(VIDEO) Will These EMAILS Ever STOP?

emails

Wouldn’t you like to ban out-of-work-hours emails and make them illegal? Find out what Luis has to say about this!

The reality is that if you’re working remotely, you’ll probably have to deal with time zone differences. Therefore, your boss and colleagues would be working while you’re sleeping, and you’ll receive their emails while you’re offline!

So, the answer is no. It’s impossible to ban out-of-work-hours emails when you’re working remotely. Instead, you could be responsible and set your expectations and boundaries with your teammates.

Watch the video to know more about this topic!

Luis:

Will these emails ever stop? Let’s ban out-of-work-hours emails, right? Yes. Welcome to Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis, and we are sick of out-of-work-hours emails. So what should we do about this? Well, what about let’s all start being responsible adults? What about that? How’s that for a new idea being responsible adults, right? So look, the reality is that if you’re working remotely, there are bound to be time zone differences. This means that bosses and colleagues will be working while you’re sleeping, and guess what? They send their emails in their work hours and you receive them outside of your work hours. So actually, no, don’t ban emails outside of work hours because that’s all the time. Instead, be responsible, right?

Set expectations and boundaries, right? Let your bosses know preferably, at the point where you’re applying for a job and you’re talking about how the workday because this should be a conversation, right? What’s expected from me, what’s not expected from me, how can I design my workday. We’re talking about remote work here so the way you manage your workday matters. And so, by the way, I mean, my work hours… We’ll settle on these work hours and outside of these work hours, I’m not expected to answer emails, right? So obviously you’ll get them because guess what? People are probably working outside of your work hours, but, I mean, that’s not so bad because if you’re a responsible adult, as I started the video with, then, well, guess what? You can handle it, right?

You can configure your phone. I mean, I did this on my iPhone, but you can do that on an Android as well. I’m sure it’s a pretty basic functionality, right? To limit notifications outside of work hours. You can even be pretty granular about it, right? You can select what apps are snoozed. So what about selecting the email client? You can snooze all apps, that’s what I do, but I understand that some people live more virtually than I do. So probably you want to use for social purposes a lot of apps, that’s fine. Just don’t use email. Who uses email for social purposes these days anyway? So just turn that off, right? On the computer, it’s a bit harder because a lot of computers don’t have the snooze functionality, but guess what? You can just close your email client like you’re done with work, that’s what I do. I close my email client. It takes a little bit of discipline, but not that much.

So there you have it. Are we all sick of being distracted and constantly on edge because we got an email after dinner or just before bed or et cetera and then we ended up not sleeping properly? Absolutely. It’s unhealthy, but trying to fix it on the other person’s side is not productive and not even fair because the other person’s work hours will probably not be our work hours. So you need to fix this. This needs to fix on your end. And how do you fix it? Number one, know when to say no; number two, set expectations; and number three, be disciplined about it, configure your hardware to respect your resting time.

That’s it. Now I have to clean up this mess. I hope you enjoyed Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis. And if you did, please press like, subscribe, and share and also check www.thinkremote.com for the latest and greatest in remote work news, tools, trips, strategies, and guides. See you tomorrow.

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