Item — HN Reader

There’s a good quote in the recent Increment issue on remote work, of a manager’s email signature:

    Received this email outside of my standard working hours (ET)? That means I’ve chosen to do some work at this time; it’s not an expectation that you do the same.

As someone prone to working odd or odd hours, I’ll often preface slack or email messages I send with a bold ‘not urgent’ or similar, in the hope that the recipient will feel comfortable ignoring it until their working hours.

I think if more people clearly set response time expectations, off hours messages would read as less of an intrusion, even to people with fewer firm boundaries.

1 comments

Some German company, I believe the Deutsche Post/DHL, was changing their email servers to not deliver emails outside of working hours. Granted this works because all folks are in the same Timezone, but it is such an elegant solution. Just not deliver the mails until the next day. If it is super urgent you can still call. Would be cool if that was a mail client feature.

I have no work mail or chat on my private devices and actually move all incoming mail to a temp imap folder which I don’t sync to my phone or laptop. Then a cron job moves it to my inbox between 8 and 8.

I need a button in slack that does this.

Yes, it’s 2am in India. Yes, I want the whole thread to be in one tool. No, I don’t want to notify the person until they’re at their desk.

Slack does have a suppress notifications setting that the recipient can set. That doesn’t help when they haven’t set it.

90% of the emails I send are because this feature is missing.

By default, a user's Slack notifications are paused at night, unless I am misremembering.