that work for her, rather than decide that I will protect her from the information she wants me to send her.

        1. AthenaC*

          I once sent an email during normal working hours to a colleague who is ordinarily in California. He called me right away and led with “I’m in Guam, it’s 2 am here, but I’ve been on calls for the last few hours anyway and this is a pretty easy question and here’s how I would answer it ….” or something similar.

          You just can’t manage other people’s time / schedules for them and it’s patronizing to try. You work how you want to work, and let them work how they want to work.

    6. Arabesque*

      You’ve made this same declaration already here. The only thing you can control is your own technology and that you’re trying to tell others what they should do based on your technology is odd. Can you image telling someone to stop emailing you because the ding you get on the other end is disturbing you? You may be in a position at work where you can tell people they may not email you at certain times but you certainly shouldn’t go onto a public advice blog and declare that no one should do this.

    7. Adam*

      Whereas I’m flabbergasted that anyone has email notifications turned on on their phone at any time of day. Why would you do that to yourself? Email is an asynchronous medium, you don’t need to know about every email right when it arrives.

      1. Tradd*

        It sounds like you would also apply that to email notifications on your work computer? Nearly all my coworkers have the popup Windows notifications for Outlook emails and Teams messages. Too visually distracting for me. I just use the little notification symbols on the icons in my task bar. I *do* often have to respond to emails quickly for my industry. I know some people in other industries only handle email at certain times of the day, but that’s not possible for me.

        1. Spencer Hastings*

          I do sometimes have to respond quickly to emails, too. But there are some that I can wait to answer, and some that I can’t. The popup is useful for telling the difference. Also, if I’m out at a client site or something, I’m probably not responding to emails about other projects unless it’s an emergency. And if I’m not working, I’m not getting notifications at all. I work extended hours when needed, but if I’m off the clock, I’m off the clock.

  9. Trudy's Blue Summer's Dress*

    Unless you have a bad boss, sending an email at any particular time shouldn’t mean “immediate reply” so I think the concern is a bit overblown. I don’t really want to have to manage other people’s inboxes

  10. JM*

    One issue with delay send is, it’s not available everywhere. (E.g., I dislike the Gmail & Outlook web interface and prefer to use a native email app on my laptop, which doesn’t support it.)
    Additionally, sending out email at a particular time creates the illusion that I’m online and available to respond. (This is probably more true for time-delayed Slack messages; less so for email, which is a more asynchronous medium.) So to me, scheduling messages for 8am when I know I’m actually gonna be asleep at the time feels a bit dishonest.

    Some of this is definitely coloured by me having spent ~10 years working in a multinational collaboration with colleagues on five continents, where it’s just not possible to consider people’s work hours. But I feel that it’s everyone’s responsibility to change their notification settings so they don’t get interrupted by work email outside their working hours.

    1. Hlao-roo*

      I dislike the Gmail & Outlook web interface and prefer to use a native email app on my laptop, which doesn’t support it.

      FYI, I use the Outlook app on my laptop and I have the option to delay delivery. It does have the limitation that Outlook has to be open to send the email, so if my laptop is off at the scheduled time the email will not send. (I haven’t used this feature in a while so I can’t remember if it works when my laptop is locked/in “sleep” mode.)

      For me, the “Delay Delivery” is available under “Options” when I have a new email window open. It might be in a different place if for you if we’re using different versions of Outlook.

    2. Zephy*

      I’ll +1 that managing your notifications is your responsibility, hypothetical recipient of a 2 AM non-emergent email. With obvious exceptions like police/fire/EMS and infrastructure (power/water/etc) and the like, for most jobs, nothing is so dang important at 2 AM that it can’t wait until 8 or 9 AM.

    3. green beans*

      I just tell people this is a scheduled email /slack and I’ll be on at my normal time (if it’s the kind of thing where they might want a response.)

      I use schedule send so much though. It’s incredibly helpful.

  11. Saint Florinda of the Cinnamon Rolls*

    For letter 3, it also seems like this might be something to flag to your manager, both to preempt any “Jane said you’re refusing to answer questions” pushback and to make sure this performance concern is on the radar? “I’ve been trying to help Jane with tech questions, but I’m realizing it’s now to a point that it’s impacting my workload. I wanted to just give you a heads up that going forward I’m going to just refer her to the company trainings, since it’s beyond the level of what I can assist her wit”

  12. Yallidarity*

    I had a college counselor (who taught a college skills class) one time tell me off for emailing her an assignment at midnight. Insane for the setting, in retrospect, but always spooked me. Now, 15 years later, I am afraid I will come across as naive or somehow a procrastinator by responding to people so late. I have also come to recognize the importance of setting a reasonable precedent for my working hours, so I am not expected in any way to work outside of normal hours.

