"Being reachable is the price of flexibility"

You get to leave at four for the school run. You get to work from home on Fridays. You get to take a long lunch when the sun's out. In return, you're reachable. That's the deal, and it's a fair one, and answering at nine is your side of it.

It's worth asking who you made the deal with. Nobody wrote it down. Your manager didn't say "you can leave at four if you answer at nine". You inferred the second half from the first, and you've been paying a bill nobody sent. Mazmanian and her colleagues, in the study from chapter 6, describe exactly this trade as the professionals they studied experienced it. Mobile email gave them flexibility and peace of mind in the short term, and in the longer term it raised everyone's expectations of everyone's availability, so that the flexibility to work anywhere became the obligation to work everywhere. They chose it as freedom and ended up with less.

Then look at which way the flexibility runs. Leaving at four is flexibility for you. Answering at nine is flexibility for the sender, who gets to ask a question whenever it occurs to them and have it answered. Those aren't the same kind of thing. The first is a fixed, bounded, occasional adjustment. The second is an open-ended availability. You've traded a known thing for an unknown one, and the unknown one is bigger.

The honest objection is that in some jobs it is the deal. If you've been told, in words, that flexible hours come with out-of-hours availability, then it's a term of the job and a different conversation, and chapter 22 touches it. For most people, the deal was never stated because it was never made.

There's a fairer version of the trade available. If you leave at four for the school run, you might work from eight to nine that evening, on purpose, with a start and a finish, and answer Priya then. That's an hour of work moved, and it's flexibility in the real sense. What it isn't is an evening spent reachable. The difference is whether you decided when, or the buzz did.

The practical implication is that flexibility is something you take in blocks, and availability is something you give in an open tap. Take the blocks. Turn the tap off. Nobody offered you the tap.