Imagine leaving work early to collect your children, then logging back on after they are asleep. At 10 p.m., you send a few emails. You don’t expect anyone to answer until tomorrow, but your colleagues don’t necessarily know that.
Conventional wisdom says the solution is simple: Don’t send email after hours. But if you don’t, you’ll be behind because you left work early. On the other hand, you’re now creating the expectation that your team also works around the clock. The rule designed to protect flexible working also means everyone works all the time.
Why controlling email hours no longer works
Despite the proliferation of digital technologies, with artificial intelligence promising to make our working lives even more efficient, professionals are still struggling to stay on top of their inbox. Over the last decade or so, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have strongly encouraged maintaining robust email boundaries.
However, the reality of modern work is that it is not completely separable from home, our homes are not completely separable from our offices, and our online activity is often not clearly work-related or private. Flexible work makes uniform temporal boundaries problematic because protecting one person’s preferred work schedule can constrain another person’s flexibility.
Managing expectations about responsiveness
A common response to our email management problem is to set firmer boundaries: restricting sending or checking emails after hours, promoting “digital detoxes” during holidays, and introducing law to protect these policies. Although helpful in principle, such measures can be difficult to apply in practice and may create new tensions.
Flexible work promised to allow people to work whenever it works for them. An employee with parenting responsibilities might take time after dinner when their kids are in bed to catch up with emails, or really early in the morning before the kids get up. But this means their team members might be getting emails in the middle of the night and feel compelled to respond.
We call this the “flexibility paradox”: One person’s freedom to work flexibly can inadvertently constrain somebody else’s. Global teams face an additional “time zone trap.” There may simply be no time of day that falls within everyone’s working hours.
So, what could managers do in a practical sense? Teams could agree on reasonable response times for routine email communications; how urgent matters should be signaled and responded to; what tools, other than email, could be used and when; and how individual response habits silently shape collective norms. For example, some members consistently reply within minutes while others respond after longer delays. The former may create a false impression of urgency, whereas the latter may create uncertainty or anxiety for the sender.
Consequently, rather than managing when people are allowed to email, managers and organizations should manage what they should reasonably expect from one another.
Redesigning workflows, not just the inbox
While managing expectations can address part of the problem, our work highlights a more fundamental issue that makes email boundaries such a pressing problem: Are we perhaps overusing email?
Email has become more than a communication tool. It increasingly acts as an organizational infrastructure through which work is coordinated, creating an implicit expectation of continuous connectivity. When every deadline, decision, approval, status update, and document exchange travels through email, the inbox becomes the workflow. At that point, email overload is no longer primarily a communication problem; it is a work-design problem.
We use the metaphor of the “invisible metronome” to describe how email sets the pace and rhythm of work. Email is technically asynchronous, but smartphones, notifications, and norms of rapid responsiveness can make it feel synchronous; once a message arrives, an implicit clock starts ticking. Email can therefore create an illusion of urgency, influencing when and how people turn their attention to work.
Our suggestion is an alternative approach that makes better use of digital tools that are available to organizations nowadays. Deadlines can be made visible in project calendars. Shared documents can be hosted in workspaces rather than being repeatedly circulated as attachments. Routine approvals can follow defined workflows. And synchronous communications can also take place when needed. Email can then be reserved for documenting and similar purposes, rather than serving as the default mechanism for keeping work moving.
This also makes flexible work more effective. A well-designed asynchronous workflow should not depend on every colleague being continuously reachable. This shifts the focus from individual inbox discipline to organizational (re)design. Instead of continually trying to limit people’s availability in the name of flexibility, organizations should ask themselves if such a high volume of email activity is required in the first place, or whether additional digital technologies could be used systematically instead for specific purposes.
Making work sustainable for everyone
In our recent work, we challenge the dominant emphasis on limiting email activity and instead shift attention toward managing expectations and redesigning work itself. Email overload is not simply an individual self-management problem; it can reveal deeper problems in how work is coordinated. A healthier approach to flexible work requires organizations to decouple communication from availability—and effective coordination from constant connectivity.