    All of that to say, if I am just catching up on stuff between the hours of 8-8, I just schedule it to send at 8 am. There’s no benefit to me or anyone else for them to get my response at 10 pm as opposed to 8 am.

    1. Bathyphysa Conifera*

      The very first letter I recall reading here about the direness of sending an email in the middle of the night was about undergraduates! Which if you’re looking for someone who is naturally awake and doing school stuff at 1 am, undergraduates are going to be completely normal.

    2. 2 Cents*

      Ha! I had a journalism professor who was ALWAYS online — and this was before people had phones that received email (in the dark ages). You could email him at 11 pm and he’d respond or at like 4 am and he’d respond. He said he was an insomniac and required very little sleep.

      1. Another One*

        Maybe that’s a requirement for academia? My grandmother was a college professor and was the same until she was in her 90s.

        1. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

          LOL, I don’t know if insomnia is a requirement, but it could definitely be a product of academia.

    3. Pam Adams*

      I bet the assignment was due at midnight or 1 am, meaning every college student will turn it in then.

  13. Just Me*

    I wonder if Alison’s answer here still applies, now that remote work is so common and employees can literally be located anywhere.
    I have an employee – granted, she’s not a manager so it’s different – who regularly sends emails to external parties at night. I don’t like it, but my manager thinks it’s okay, so I leave it. But the way my employee always rationalizes it is that we have employees in multiple countries (most employees work in our central office, those are the exception) and how can any client etc know where she is emailing from?

    1. Sneaky Squirrel*

      In that it’s being sent to external parties, it’s something I’d probably leave too unless there’s a bigger issue around it that you’re trying to solve. I model not sending emails outside of business hours for my internal colleagues because I don’t to help fuel a company culture expectation of being available 24-7. Other companies and clients have their own work cultural expectations.

  14. Insufficiently Festive Cheap-ass Rolls*

    I worked with someone who used weaponized incompetence in computer skills to get out of having to do things the company way. (Example: He printed out documents so he “couldn’t access” any of the links in them and since he couldn’t access stuff, he couldn’t do it.)

    In response, I got Helpful. Can’t find the original document with the links on your computer? Here, let me send it to you again! Didn’t find it in the email? No problem, I’ll send it another time; I can do this as often as you need! When he said he couldn’t access a shared drive, I went “Oh no! You absolutely need access to that drive, so we need to get IT on that right away! Here, I’ll come over and help you file the ticket!”

    He stopped asking me for help shortly after that, so I recommend to LW an equal course of aggressive helpfulness. “Oh, golly, which part of the training was unclear to you? I’ll help you file feedback with them so it can be fixed. Oh, you haven’t taken the training? I’m afraid I have to finish Project X before I can give you too much help, but I can come over for a minute and get you set up and started.”

    Basically, any rationale to say “I can’t/I don’t know how” should be met with “You can! Here’s how to learn!”

    2. WeirdChemist*

      I have found that being “cheerfully unhelpful” as I like to call it is also useful. “Oh, that info, it’s definitely in the SOP documents. What did it say, I can’t remember exactly, but it’s definitely in there! Gosh I hope you find it!!!”

      Or, if the request is over email/text/messaging etc take sliiightly too long to respond. “Oh gosh, sorry, I got so caught up in Other Project I didn’t have time to respond! Hope you found it!!!”

      People like that find it faster to get you to do it for them than just trying themselves. So make it slower. But seem like you’re happy to help!!!

      1. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

        Yes, this is the approach I took with a similar coworker always wanting me to help her with random tasks that she really should’ve already known how to do that I did not have time or desire to walk her through (and that even if she didn’t, they were easy to Google). “I’ve never needed to do that, but I bet if you Google it, you can find out how.”

    3. Might Be Spam*

      My daughter’s coworker was like this. So she told her coworker that she was also so helpless that she had to use her boomer mother for tech support. Of course, she neglected to mention that her mother’s job was in tech support.
      For Christmas that year I got her a mug that said “I don’t need Google, I have my mother.”

  15. MaybeMaybeNot*

    I work in an org where some are remote, some are hybrid, some are on sabbatical in Europe, some have different regular working hours, etc. I’ve seen numerous people have a little caveat in their email signature that says “I work varying hours and may respond to an email outside of the normal work day. Please feel free to respond at a time that works best for you!” To me this is the perfect answer.

