What it costs the people at home

The four-minute reply is quiet. You're still on the sofa. The programme's still on. Nobody at home is being asked to do anything. It feels like a private habit with private costs.

Becker's second study, from chapter 8, is the reason it isn't. In 138 pairs of employees and their partners, the expectation of monitoring email out of hours didn't only make the employee anxious. It crossed over. Partners of people under that expectation reported worse health and lower satisfaction with the relationship. The partner wasn't receiving any messages. They were living with someone who was, and the living with was enough.

Look at what the partner sees. A person who's here and not here. A conversation that pauses for the phone and resumes a beat late. A face that changes when the screen lights up, in a way the earlier book Look up described for the phone at the table, and the description holds for the sofa. A Sunday afternoon where "no rush" turned into twenty minutes of comments while the other person waited to go out. None of it is a row. All of it is a message, and the message is that the inbox has a place in the evening that the partner doesn't.

Butts and colleagues' study of anger found the same thing from the other direction. The messages that made people angry were the ones that pushed into non-work time, and the anger was what predicted conflict between work and home. The reply is sent to make the message go away. What's left in the room is the mood the message made, and the mood is what the family gets. The earlier book Leave it at work is about the job in your head at home. The reply is the job in your hand, and it's the more visible of the two.

Children get a version of this too, and it's worse for being wordless. A child who's talking about their day to a parent whose phone just buzzed learns something about what competes with them, and how it does, and I'd rather not write the lesson out.

The fair objection is that your partner might do it too, and the house has two phones lighting two ceilings. Chapter 22 takes that. It doesn't change the cost. It doubles it.

The practical point is that the four-minute reply has an audience, and the audience isn't the sender. It's the person on the other end of the sofa, who learns from it exactly what Priya learns, which is where you are at nine.