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Comment by fred_is_fred | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday and send an email so I don’t forget. I have people on my team who view that as a “drop everything, cancel the wedding, pull the car over” level emergency. The issue is they ALL do this to themselves. They put work email on their phones, they have notifications enabled. Nobody asked them to do this, nobody asked them to read email all weekend. Even if I tell them “please ignore all weekend email”, it’s like they physically cannot do it. It’s almost an addiction.

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Help them out by scheduling the email to be sent during business hours?

When did this shift happen? People shouldn’t check email when they don’t want to read it.

Often others don't behave in the same way we would or even the way we would expect. My suggestion is in the spirit of trying to offer a little help to your fellow teammates with a few extra clicks, in what seems like a very low effort compromise.

I suppose it depends on your team dynamics, size, structure, etc. I work with a small, tight knit team and if I already knew someone was going to act a little neurotic with regards to a low priority weekend email, I would do the extra few clicks to make their life slightly better. In a large corporate setting maybe I would be less sympathetic, who knows.

Large corporate setting for sure and yes I ended up doing scheduled emails specifically for this person. But im not sure the original cause of why they couldn’t stop checking. I couldn’t control everyone’s emails in the whole group either.

I suspect it was when smart phones started defaulting to notifications for every email. A scourge.

But why the heck do people get work emails to their private phones in the first place?

I just don't understand America. And, since this law was apparently necessary in Australia, not that either. They're both just weird.

In Australia the email thing being discussed is largely a sideshow to the law that was recently passed.

The behaviour of concern relates to the kind of bosses | managers that make a point of contacting employees out of hours and pressuring them to attend the office | answer questions at length, etc.

It's the direct phone calls and obsessive DM's @ 2 minute intervals that being targetted - most people handle auto generated work related emails well enough, they learn to disable notifications and have muscle memory for "Dismiss".

I completely agree. But it's not just America, this was definitely common when I was working in Ireland for Irish companies too.

I was the weird one for not having Slack on my phone. So far I haven't been fired for it. But maybe I haven't been promoted either.

That's what paper is for. Not email.

Are you really suggesting people use snail mail simply for async?

LMAO! No... How did you even get that?

> Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday

I'm suggesting when you have that random thought, you write it the fuck down -- even if you have to add a reminder to call or email someone at an appropriate time. I'm kind of shocked that this is some new development to people.

That adds one more opportunity to forget though. There’s no need to be condescending.

Yes, there is a need to be condescending. Outsourcing your personal notepad by emailing people off-hours is silly, rude, and abusive. That kind of behavior warrants direct confrontation and aggressive ridicule.

No, it doesn’t.

I live nine time zones away from some colleagues. I’m not going to schedule every email. They can read it in their working hours.

E-mail should not have notifications

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