How is this bad exactly? You don’t have to accept on Christmas. Some people like to work on Christmas because they don’t celebrate it and they can have some unbroken space for work. Do I have to make sure I’m not sending meeting invites or email then to comply with workplace etiquette?
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Routine messages (non-urgent/time-sensitive) should only go out during business hours (+/- 1-2 hours). They can be composed whenever but schedule send to be delivered during business hours. The office is closed on Christmas, so any message sent out that day is outside of business hours.
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If I’m working late or non-standard hours, I make a point to send out an email at that time just so everyone knows how dedicated and great of a worker I am. MSOutlook always pops up and suggests “Send this during normal work hours?” or some such and I say, FLORIDA UNIVERSITY, MS! SEND IT NOW!
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It’s bad because new hires are learning how to navigate their careers, and they look to their managers and other successful people in the company to inform their brand development.
I have had to tell a few of my managers that they need to knock that shit off, because our entry level hires see it and think, this person doesn’t have a work/life balance and they’re successful and have the power to determine if I am successful, so this is what I should do, too.
And because they keep doing it anyway, I also make it a point of telling all the new hires on our team that working late should be a rare occurrence, and just because some people on our team are chronically working, they should log off and take that study time, wait to respond to that email, and set boundaries for themselves.
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I am curious why people check their work email if they don’t want to be working. I do somewhat see na’s example point, but if i am working at 10pm, and something is more like tomorrow/this week, am i really causing a problem?
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I agree with @NerdAlert’s broader point, but everyone knows i am very part time and do a lot of time shifting. If I’m working at 8pm, it’s because i decided to take a nap in the afternoon. So i just send those emails at 8pm, and don’t worry about it.
Also, I’m not working with any entry level employees.
That being said, if i made the meeting on Christmas Day, i would schedule the note to be sent later.
But our MS Teams has just been upgraded to send more stuff to people’s home devices. So going forward, i may be more careful about sending stuff during non-business hours.
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I use VBA macros in Outlook.
I have one macro that auto-executes for each mail message I send:
- If it’s outside standard business hours, it prompts and gives me the option to delay sending until 7:30am on the next weekday.
- If it’s during business hours, it prompts and gives me the option to delay sending until 5pm (presumably because I don’t want responses to distract me from other work during the rest of the day, or just in case I need to revise something).
Both “delayed send” and VBA are under-appreciated features in Outlook. (Sadly, corporate IT does its best to make VBA difficult to use, and Microsoft seems to want to remove it from Outlook.)
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this is me this week. i am post-rona but the congestion is hanging around in the sinuses. and bc of the pain and fever-y stuff I am barely sleeping
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I’ve had a manager that insisted that 40hrs/wk was the bare minimum…and that not routinely going beyond that requirement was shameful…and he also threw in a bunch of “personal brand” bullshit.
I didn’t last long under him.
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I only had a very low grade fever for 1 day. My sinus congestion is still around but greatly improved. I’m on the mend. Symptoms started last Thursday.
VBA macros in Outlook seem very buggy to me. I set something similar up once and it didn’t consistently work so I turned it off.
I have no problem following this (now that there is a schedule send capability) but askamanager disagrees with you (as long as it’s just email, not texting too).
I agree with the take in TTY’s link. I don’t think it’s bad to send emails at weird hours as long as there is no expectation of an immediate response (which is precisely the point of email). And if you’re scheduling an in-person meeting and booking a conference room you’d never want to wait or the room you want might get booked by someone else.
Early in my career, we had a “Tuesday at noon” deadline thing and the office was closed on Monday. (Boston Marathon, anyone who’s worked in Boston knows all the details.) I realized late Friday afternoon that the file needed for this project was corrupted and it needed to be rebuilt and my boss was out on vacation until Tuesday. So, I took it on myself to fix it but we already had weekend plans so I knew I wasn’t going to touch it until Monday.
I came in early evening on Monday, spent about 10 hours rebuilding this file and making sure it worked correctly. It was almost 3am when I sent an email out setting what happened and that I planned to be in the office around 10am after I got in a little sleep. (Home was 45 minutes away from work.)
When I got in, my boss asked to speak with me. She told me she was very appreciative of what I had done, but I was a student and I worked 40 hours and not 50+, 60+ or whatever, I was not to do that again and I should definitely not send any emails out at 3:00 a.m again.
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Yeah, some folks are keeners.
We have an internal IM system, I frequently post stuff to my marketing person at all hours of the day/night/weekends etc. She responded once during off hours, I told her that those notes are just to get stuff out of my brain, no need to look at them until she’s back on the clock.
I have a firm policy, we’re not amazon, there’s no emergency here.
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I don’t see it as an issue because a person will see it as soon as I send it. I think it’s an issue because people will start to see a pattern in the timestamps and recognize that I send emails late at night or on the weekend, some of them really urgent (for the next morning).
Then they begin to feel anxiety about whether or not they have an email waiting for them as soon as they log on, so they log on frequently outside of work hours to check, maybe address it then because they don’t want to let it wait, and now, they aren’t disconnecting from work like they ought to be. Or maybe they don’t log on, but it’s always on their mind.
The pandemic really blurred the lines between being “at work” and being off, and I think it’s created some unhealthy habits in some people.
I assume that if someone needs me on off hours, they will text me on my cellphone (or call). And that emails are not meant to be checked on off hours so there’s no point in putting an urgent one there. (Unless urgent means, urgent but it would be okay to start working on it the next business day).
I’m flattered that you’re responding to me, but not sure why lol.
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i don’t know what happened. i was replying to arthur but somehow you got dragged into it
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I went to the grocery store at 9:00 AM. When checking out I tapped the Do-you-want-cash $40 button. The lady checking me out hands me my receipt and money and tells me: “Next time ask me if you can get money first, especailly this early in the AM”
Ugh, when can I leave earth?
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