"I'll just check my messages"

A look at the phone at half past seven isn't work. It's thirty seconds. It tells you nothing's on fire, and knowing that lets you relax, which is the whole point.

This book isn't mainly about the phone, and I'm going to keep to one chapter. The earlier book The work will still be there covered the evening email in more depth, and Look up covered the phone at the table. But the look belongs here, because it's the passenger's favourite way back in.

The look doesn't tell you nothing's on fire. It tells you what's in the inbox, and what's in the inbox is a set of open loops that were closed, as far as your head was concerned, at half past five. A message you can't answer until tomorrow is now a message you're not answering. A question you'd have dealt with in the morning is now a question you're holding. The thirty seconds are the thirty seconds it takes to reload the passenger.

Belkin and colleagues surveyed 570 working adults about evening email and found something that bears on this. What lowered detachment wasn't the time people spent on email after hours. It was the expectation that they'd be monitoring it. The feeling of being on call was what tired people out, through exhaustion, even when the actual minutes were small. The look is how you keep that expectation alive in yourself, quite apart from anyone else's. If the phone might have something, you're on call. If you check it to see, you've confirmed you're on call. Either way the evening has a thread running back to the office.

There's an honest objection, which is that some jobs need you reachable. That's chapter 24, and the answer there is to make the reachability specific, a phone that rings for one kind of thing, rather than an inbox that might contain anything. For the ordinary job, though, the look is a choice, and it's a choice to reopen what the last ten closed.

The practical line is short. The last ten, in chapter 18, ends with the inbox looked at once and closed. After that it's shut until the morning, and if someone genuinely needs you they have a number. That's all. The point of this chapter isn't a rule about phones. It's that the look isn't neutral. It's the one thing you can do at half past seven that's guaranteed to bring the passenger back, and it takes thirty seconds.