    I love this because it takes away the pressure for the receiver, but also doesn’t require the sender to schedule send or anything outside of the normal reply, type, send process (I’ve definitely had schedule send backfire on me due to tech or user errors where the scheduled time is wrong, the email doesn’t send because I accidentally closed Outlook, etc. so I personally hate using it).

    For those saying they’re annoyed by people who send emails at 2 a.m., you know you can turn off notifications, right? I personally have Outlook and Teams on my phone for work but do not receive any notifications for either, that way I can look at my emails all I want, but don’t get notifications all day (and night). There are all sorts of ways to customize this–put your phone on do not disturb, mute certain apps, quiet your ringer, you name it. I feel like email is asynchronous and we’re all adults who can adapt our notifications to best suit us accordingly, but that need doesn’t fall on the person sending the email who happens to be a night owl or on a business trip on another continent. *shrug*

    1. A. Lab Rabbit*

      Your third paragraph is so important. I have control over my own approach to technology; I do not and should not expect to have control over other people’s approach to technology.

      1. HonorBox*

        The challenge is that for every boss like the LW, there are some like the one I point out below, who have not clearly defined expectations that people shouldn’t have to check emails at all hours and/or expect that people are available by email at all times.

        I do like you do and don’t have any sort of notification of new messages on my phone. I have to open the programs to view anything. I also have a boss who is totally supportive of that approach, both because he values people’s down time, and because he knows that he can call me at any time if there’s something that can’t wait, and I’ll pick up. And I have to add this, too: Every time he’s called me at a time that isn’t normal business hours, he apologizes profusely for bothering me.

    2. Spencer Hastings*

      I’ve never been a fan of those email signature lines — when I see “my work hours may not be your work hours”, my thought is “no s#%^, Sherlock”. It feels condescending, but maybe I’m just weird.

      1. Bathyphysa Conifera*

        Once I would have found it condescending, but have seen too many threads here on the rage induced when you want people to send you information, and they do, but you wanted them to send it at some different time. So once it started appearing, I figured they would have been the target of or witness to such a rant.

      2. Allonge*

        It may be, a bit, but I for one would adopt it instead of trying to play guessing games on when people would prefer to get their emails so it does not trigger an anxiety gained from a manager three jobs ago. Like, I empathize, but I cannot fix that: if this helps, so be it.

  16. HonorBox*

    A close friend has a boss whose hours are longer than my friend’s. This is both by need, and because the boss is probably a little (or lot) too dedicated to their job. Boss will send emails when they arrive at the office, two hours before my friend is supposed to, or over the weekend when they’re at the office and my friend is off.
    My friend knows that they shouldn’t be answering emails in their jammies, but that is an uphill battle that is hard to fight. My friend would be far less stressed and far less connected to their email when they’re off the clock if boss scheduled delivery of messages so they arrived when my friend (and many others who work there) were on the clock because the understanding would be “get to this when you’re in” versus “do it immediately if not sooner.”

    1. A. Lab Rabbit*

      Eh, it sounds like your friend is making their boss’s problem their own problem. This is a good example of how employees need to set good boundaries, at least in their own mind.

      1. HonorBox*

        True. So true. That is something we’ve discussed A LOT. However, at times when the answer to a 5:30am email doesn’t come by 6:15, the boss has been VERY frustrated, which creates more stress for my friend.

    2. Another One*

      In my office, the higher you are up the food chain, the longer your hours. I made this really clear when I was interviewing people (partly because a lot of applicants were like “I will work all the hours” and I was like “yeah, we don’t pay enough for that.”)

      And it’s something I repeated when my hire started. But I really appreciate that when my boss grabbed myself and my junior for a 5 minute meeting at like 4:59 yesterday, he apologized for keeping us after 5pm. I want my junior to know that when we say 5pm is quitting time (barring extenuating circumstances), we mean it.

  17. On Eagle's Wings*

    I also work remote and answer emails at 2 AM… but I want it to look like business hours, so I use the ‘schedule send’ option. A standard option is today/tomorrow 8 AM or 9 AM. I stagger the emails to look like I’ve been really busy between 8.10 and 9 AM.

    Happy side effect: sometimes people respond immediately to my emails before I have finished my first coffee of the day, but their responses to staggered emails are correspondingly staggered. They are not all responding to an 8.00 email.

