Avoid after-hours email replies

Every freelancer in the IT industry has gone through this. They work with international clients and then suffer from: The issues caused by different time zone. Because you're building sites in the morning. Taking client calls at midnight. Replying to “urgent” messages during lunch. All while pretending this is normal. But you’re not being flexible. You’re being available. And they’re not the same thing. And the fix is clarity. Not hustle. Structure. Not burnout. And there's a few basic things you can do for next time: 1/ Set your hours like a business Not “when I’m free.” and "Not “when they need me.” Your hours. In your time zone. Write it. Share it. Stick to it. Example: “I work Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm IST. Replies within 24 hours during this window.” 2/ Put it in the Contract Not a vague email. A real clause. For example: “Freelancer’s working hours are 9am–5pm IST. Communication outside these hours may be delayed. For emergencies, phone contact is allowed - only for critical issues.” 3/ Use tools that do the talking Calendly. Auto-responders. These save you from typing “Sorry I missed this” 20 times a week. Let software protect your sleep. 4/ Say it before they assume it Time difference? Mention it. In-person work? Mention it. You’re not ignoring them - you’re just offline. 5/ Keep receipts Confirm availability by email. Screenshot the agreement. So when the drama hits, you have the proof. This is how you stay respected in your field. Boundaries don’t push clients away. They build trust. So protect your time, or someone else will take it. --- ✍ Tell me below: What’s one boundary you wish you had set earlier in your freelance career?

It's Sunday night. Are you about to send a work email? Don't. (At least if your company's normal workweek is Monday-Friday! If you work for a company with a work from anywhere anytime policy, that's amazing! This may not apply to you. But in a traditional business with set hours like I've worked in most of my career? Read on.) Before leaving the corporate world earlier this year to launch my own business, I worked in the world of HR for nearly 30 years, leading HR for 25. So I get it. If you are a leader, you can't always shut your laptop at the end of the day Friday and forget about work. But you can try. And if it's not possible, you can help make sure your team has a much needed weekend or evening break. How? If your work hours are all over the place, schedule that email to be sent during normal business hours. It's easy to do in most platforms. (NOTE: This is easiest if your team is in one time zone on roughly the same schedule - it's trickier, but not impossible, to work with each team member's time zone.) You may tell your team it's ok not to respond to emails, or even have a bounceback email that says something like that. But what matters more than intent is impact. The impact of a team leader sending copious amounts of emails during non-work hours can have the unintended consequence of making your team feel like they have to work 24/7. That they have to check their email constantly even when off for a day or a week. And while that may be in some cases, and certainly urgent issues come up from time to time, most of the time it's habit. That feeling of always having to be on is not sustainable to most people - and can and will lead to burnout. We talked about this a lot with the executive team at my last company because my team members felt this deeply from all across the company. As executives we couldn't necessarily always shut off at the end of a day or week. But we could make sure our people did. If we had to be plugged in or wanted to be catching up on email on the weekends, we scheduled our emails to be sent during the workweek. If something came up that was urgent and we needed a team member? We called. It wasn't perfect. But it was something. And it gave my team - who felt comfortable bringing up these concerns - a break. Which gave everyone else who might not have been comfortable saying something a break as well. Most of the time that email can wait. And that gives you a break too.

Can we make it a standard practice to delay-send emails that aren't urgent? (Which, honestly, is almost all of them - don't come at me with your "I couldn't get to it until 8 PM on Thursday night, but we need to stay on schedule..." excuses. Accept that your colleague will get to it in the morning and shouldn't be on standby for a late-night email). I am not available 24/7. If you email me on a Friday night or Saturday morning, I will not respond until at least Monday. I say at least because there's a HIGH likelihood that a weekend email will get buried in my inbox or marked 'read' if I open it on my phone by accident and I'll forget about it come Monday. This is a boundary that has been incredibly difficult for me to put in place as a proposal professional. I spent a good chunk of my career being told that I need to be available 24/7 to support the schedule of a SME/PM that has "more important" work to do during the day. As a result, I feel hardwired to respond to emails instantly. I get extremely anxious when I receive odd-hour emails (and yes, I have do not disturb and such on my phone; the notifications still slip through sometimes). That's why I have a timed-send policy for all emails I draft outside of normal working hours. I don't ever want to be the cause of someone else's anxiety because they wake up to an email from me or have their notifications on and see one right before going to bed. TL;DR: If you want to do one very small thing to support a proposal pro today, delay-send your emails and restrict your communication to within working hours.

