One Friday afternoon 10 years ago, Andrew Heaton, then a cable-news writer, joined his colleagues for a meeting. The show’s producer asked the staff to keep an eye on their email over the weekend in case they needed to cover a breaking news event. No one seemed to mind—working full days in person while remaining on call in the evening and on weekends has always been a standard practice in the news business—but Heaton had a simple request.
He said he would be happy to go in but asked if his boss could call him on the phone instead of emailing him. He didn’t want to spend his time off continually monitoring his inbox for a message that might not even come.
“It would have been just me, tethered to my phone all weekend, checking email for no purpose,” Heaton, who now hosts a political podcast, told me. “I think it’s a very valid request that you just call me so I don’t have to dedicate 10 percent of my brain to this job forever.”
His boss agreed. The big news never materialized.
Heaton was onto something. In the United States, employees work more hours than those in many other rich nations. As more white-collar employers require their staff to be in the office full-time again, workers have the right to demand something in exchange: a return to the norms of the 1990s, before smartphones made everyone instantly reachable. (Bosses, of course, have the right to say no to all this.)
I’m aware that offices in that era were not perfect—satires such as Office Space and Fight Club brilliantly mined the hopelessness of cubicle life then. But at least Lumbergh couldn’t ask about your TPS reports while you were in your home bathroom. Smartphones have created a culture in which Americans are constantly at work in one form or another, even when they’re at home. And it is stressing people out. A 2016 study found that the mere expectation of unread email can cause stress and emotional exhaustion. The presumption that workers should respond to email at any time, the study’s authors concluded, “contributes to experience of work overload” because it inhibits employees’ “ability to psychologically detach from work-related issues.”
For most of my career, I measured an embarrassing level of self-worth through my job. I spent years as a political correspondent obsessing over work at all hours, even in the middle of the night, when I routinely answered emails and made story edits in the dark between bouts of sleep. Jonathan Malesic, the author of The End of Burnout, told me that work defines many people. “We just can’t imagine that a person is worth something if we aren’t working,” Malesic said. “You’re anxious about your worth. And the only way you know how to prove it is you’re working all the time. As soon as you’re not, your value is in question.”
I have recently gone to great lengths to draw a line between home and work. Two years ago, my family and I disconnected the internet from our house. I recently traded my smartphone for a flip phone. As much as possible, my work as a writer and university instructor is completed at the workplace, and my attention is on my family while I’m at home, a balance I was never able to achieve before we disconnected. I still bring some work home with me—papers to grade, books to review, articles to write—but I’m not constantly checking whether someone is trying to contact me. My employer knows my landline number and can call if needed.
Though the always-on work culture has existed in many companies and industries since the advent of BlackBerries and iPhones, the expectation to be reachable at all times was solidified during the coronavirus pandemic, when millions of Americans worked from their couches, relying on communication apps such as Zoom, Slack, and email. The pandemic era also made the workday looser, which allowed people to complete tasks while attending to home or family needs but meant that working hours could begin early in the day or extend late into the night.
For millions of people, those days of flexible work are ending. Many corporations and organizations, including the nation’s largest employer, the federal government, are winding down or ending remote work. McKinsey & Company reported that in 2024, the number of people working at least four days a week from an office had doubled to 68 percent, from 34 percent a year earlier. Disney, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase have called employees back to their desks over the past few years. As in-person attendance again becomes the norm, workers risk having the worst of both worlds: the requirement that they give their days fully to the office and remain available to their bosses from home on nights and weekends.
You might not be able to go completely MIA after the daily 9 to 5. But you can insist that anyone who wants to reach you after-hours make a telephone call. Let your supervisor ring you at 7:45 p.m. and hear your frazzled tone as you balance your phone on your shoulder while trying to give your unruly kids a bath. Let your boss hear the clanking of silverware on dishes when he interrupts dinner with your roommates. Employers should stop pretending that doing business at all hours isn’t an imposition on employees, even if it is sometimes a necessary one. Let the person delivering the message bear some of the cost, too.
Before smartphones, leaving the office at the end of the day and enjoying your life without the fear of interruption wasn’t radical; it was typical. And setting boundaries against after-hours intrusions has precedent today as well. In 2016, the French government adopted a “right to disconnect” law that allows workers the freedom to not respond to messages from employers outside of established working hours. Ireland, Belgium, Australia, and other nations have instituted similar restrictions. Last year, state legislators in California and New Jersey proposed their own bills.
But the U.S. federal government is unlikely to pass this sort of legislation, and many American workers may struggle to set clear boundaries on their own. Sarah Jaffe, the author of Work Won’t Love You Back, told me she was skeptical about whether our nation’s workers would ever feel comfortable enough to stand up for themselves like this. “Most employers are not going to go for it,” Jaffe said. “They like to be able to call you at any point in time to lengthen your workday indefinitely.”
As much as many Americans complain about their relationship to work, Malesic told me, we don’t do much about it when it comes to the types of leaders we elect or the labor protections we demand. “If Americans were really as upset about our working lives as we claim, I think our politics would look a lot different,” he said. “People complain about their job invading their life all the time,” but many, for instance, “show very little interest in electing pro-union politicians.”
I know that protecting evenings and weekends can be easier said than done. And doing so might be near impossible for people whose work requires them to be instantly reachable, such as first responders or others in the business of saving lives. But other workers, when they’re done for the day, should be able to power down those Slack and email notifications. When they cross the threshold of their office doors, they should feel free to exit mentally as well as physically. If companies want employees to work like it’s the ’90s, then they should work like it’s the ’90s.
The post Why You Should Work Like It’s the ’90s appeared first on The Atlantic.