    When I receive client emails at 2AM, even if I am working, I will respond during my normal business hours – unless it is a current project with a tight deadline. Basic ‘here’s some work, please review before it gets sent to management’ can wait. However, that does tell me that I’m not the only one working non-standard hours.

    1. Pretty as a Princess*

      Schedule send in outlook only works if you have outlook open and are connected to the server at the scheduled time:) So it can be a great solution if you aren’t traveling, but not so much if you are in situations where you won’t be connected during the normal business day.

      Many of my colleagues have learned this the hard way. Get off a flight that lands late at night, dash off a couple urgent replies to things in your inbox because you will be in a non-email-accessible place all the next day, and schedule outlook to deliver those email messages during “normal business hours”. Welp, you’re not connected at the time you scheduled the email for, so the messages don’t get sent and the dozen people who are online waiting for the meeting you scheduled and failed to cancel are super pissed off, and here you are unreachable so no one has the information you thought you sent which explains the cancellation you thought you sent, and you’ve wasted all their time.

  18. Bathyphysa Conifera*

    Two points I really like in the advice to #2:
    • Pick three anodyne topics (e.g. pets, travel, and TV) and stick to those for chatting with employees.
    • One of the topics cannot be how you have trouble with boundaries and so keep oversharing but you’re trying not to do that now.

    1. Unauthorized Plants*

      I broke an oversharing on social media habit by sticking to a whimsical new year’s resolution to only post updates in haiku for the full year. “Will it Haiku?” is now my own personal shorthand for thinking through whether I share something now.

  19. DEEngineer*

    For the oversharer, I empathize so much! I’m in my mid-forties and still kick myself for oversharing sometimes even on innocuous topics. But I’m in good company. One of my close colleagues yesterday had a tear next to the back pocket of her jeans, exposing about 4 square inches of white underwear. I discreetly let her know as soon as I could pull her aside privately and she went on to tell every person she interacted with for the next few hours before she left to go home early! Not that there is a problem with it, but that’s the type of thing I’m personally working on. Better to leave a little mystery.

  20. Green great dragon*

    Scheduling doesn’t work for me as we have separate work and personal devices for security reasons. A scheduled email won’t send until I log in, so we’d end up with an email from me at “9.45am” apparently ignoring 2 hours of conversation between the early starters. On the other hand, no-one’s going to see an email from me unless they’re actively logged in.

    Definitely one that depends on your company.

  21. iglwif*

    I feel like the answer here depends on how clear it is for others at your organization that they need not and should not be monitoring their email outside their own working hours.

    If everyone genuinely feels comfortable to unplug from their work email/slack/teams/etc. when they’re not at work, then you can send emails whenever you want/need to, because they won’t see them until they’re back at their desk and likely won’t notice the timestamps (I know I rarely do!).

    But if you know or suspect that people are checking their email in the evenings and in the middle of the night, then you probably should be scheduling your middle-of-the-night emails to send during YOUR normal workday, even if it’s not other people’s normal workday.

    I do like the “my work hours may not be your work hours, don’t feel like you have to reply when you’re not at work” messaging, but people don’t see that until they’ve already opened and read the email, so …

  22. Pam Adams*

    I work with college students- I expect that emails and occasionally “X has joined your Zoom” notices will show up at all hours of the day and night. I don’t have Outlook or Teams installed on my phone, and while they’re installed on my tablet, notifications are off.

  23. cowtools*

    I am in academia, where working hour norms are really wonky and bad. I have some coworkers who add a “my working hours are different from yours, don’t feel like you need to respond if you get emails at weird times” notice. And I do often get 1 AM or 3 AM emails from them. I don’t mind weird hours, but I happen to know for every single one of these people that they are also working full standard hours and usually more – and so it does bother me to receive those emails because, despite their disclaimer, it does set a standard of working beyond what we are paid for. Especially since that’s largely coming from people much more senior than me. I don’t feel any pressure to respond immediately, but it sets norms that make it hard for me to feel like I can hold boundaries around my hours (which is tough to do anyway). I think I wouldn’t feel this way if people were just flexing their time or it only happened during really busy periods, etc.

    1. cowtools*

      I don’t get work email notifications outside of work, so it’s really just seeing those emails the next day and knowing that people are regularly working all day, and then also working in the middle of the night.

