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Comment by mavelikara | Hacker News Reader

> "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along"

I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.

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Most C-level folks that I’ve worked with in the past decade have told me that they send messages when they have time, which is often off hours, but they don’t expect a reply until business hours. I’ve heard very few middle managers say the same thing, so a late night message may be perceived differently. But that’s just my personal experience, obviously very situational.

Yes, I've also had managers that start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning and so it wouldn't be unusual to receive emails from them at 5am. There was never any expectation to respond to emails straight away and the same should apply to emails sent in the evening.

One nice feature of Slack is that you can schedule messages to send when the recipient's working hours start. Let the automation take care of keeping messages to working hours.

In smaller companies (where C-level doesn't exist) this works similarly where directors/owners just have to deal with stuff outside of normal hours because somebody has to. Just because they do and have skin in the game, doesn't mean they expect the employees to respond to anything.

Slack helped a lot by making scheduling messages for the next day really simple and not notifying out of hours by default. Outlook could really improve its UX around that functionality - you can schedule messages right now, but it's pretty much hidden.

I know at least one senior level exec that uses that feature. I had never heard of it before (and I use outlook).

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