“Charlie sends too many after-hours emails, and it gives me anxiety.” That was the feedback I received a few years ago during one of our engagement surveys. I’ll admit...it stung at first. I’ve always been passionate about my work and inspired to work when the creative energy arises; which often means sending emails outside of work hours. But, what I thought was harmless to others turned out to unintentionally impact my team’s ability to find work-life balance. That feedback was a wake-up call for me.  So, we made a change. We introduced a policy to eliminate emails after 6pm. This policy lives under our greater “Workplace Flexibility Policy” and these days, it’s becoming known as a “Right to Disconnect” policy. Either way, the guidelines are the same… Employees not expected to check or respond to messages outside of regular work hours…and, if work is done after-hours, team members are encouraged to “Schedule Send” emails to arrive during work hours. Simple but powerful. Our policy has been in place for us for a few years now, and it’s helped set the tone for healthy boundaries and work-life balance. I’m excited to see that there are larger conversations around the “Right to Disconnect,” with some nations and even U.S. states considering legislation to ensure employees can fully unplug. Whether driven by laws or company culture, the message is clear: Boundaries matter. I share this because that one piece of tough feedback ended up being a gift to me and my team. It helped me grow as a leader, helped our company culture shape and formed the DNA of who we are today. Now tell me…have you ever worked somewhere with a “Right to Disconnect” policy? Who agrees that it's time to normalize flexibility like this? 🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♀️ #worklifebalance #disconnect #flexibility

Refrain from sending e-mails at night The members of many organizations I work with complain about work/life imbalance. I’ve shared a number of tools in these posts on how to better achieve balance in line with one’s priorities, but I have not written enough about the leader’s role in driving the core problem. We’re not talking about toxic leaders here. Those folks are in an entirely different category and warrant special attention. My comments are focused on the caring, well-meaning leader who realizes that a number of his employees will stay in the office as long as the boss, regardless of circumstances. That leader knows that the workers have a life too, so he does not typically arrive too early or leave too late. He frequently takes at least some portion of work home because there are just too many important tasks to get done during regular business hours. We’ve all been there. The problem arises when the leader opens up his laptop at home and starts firing off e-mails. The cascading effect is that the employees understand that their boss wants them “on duty” around the clock. Even if you preface your direction with a comment like “you don’t need to answer this until tomorrow,” some of your employees will answer right away. Others will learn to do so too, and before too long, their lives are out of balance and they do not control their own clocks. This is what I suggest: continue your behavior with taking needed work home (but be careful with your own balance). Go ahead and draft e-mails if you need to pass information, ask questions, and assign tasks, but don’t hit “send” until you get to work the next day. There will (of course) be times when you’re dealing with an emergency or need an immediate answer. That’s what they make the telephone for. Pick it up, make the call, and get your answer or give direction, just don’t do it with e-mail. If you’re like me, I sometimes wake up with what I call “monkey brain” and can’t get back to sleep. I then decide to start my day early and stretch, read, write, etc. When I was still in the Army, I had a lot of folks working for me and I found out that I was driving them crazy with my early morning e-mails. Looking back, I wish I had better discipline to wait until I got to work to hit the send button. You can learn from my example but it’s not always a good one. Enjoy your leadership journey! #leadershipdevelopment #leadershipadvice #businessstrategies #leadershipskills

"'I'm sending this at 9pm but no rush!' Yeah, I've made this big mistake, too. I thought adding 'not urgent' to my late-night emails made me a flexible boss. I was wrong. The truth is, there's no such thing as a 'no rush' email from your CEO at midnight. What's your company's unwritten rule about after-hours communication? I learned this because my team feels safe enough to give me constructive feedback. Someone once told me they felt guilty about not responding to my 'optional' late-night messages ASAP. That's when the schedule send function became my best friend. If I'm catching up at 9pm, those emails go out at 9am tomorrow. I knew to be an effective leader and to maintain our culture of balance & belonging, I had to give people real permission to disconnect. Your team doesn't need to know you're a night owl. What they need is clear permission to have true off hours.