Notes

These notes give the sources behind the claims in each chapter, and say where I'm giving my own interpretation. The book isn't legal or medical advice. If your employer's demands are unreasonable, ACAS gives free advice. If the phone comes with dread rather than habit, your GP is the person to ask. The examples throughout, Priya and the slide deck, the Sunday "no rush", the manager who writes at ten, the client and the family chat, are invented to illustrate and aren't drawn from real people.

Studies were checked on 26 September 2026. Giurge and Bohns 2021 was read in full from an open repository copy. The rest were read as published abstracts. None carried a retraction or correction notice at that date. Where a study is a survey taken at one time, it describes an association and can't show what causes what, and I've tried to say so each time.

Chapter 1. No sources. The terms are the book's own.

Chapter 3. Giurge and Bohns, "You don't need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 167, 2021, pages 114 to 128. Eight pre-registered studies with 4,004 participants in total. The first was among public sector employees in Spain and the rest used online samples. The claim about what reliability is for is mine.

Chapter 4. Belkin, Becker and Conroy, "The invisible leash: the impact of organizational expectations for email monitoring after-hours on employee resources, well-being, and turnover intentions", Group and Organization Management 45, 2020, pages 709 to 740. 570 working adults, surveyed at separate times. The earlier book referred to is The work will still be there. The claim that a reply invites a reply is my observation.

Chapter 5. Giurge and Bohns, as above. Their study 5 found the bias larger outside working hours. Their study 3 found that marking an email urgent or not didn't remove the bias.

Chapter 6. Mazmanian, Orlikowski and Yates, "The autonomy paradox: the implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals", Organization Science 24, 2013, pages 1337 to 1357. A qualitative study, which describes what the professionals did and said and can't say how common it is. The claim that the fast reply signals availability rather than competence is mine.

Chapter 7. Derks, van Duin, Tims and Bakker, "Smartphone use and work-home interference: the moderating role of social norms and employee work engagement", Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 88, 2015, pages 155 to 177. 100 employees over four working days. The distinction between sending and expecting is mine.

Chapter 8. Becker, Belkin, Conroy and Tuskey, "Killing me softly: organizational e-mail monitoring expectations' impact on employee and significant other well-being", Journal of Management 47, 2021, pages 1024 to 1052. Three studies, 108 adults by experience sampling, 138 employee and partner pairs, and 162 adults surveyed twice. Cambier, Van Laethem and Vlerick, "Private life telepressure and workplace cognitive failure among hospital nurses: the moderating role of mobile phone presence", Journal of Advanced Nursing 76, 2020. 849 nurses, cross-sectional. The extension from the ward to the sofa is mine.

Chapter 9. Giurge and Bohns, as above, for the observation that speed is used as a proxy for effort. The claims about what's remembered at review time are mine.

Chapter 10. Mazmanian and colleagues, as above. The distinction between flexibility in blocks and availability as a tap is mine.

Chapter 11. Pielot and Rello, "Productive, anxious, lonely: 24 hours without push notifications", MobileHCI 2017. 30 volunteers. Fitz, Kushlev, Jagannathan, Lewis, Paliwal and Ariely, "Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being", Computers in Human Behavior 101, 2019, pages 84 to 94. 237 participants in a randomised field experiment using the authors' own app. One of the authors, Dan Ariely, has had questions raised about data in unrelated work. This paper isn't affected by any notice and I've used it only for its main comparison. The earlier book referred to is The phone can wait. The claim that checking feeds the wonder is my interpretation.

Chapter 12. No research sources. The argument about the nod is mine.

Chapter 13. Giurge and Bohns and Mazmanian and colleagues, as above. No study I found tested whether faster replies cause more out-of-hours messages, and the teaching mechanism is my reading of how expectations form. The earlier book referred to is The work will still be there.

Chapter 14. Barber and Santuzzi, "Please respond ASAP: workplace telepressure and employee recovery", Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 20, 2015, pages 172 to 189. Two scale-development studies. Barber, Conlin and Santuzzi, "Workplace telepressure and work-life balance outcomes: the role of work recovery experiences", Stress and Health 35, 2019. Two online surveys of 254 and 409 employees. Butts, Becker and Boswell, "Hot buttons and time sinks: the effects of electronic communication during nonwork time on emotions and work-nonwork conflict", Academy of Management Journal 58, 2015, pages 763 to 788. 341 working adults over seven days. The NHS page on stress at nhs.uk, read on 26 September 2026. The earlier books referred to are Nothing gets solved at three in the morning and The work will still be there.

Chapter 15. Becker and colleagues and Butts and colleagues, as above. The earlier books referred to are Look up and Leave it at work. The remark about children is mine.

Chapter 16. Ohly and Latour, "Work-related smartphone use and well-being in the evening: the role of autonomous and controlled motivation", Journal of Personnel Psychology 13, 2014, pages 174 to 183. 1,714 working people, cross-sectional. Mark, Voida and Cardello, "A pace not dictated by electrons: an empirical study of work without email", CHI 2012, pages 555 to 564. 13 workers in one organisation for five days. The description of the ten o'clock reply is mine.

Chapter 17. No research sources. The window is my suggestion.

Chapter 18. Giurge and Bohns, as above, study 6, where the note read "This is not an urgent matter so you can get to it whenever you can." The earlier book referred to is You could have said no. The wording of the line is mine.

Chapter 19. Fitz and colleagues, as above. Derks and Bakker, "Smartphone use, work-home interference, and burnout: a diary study on the role of recovery", Applied Psychology 63, 2014, pages 411 to 440. 69 employees over five days. No phone setting or product is named because they change.

Chapter 20. Pielot and Rello, as above, including their two-year follow-up. What to expect is my expectation.

Chapter 21. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, "Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006, pages 69 to 119, for the when-then form. Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, "How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world", European Journal of Social Psychology 40, 2010, pages 998 to 1009. 96 volunteers, 82 with usable data. The rule hasn't been tested as a package.

Chapter 22. Derks and colleagues 2015, as above. Cambier and colleagues, as above. ACAS pages on work-related stress and bullying at acas.org.uk, read on 26 September 2026. The earlier book referred to is Your turn to text. No claim is made about the law on out-of-hours contact in the UK or elsewhere, because I couldn't read a current official page stating it.

Chapter 23. Lally and colleagues, as above. The extension from a missed day to a missed evening is mine. The earlier book referred to is The work will still be there.

Looked up and not used. Kushlev and Dunn's 2015 study in Computers in Human Behavior, "Checking email less frequently reduces stress", is often cited for this subject, but no abstract was available to me from any source and it isn't cited. Dabbish and Kraut's 2006 study of email overload had no available abstract. Perlow and Porter's 2009 Harvard Business Review article on predictable time off describes a consulting firm's experiment and isn't a peer-reviewed study, so it isn't cited. Later telepressure papers by Semaan and colleagues are about measurement and aren't relevant.