Many employees report being unable to switch off from work outside office hours.

Many employees today continue to read emails and answer messages from their manager in the evening, at the weekend and even during their holiday. This creates serious problems, but companies and governments can improve the situation.

The first problem is health. A person who never stops thinking about work cannot relax, so he sleeps badly and feels tired all the time. After some months this causes stress, headaches and sometimes depression or burnout, and then the employee must take a long sick leave, so the company also loses.

The second problem is family life. When a father answers messages during dinner or during his son's football match, he is physically present but mentally at work. Children and partners feel that they are less important than the job, and this creates conflicts at home.

One solution is a law about the right to disconnect. Some countries already decided that a company cannot demand an answer after working hours, and an employee cannot be punished if he does not reply in the evening. This protects workers who are afraid to say no to their boss.

Another solution is inside the company. Managers should not send messages at eleven o'clock at night, because employees think they must answer immediately. If the manager writes emails only during working hours and takes real holidays, the staff will do the same, because people copy the behaviour of their leader.

In conclusion, being always available damages the health of employees and their family relationships, but clear laws and better behaviour from managers can protect people's private time.

A large proportion of employees now report being unable to disengage from work outside their contracted hours. The causes are less technological than they appear, and this determines which remedies can work.

The first problem is the loss of recovery. Rest is not simply a preference; sustained cognitive work requires periods in which the demand is genuinely absent, and an evening spent half-monitoring a phone does not provide them. The result is deteriorating sleep, reduced concentration and eventually burnout — a state from which recovery takes months rather than days. Employers lose considerably more to this than they gain from the extra evening replies.

The second and more intractable problem is that availability has become a signal of commitment. An employee who answers at ten at night appears dedicated, which means anyone who declines to do so appears comparatively less so, regardless of their actual output. This is why advice to set personal boundaries so rarely works: the individual who follows it pays a career cost while the norm remains untouched, so the rational choice for each person is to keep answering.

Because the problem is collective, the solutions have to be as well. A legal right to disconnect — establishing that employees cannot be required to respond outside working hours and cannot be penalised for not doing so — removes the individual risk by making non-response the default position rather than a personal stand.

Within organisations, the practical measures are straightforward. Systems can hold messages written at night for delivery the following morning, which costs the sender nothing and removes the implied demand. More importantly, managers must be assessed on what their teams produce rather than how quickly they reply, since responsiveness is measured easily and therefore tends to be rewarded by default.

In conclusion, constant availability damages health and has become an unspoken measure of commitment. Since no individual can opt out of a norm, only rules and management practice can change it.

It is tempting to blame smartphones for the disappearance of the boundary around work, but the technology only lowered the cost of contact. What keeps people answering at eleven at night is that responsiveness has become the cheapest available proxy for commitment — and once that is true, no individual can withdraw from it without paying for the withdrawal. Recognising this as a collective action problem rather than a failure of self-discipline is what makes the remedies obvious.

The first harm is the loss of recovery, and it is worth separating from the number of hours worked. Cognitive performance depends on periods when demand is genuinely absent, not merely reduced — an evening spent glancing at a phone every twenty minutes supplies almost none of the restoration a genuinely disconnected evening does, even though very little work was actually done. This is why the damage accumulates in people who would not describe themselves as overworked: they are never fully off. Sustained, it produces sleep disruption, narrowed attention and eventually burnout, a condition measured in months of absence rather than days.

The second problem is the signalling trap, and it is the reason the first persists. Availability is instantly visible while quality of work is not, so an employee replying late at night looks committed and one who does not looks comparatively indifferent — irrespective of what either produced. Everyone therefore has a private incentive to remain reachable, and anyone who unilaterally stops absorbs the cost alone. This is precisely why counsel to "set boundaries" has achieved so little: it asks individuals to solve a problem that exists at the level of the group, and quietly penalises the ones who try.

The solutions follow from that. A statutory right to disconnect works not because it forbids evening emails but because it changes the default: when non-response is the legal norm, declining to answer stops being a personal statement about one's dedication and the signalling value of availability collapses. Several countries have adopted this and the mechanism is the point, not the enforcement.

Two organisational measures reinforce it. Messaging systems can hold anything composed outside working hours until the next morning, which imposes no cost on a manager who wants to write at midnight while removing the implied demand on the recipient. And senior staff have to be assessed on output rather than reply speed, because responsiveness is easy to measure and easy things get measured — the modern equivalent of presenteeism, rewarding visibility over contribution.

In short, the problems are a genuine loss of recovery and a norm that punishes anyone who resists it individually. Since a norm cannot be opted out of one person at a time, the answer has to be a rule and a change in what managers are rewarded for — not advice to the exhausted about switching off their notifications.