      1. metaleatingarachnid*

        I also work in academia and feel exactly the same way about these disclaimers, although I appreciate many people do seem to find them helpful. I’ve been tempted to put “I never send emails outside my working hours, don’t work more hours than you’re paid for, join your union” in my signature…

  24. Coverage Associate*

    I do delayed delivery for internal emails and the occasional domestic client email. Since almost all of my clients are at least 2 hours ahead, and some 8 hours ahead, I don’t worry much about the optics of email timing.

    For emails to coworkers, I find that late evening emails are more likely to get lost than morning emails, especially for hourly coworkers who don’t check email after hours. Exempt bosses don’t lose emails, but I care about the timestamp optics and having the option of it being clear that I worked late to finish something, or not disclosing that.

    I do have the occasional problem of a delayed delivery email not going out on time when both my laptop and phone are powered off.

    In my work, I have to pay attention to time stamps. A client may email me at their 8am, my midnight, and I may have to prioritize my response so that the client gets a response same day, usually before 10am my time. Our goal is to at least acknowledge the email the same day, but substantive responses may take more time than the 1 or 2 work hours that overlap.

    Also, I get 3 industry newsletters every business day between midnight and 2am. They are usually my first emails of the day, but anything timestamped between them stands out.

  25. Dulcinea47*

    This is really, really catering to people who are concerned about appearances, instead of letting all of us be adults about our own schedules.

  26. Qwerty*

    Our actions as leaders mean more than a feel-good message in an email signature. Words are easy – plenty of leaders with the “respond during your work hours” message are really just trying to CYA while wanting responses and plenty of leaders have been able to foster work-life balance without needing that signature. Here’s what I found helpful

    1. Tell your team how you’ll contact them when something is urgent. I will call or text if I need them outside of work hours and reiterate this regularly. If its during the workday I will walk over to your desk if I need you faster. That helps resolve some unconscious pressure so they are never wondering if a message is urgent.

    2. Set Core Hours for when you need them to be responsive. Some places these might be 9-5 regular business hours, others it is a subset like 10-2 so people can stagger their day.

    3. Check in with people who respond at weird hours. You don’t have to do it much, but get a gauge for whether someone is responding at 10pm because they also flex their hours or because they feel like they have to get caught up on all the after hours emails. Being concerned about your employees working late will mean a lot to them.

    4. Model disconnectedness outside of work. I do not put email on my phone and recommend this frequently to my team. I teach each of them how to set up quiet hours for IM notifications while recommending to avoid it on their phone unless they really want it. I’m frequently away from my desk in far parts of the building, which is the main reason I have it for this job, so that I’m available if my team needs me.

    5. Prioritize pushing information your team needs rather than requests when sending evening emails. It’s an easier start to your day to get “Here’s the file you needed to unblock your workday” than “Important question from your boss”. If you are sending them requests, soften the language so it’s less “do the thing” or “I need answer” and more “Sometime Wed morning can you pull the TPS reports?”

    6. Be mindful of how other leaders/executives function. I don’t typically mind evening emails from my current boss. BUT all other members of leadership send me IMs after hours and urgent sounding messages, or they engage with each other in decision making email threads in the evenings. Those things make me work in the evenings and cause me stress, which made my boss’ emails feel more urgent. Fortunately he pulled back and started working with his peers to get them to stop.

    7. If your team member replies to your email, do not respond. Treat the emails you send out as putting a pin in the conversation until the next workday. Engaging in an active back-and-forth conversation sends a message that they should be working and replying to you.

    7. Be open about why your work hours are the way they are and what your expectations of the team is. Can they work split hours like you? Personally I try to leave by 5:30pm every day, no matter what. If something is still bothering me after dinner and disengaging from work, then I’ll pop back online for up to an 1hr to handle things blocking others – usually emails and code reviews. Multiple team members start their workday before me, so it works well. My team loves this and it has helped them reduce their overtime hours and find their own schedule that works for them.

    I guess the theme in this making any team I inherit aware that my job is to unblock and enable them. Instead of the old advice about working longer hours than your boss, I flip it so that my team needs to work standard hours and leaders will work slightly more in order to keep everything running smoothly.

  27. anonymouse*

    I will never understand why this is a question. Don’t look at your work email outside work hours! Not only will people no longer have to worry about what time they are sending email, it will solve a lot of other problems too.

    1. mreasy*

      I always read off-hours emails as indicating schedule flexibility, i.e. I had to do X thing during work hours today so I’m working late, rather than an always-on culture. But I guess if you are trying to combat an existing always-on culture, schedule send is the way to go!

      The fact that people have their email notifications on during non-work hours feels like a them problem, also.

