We should plug in useless emails out of hours

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Imagine buying a tub of peanut butter ice cream with very large sugar and finding a message on the label titled, “Ten Top Tips for Losing Weight.”

If you think one piece of advice might be, “Stop peanut butter ice cream,” don’t think like Tim Cook, Apple’s boss.

Last week, Apple announced their iPhones will soon feature a “powerful tool” called Focus to better manage the storm of bleats and pings that can make concentration and relaxation irretrievably difficult. Users will be able to change their Twitter voice if they are busy at work or mute work emails on weekends.

Or they could do something even more effective: turn off the distraction device or remove their eye-catching apps. Of course, Apple would prefer you not to either, as it makes money both in its app store and in the sale of iPhones. But you can see why he’s interested in looking like he’s doing something to stifle digital lunch.

Before the pandemic, an exhausting and always active work culture was a problem and has worsened considerably since then.

We are in the midst of a “burnout epidemic,” according to Jennifer Moss, a U.S. workplace expert who co-authored a survey of workers in 46 countries last year. Most said the work is getting worse he wrote to the Harvard Business Review. As one respondent put it: “Emails start at 5:30 in the morning and don’t end until 22:00, because they know you have nowhere else to go. For single people without families it’s worse, because you can’t say, “I need to go take care of my kids.”

These words are supported by official statistics in the UK, which showed people working from home last year made six hours of unpaid overtime a week on average, compared to 3.6 hours for those who never worked from home.

Keeping homework in mind is here to stay after closures, in part because many employees want it, which is a problem. Long working days kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, an innovative World Health Organization to study he said last month. It was found that more than 55 hours of work a week can be risky.

It is not uncommon for governments around the world to face growing pressure for workers to have something considered a suspicious novelty: the right to disconnect.

This is spreading faster than one might think, and not just in docile, white-collar labor. Victoria Australian state police recently won the right to shut down after hours on what their employee was doing said the association it was the first such agreement for a law enforcement agency. People were “tired of feeling on duty 24 hours a day” and needed an opportunity to rest and recover, the association said. There are too many work messages outside of banal hours or they could easily wait.

Ireland introduced a code of conduct on the right to disconnect in April and Canada is studying a similar action, just like other countries.

This is good. Fears that these measures will stifle the flexibility of employers are exaggerated. “It’s not nine to five,” says Andrew Pakes, research director at the UK’s Prospect union, which advocates for disconnection rights. “It doesn’t mean that people say, ‘It’s 5:22 p.m., so I won’t reply to that email.’ Nor does it mean that a global approach is needed. for more than four years a law has been established that obliges companies with more than 50 people to negotiate agreements on how best to shut down.

Workers at Orange’s telecommunications company in France should not respond to work messages on weekends, holidays or evenings, or when training, a spokeswoman said. In other companies, workers returning from vacation can spend a full day recovering what they lost without having to deal with customers or internal meetings, said Alex Sirieys, head of France’s international sector. FO-Com trade union.

Sirieys says not all disconnection policies are perfect. “It depends on the will of the CEO,” he told me last week. Success is also based on workers and managers simply talking to each other, he added, and using it common sense, or common sense. Either way, the ability to turn it off always made a lot of sense and never more than it does right now.

pilita.clark@ft.com

Twitter: @pilitaclark



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