I Answered Work Emails on Every Continent. Nobody Asked.
Why you can’t switch off on vacation, and what helps
Nobody has ever asked me to work on holiday as much as I have asked myself to.
I’ve answered emails from poolsides and beaches, taken calls on trips, and worked 8 solid hours on long-haul flights on my way to actual holidays.
A few years ago I parked by Hutt Lagoon in Western Australia, the most amazing bubble-pink lake I have ever seen.
I honestly looked at it for about 15 seconds.
And then I called my colleagues.
A client back in Singapore was unhappy about something (I can’t even remember what now). My team was already handling it, everyone was completely fine without me.
Literally nobody had asked me to call.
But I just needed to know what was happening, to check, to make sure, to feel like I was still there. Maybe to feel like I was important?
Honestly most of my holidays have looked like some version of this and it might be a version of yours too this summer.
Which is why I got very interested when I came across a study about what being available for work actually does to our ability to recover.
In 2022, psychologists Thörel, Pauls and Göritz pulled together 121 studies on being available for work outside normal working hours.
Staying reachable was associated with worse recovery, worse wellbeing and worse private life, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who had to ditch their partner in an exotic location for a Zoom call with the mothership.
And look, staying reachable does help some things at work, which is why people do it.
From my experience it gets you brownie points and it makes the post-vacation work catch-up less painful when you get back home.
But this is the interesting bit: they found no systematic difference between the effects associated with being expected to be available and actually being available.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever be reachable, and some jobs genuinely require someone to be on call.
Maybe you’re the emergency contact, or there’s something super important happening while you’re away, or you work for yourself so disappearing for 3 weeks just isn’t realistic.
But there is a difference between that and everyone vaguely assuming you might be available, all the time.
The awkward part for me is that a lot of this research looks at expectations coming from employers, but mine mostly aren’t.
For the past couple of years I’ve split my working life between a company in Singapore with genuinely good leadership and work-life balance, and Unwritten, where I get to be my own boss.
And turns out I’m a really shitty boss to myself.
I’ll be the first person telling colleagues to log off, enjoy their holiday and deal with something when they get back.
Apparently those excellent working conditions do not extend to my own self.
And I think I learned a particular version of what being “good at work” looked like over the years.
I moved to Singapore at 23 years old and have spent most of my working life there.
It’s a fast-paced, competitive environment, and we never really thought of ourselves as fancy expats floating around Asia. We were immigrants.
And if any of you have ever worked in a different country, you know the drill: you worked hard, tried to keep your job, maintained your visa status and made yourself useful.
But somewhere along the way, “useful” became “reachable 24/7”.
Turns out being reachable 24/7 has a bill attached, and mine arrived in 2022 as a spectacular burnout.
Which is why France’s famous “right to disconnect” laws have always sounded VERY French to me.
Despite growing up in the Alps, I’ve never really worked there. Growing up, August basically meant the country was closed and everyone was on congés payés.
I assumed this law meant bosses couldn’t email employees after hours but unfortunately, it’s way less dramatic than that.
The whole point of the law is to get companies to define what ‘disconnecting’ means, and things like when employees can be expected to be reachable and when they’re not.
And that’s something I hadn’t really thought about for myself.
A couple of weeks ago I had to set an out-of-office because I was going to be completely offline in the Andes for 5 days of hiking on the Inca Trail.
Mine said, verbatim:
I am currently overseas with no internet access until the 6th of August. I will respond to your email when I return.
Notice how I didn’t say “responses will be delayed” or “I will respond as soon as possible”.
Like, no. I will respond when I come back online in a few days.
Obviously I’d given my colleagues in Singapore the heads-up. Plus the boundary was easy to maintain because I genuinely had no internet access on the hiking trail (It’d be a lot harder to do exactly the same thing with perfect WiFi...)
So before your next holiday, set some healthy availability boundaries with one of your colleagues.
It could be something like:
“Hey, I won’t check email while I’m away but text me if something urgent comes up”, or “Let’s do 1 check-in while I’m away, otherwise I’m offline”.
Obviously you may need to adapt these based on your job, just remember that “I’ll try not to work” ends up keeping your mind focused on the inbox.
Or like me, you can head somewhere with no 5G or WiFi for a week so you can realise by the end of it that you’re not indispensable after all.
And that’s a really good thing.
The Unwritten Check-In
This week’s bare minimum: Before your next vacation, agree on 1 availability rule with a colleague. Let them know when you’ll reply, what qualifies as genuinely urgent, and how to contact you if it is.
Ask yourself: Do people really expect me to be available, or have I made myself too available?
With love,
Noemie x
P.S. I am SO curious, what’s the most ridiculous place you have answered a work email from?
Key Sources
Eberhard Thörel, Nina Pauls and Anja S. Göritz, ‘The Association of Work-Related Extended Availability with Recuperation, Well-Being, Life Domain Balance and Work: A Meta-Analysis’ (2022) 12(4) Organizational Psychology Review 387 <https://doi.org/10.1177/20413866221116309>.
France, Code du travail, art L2242-17 (in force 1 January 2017).
Law Library of Congress, ‘Telework and the French “Right to Disconnect”’ (In Custodia Legis, 2020) <https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/08/telework-and-the-french-right-to-disconnect/>.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.