    2. darlin’*

      We have Flex Time (autocorrect capitals, weird) so I can, and often do, leave work to do something and log in later.

      Went to the gym at 4pm today and am now working for half an hour just to finish things up.

      I do try not to send messages or emails though, stresses me right out if someone immediately comes online !

  28. Rebecca*

    I have always assumed that email is for asynchronous communication and have never paid attention to what time they are coming in – I use the mute function to turn off notifications when I am not at my desk, or just ignore them. When I send, I just use the schedule send function, but that’s for my benefit – I don’t want to set up an expectation with clients that I’m available at night, even though sometimes I am.

  29. Rachel*

    I will DIE on this hill.

    EMAIL IS ASYNCHRONOUS.

    I don’t have to do an extra step to delay send the email because you don’t have good boundaries.

    Text/IM is for “at the time”.

    Reply to my email during YOUR work hours.

    1. anonymouse*

      “I don’t have to do an extra step to delay send the email because you don’t have good boundaries” 100%

    2. louvella*

      For real.

      I don’t work Fridays. I have coworkers who work on Fridays. They send me emails on Fridays. I see them Monday morning. I reply to them when I get a chance. They know I don’t work Fridays, but I’m not mad at them for emailing me. I just have notifications turned off.

    4. Morgan*

      Yup.

      A recipient has far more control over what level and intensity of notifications they want to receive (just an app icon, a badge/banner on their screen, a pop-up while the phone is locked, a vibration, a loud and attention-grabbing sound…) knowledge what times are appropriate for which in their particular case – than anyone sending a message does.

      I guess in a way this is another ask vs guess thing, or a similar sort of division, but one where the structure of the tools themselves heavily tilts towards one side.

  30. Rae*

    I deleted Outlook and Teams from my phone bc I do not get paid enough to be always available for problems (with my boss’s blessing). Anything I can help with can wait 12-24 hours.

  31. Worldwalker*

    I work with contract sculptors everywhere from the US to New Zealand. We just email each other whenever, and don’t particularly care if the other person is at work at the time or not; they’ll get to it when they wake up. It can be confusing at times (I keep a list of their GMT offsets) but since there’s rarely less than a day’s time from when one of us sends an email and needs an answer, it works for us.

    Though there was the situation during the Paris Olympics … 3D sculpting was one guy’s side hustle. His day job … was as a Paris cop. Yeah, mandatory overtime for a couple of weeks. But of course I knew in advance, and scheduled accordingly.

  32. menopausal ninja*

    If you are a leader:
    – use delay send to model disconnecting from work and good boundaries

    Everyone:
    – TURN OFF EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS! In almost all workplaces in our current communication environment, if it needs doing before the next normal work period (ex. I’ve never had notifications on for any of my email ever in my whole life. It’s never been a problem in any of my jobs as long as I actively check my email during work shifts.

  33. Rebecca*

    Send a timed email! The higher ups at my organization started doing it a while ago and I prefer that.

  34. Susannah*

    I had a colleague whose e-mail signature included the words” I have two toddlers and sometimes email at odd hours. That doesn’t mean you have to.”

  35. LongTimeLurkerTurnedFrequentCommenter*

    The director of our group was similar to that, and in our employee survey, many addressed that and said they felt obligated to respond because of his status. We luckily had this really candid meeting where we established levels of communication and their priority. An email was “respond when you can”, an IM was “hey when you see it respond”, and a phone call was “answer the phone right this minute or call me back ASAP”. It helped calm a lot of us down. We were a group that was close to the manufacturing plant so sometimes after hours calls happened, so it was important to know when we could ignore and when we needed to respond.

    This was before schedule send was a common feature, and I think now a lot of us schedule send for the next morning.

    I also think a statement in a meeting or a quick separate email stating exactly that is fine!! Open communication like that to your employees will make them feel more comfortable, and then you can establish your own priority levels of response.

  36. Working Class Lady*

    I think as long as you do not act aa though you expect your employees to see or respond to emails late at night, you’re fine.

    Personally, as an employee I would just decide those are hours that work for you and it isn’t really my business. Email is one of those communication forms that you don’t see until you look for it, and the other person gets the email whenever they happen to log in.

  37. hernamewaskitty*

    I’ve seen email signatures that simply say “my work hours may differ from yours; please feel free to respond during your work day.”

  38. Bill Johnson*

    When I work after hours and want to send something out that’s fresh on my mind, I just schedule a send for when my team is working. Problem solved.

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