What it costs you

The cost you've been counting is minutes, and chapter 8 argued the minutes are the wrong unit. This chapter is about the right ones.

The first is the state Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi call workplace telepressure, a preoccupation with messages and an urge to answer them quickly. They built a scale to measure it and found that people who scored high on it reported more burnout, both physical and mental, more days off sick, worse sleep, and more email answering, and that this held after accounting for how involved people were in their jobs and how demanding the technology was. Telepressure isn't the same as being busy. It's a particular relationship with the inbox, and it's the one the four-minute reply builds. In a later pair of surveys with 254 and then 409 employees, Barber and colleagues found that telepressure went with lower satisfaction with the balance between work and life, and that a large part of the link ran through people's inability to detach from work and their loss of control over their own free time.

The second cost is sleep. The phone that lights the ceiling at eleven is a work event happening in bed. The NHS lists sleeping too much or too little, constant worrying and being irritable among the signs of stress, and says to see a GP if you're struggling to cope. Evening messages aren't the only reason for bad sleep, but they're one you can remove by yourself. The earlier books Nothing gets solved at three in the morning and The work will still be there both take the hour before bed seriously, and the work email is one of the things they'd keep out of it.

The third is anger, which surprised me. Marcus Butts, William Becker and Wendy Boswell had 341 working adults report on work messages received in their own time over a week. Messages with a negative tone made people angry, which you'd expect. But so did messages that simply required time, regardless of tone. A perfectly polite request that needed twenty minutes on a Sunday produced anger, and the anger was what carried through to conflict between work and home. The four-minute reply is sent to keep the peace, and the message it answers has already cost some.

The fourth is the wonder itself, which chapter 11 argued grows with feeding. An evening with a watched inbox is an evening with part of you posted at the door. That's not a cost that shows in any single evening. It shows in the fact that you can't remember the last one you had entirely to yourself.

I'd add one honest limit. All of these are associations from surveys, and people who feel telepressure may differ from people who don't in ways the surveys can't see. But the direction is consistent across every study I've found, and none found the fast reply doing anyone any good.