Alternatives to Sending Emails at 2AM

It’s a typical relaxed, slow weekend. As I rub the crust out of my eyes, I roll over and look at my phone to see what time it is. There it was on the screen: another email sent to me from a colleague just before 2am.

This isn’t an anomaly. For years I’ve opened my inbox to see non-urgent emails from colleagues at other organizations sent at 11pm, 2am, or 4am during the evening and over the weekend. It’s really stressful to see. The separation I am trying to have between work and life breaks down and I feel bad for the sender who is having to work on and think about the thing they’re emailing about so late in the night.

To be clear, this isn’t about the west coast or Hawai’i-based colleagues sending an email late in their afternoon or the colleagues working across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not about the listserv emails that go through whenever the admin has time to approve it. Our colleagues are remote and we work globally, so time differences are going to happen. What it is about is the folks within the continental US time zones sending direct non-urgent emails in the middle of slumber time and the way our movement overworks.

Here’s the thing, I understand why people work so late—there are so many meetings and people asking for your time during the day, plus childcare duties, errands, and other pulls on our time that it is easier to do work during the dead of night when no one is asking you for anything. I get it because I have liked working during the late night shift. It can be calming. Some people just work better at night. It works better for a person’s neurodiversity. But sending emails and texts late at night causes notifications on the phones, computers, and tablets of people who are trying to set boundaries around their work hours. Not everyone is able to have a separate work phone or completely turn off email notifications on their device. But there are things that we all can do to meet everyone’s needs.

Use a Schedule Send Feature

Most email programs have a schedule send feature that allows you to choose a time to send an email later in the day or at a different date or time altogether. These features are pretty standard now (even Slack has it!), but in the event that your email program doesn’t have it, there are programs that have this feature as a downloadable add-on like Boomerang. Using this allows you to keep your workflow and sends the email at a time when it works for most schedules. Here’s how in Outlook, Gmail, Mac Mail, Boomerang for Outlook, Gmail, and Mixmax.

Utilize Your Drafts Folder

The old-school way of sending emails later is by writing the emails and putting them in the drafts folder and hitting send during typical working hours. This is a method I have used before the schedule send feature was available and it helped me deal with the issue via email so that it’s off my mind, but does not impact others. This has helped immensely when I’ve had to reply to stressful emails or other challenging requests. I didn’t want my mind to fester, but I wanted to get my thoughts down. Saving it in the drafts also allows you to reread what you want to say before you hit send. The key, of course, is remembering to hit ‘send’ when it’s time.

Analyze Why You’re Working Late at Night

The real question is figuring out why you’re working so late. For some people it works well with their neurodivergence or insomnia. For others, it works better with their childcare schedules. But for a lot of people it’s because there’s just so much work, so many meetings, so many things to do and so few hours. Take a look at what it is that you’re doing late at night and what the root cause is. Have a conversation with your supervisor about your workload and schedule to see if you can adjust. Perhaps it’s a solid day per week with no meetings. Maybe it’s only meetings in the morning so that you can use the afternoon to focus. The Management Center suggests work blocks or “time blocking” to have a specific set of time to focus on particular projects or tasks. The time is set aside and that’s the only thing you’re working on so you can get it done. 

Talk About Boundaries at Work

Bring the issue up at staff meetings and with colleagues. If you’re struggling to find enough hours during the day to finish up your projects, it’s possible that other staff are experiencing the same. This indicates that it’s a workplace issue and some new policies and norms need to be set. Your management team should be supporting you in not only getting your work done but also having a manageable load and doing it during the hours you’re actually paid to do it.

Set Boundaries for Your Team

If you’re the lead of an organization or on a team, the boundaries are set by you. If your employees and colleagues see you working late and receive emails from you, they’ll feel the pressure to respond and that it’s an expectation they should be working overnight too. It’s not a good precedent to set and leads to burnout. Take a look at your own habits first and think through tactics to change them. Talk about it openly with your staff so they know it’s something you’re actively working on and they can work on it too. Modeling changing behavior is vulnerable, but it also ensures that your staff can help you through your process and gives them the space to try to change their behavior as well.

What’s Important and Urgent Varies

One of the late-night emails I’ve recently received was a clarification of sorts about something that happened weeks ago. To be honest, I’d put it out of my mind once it was resolved. But it clearly sat on the mind of the email sender weeks later, late at night on a weekend. What might feel urgent or important to you may not be urgent or important to someone else. Or, perhaps, they’ve put it out of their mind and aren’t interested in thinking about it late at night. It’s normal to think that the things on our plate are urgent and important—you’re trying to move work forward, it’s front of mind for you, and it is important to you. But people have lots of competing priorities and urgency and importance vary. And of course, something can be important, but not urgent.
Thinking through the urgency and importance of an item for you versus what it is for someone else will help you think about whether that email needs to be sent in the middle of the night or if it can wait. Usually, if something needs to be sent in the middle of the night, like there’s an emergency at the clinic, a phone call or text is probably warranted anyway. Again, if you want to get what you want to say off of your chest, it’s fine to write the email and schedule it to be sent first thing in the morning. It really helps, I promise.