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Catching up on emails outside regular work hours? These handy tips can help you hit the right balance for yourself and your colleagues.

In an increasingly connected world, messages can be sent and received at all sorts of times, and places. Ringing sounds, chimes, little red dots, alert notifications, all prompt us to ‘pay attention’ and take action. But is this really for the best? Not always!

Especially now that many more of us are working from home, or working from home more often, we may need to take some extra steps to help protect our time ‘at home’, ‘at rest’ or ‘at play’ from work-related intrusions.

We also need to protect our colleagues. Seen a great article? Had an excellent idea? Remembered something? Finally catching up on that email query? These can all be good reasons to contact colleagues, and in an ideal world, we have all thought about ways to triage messages and customise notifications to suit what works for us, and help protect the time we need preserved. Sadly, this is not always the case.

So, what can you do to help with that balance? Below are a few things to consider if your fingers are itching to catch up on emails after, or before, normal working hours.

Clarifying expectations

Receiving emails after working hours may not be inconvenient at all, if you know that you are not expected to do anything about them at that time, so if sending a message out of hours, it can help to flag when you are hoping for action or a response. Some people also find benefit in including a message as part of their email signature as an ‘explainer’ for out-of-hours communications, such as:

I work flexibly. If you have received this email outside of normal working hours, I am sending it at a time that suits me. I am not expecting you to read or reply until your normal working hours.

Draft now, send later

Clearing that email inbox or to do list can be a great feeling, but as you hit ‘reply’ or ‘send’ on email after email, if it is after hours, you can be adding to a perception or feeling of expectation about ‘working around the clock’. A better model can be to draft the email, but leave it in your ‘drafts’ folder until a more work-friendly hour, and send it then.

An added bonus of this approach is that, before you hit ‘send’ the next morning, or later that day, you can take a moment to reread what you have written. You may find that your ‘morning eyes’ are a bit more perceptive of typos, sentence clarity, diplomacy, or getting to the point more succinctly. Another alternative is to draft your email at the time that is convenient to you but time it to be sent automatically, at a preferred time during business hours. Outlook has settings to enable this, both for and computers.

And don’t forget, when it comes to protecting your own time, it is a great idea to customise your alerts and notifications to suit your work hours, and what you want to know and do, when!