Lately I’ve seen a lot of conversations along the lines of “stop sending non-urgent work emails at 10 pm”/“10 pm is the only time some of us can catch up on emails, so turn off your notifications if that’s how you feel about it.”

Allow me to introduce you to DELAYED DELIVERY.

Turning off email notifications altogether means people aren’t getting notifications of non-urgent catching-up in the middle of the night or on weekends or whatever, but it also means no notifications of actual emergencies or things that really cannot wait until business hours.

Outlook and Gmail and I’m sure others have the option to schedule when you want the email to be delivered, with a couple of additional clicks, which means people catching up can still catch up without people feeling obligated to read and answer non-urgent emails at off hours.

Obviously I’d love it if we lived in a world where people were not having to work bizarre hours to keep up, and people weren’t expected to be online and available 24/7 for stuff that is just not that important.

But since we don’t live in that world, IMO scheduling email deliveries is a better option than expecting recipients to ignore the message or turn off notifications.