Why Am I So Tired?: How Work Email Makes Us Feel Overworked

Like most of us, I have been exhausted for the past few years. My workload went back to normal after the first crazy years of the pandemic, but that didn’t seem to matter. So what was going on? I finally figured out that part of the problem was that my work email was polluting my evenings and weekends.

I didn’t think that answering a few emails during my time off would have such a big impact. After all, I have always been grading and preparing classes on weekends. Most faculty seem to be doing that, and it’s nothing new. I remember my father doing the same when I was a kid. And I’m used to checking my email once or twice over the weekend too.

But then, a few years ago, I was working on a time-sensitive project with a group of colleagues. And they weren’t just checking email once or twice on weekends and evenings. They responded right away, even late at night. And they weren’t just emailing but also texting. I felt guilty for holding things up, so I started checking my email throughout the weekend, and I shared my cell phone number so that they could text me too.

I didn’t like getting texts asking me to do work during my time off, but the tradeoff seemed worth it. We were in a time crunch, and if people could get information from me right away, our project could move forward quickly.

The project ended but the habit stuck. I vaguely noticed that I was feeling increasingly tired and that I found it harder not to think about work. But I blamed the pandemic. After all, answering a few messages isn’t a big deal. Is it?

Turns out, it can be. Recent research by Becker, Belkin, and Tuskey and Belkin, Becker, and Conroy explains what was happening to me:

My constant accessibility was messing with how I experienced my weekends. Monitoring email and texts was different from my old weekend work because it lacked boundaries. I could never ‘finish’ monitoring in the way I could finish grading a pile of papers. Instead, I spent my entire weekends switching between work and leisure mode, always ready to respond to incoming messages. Switching attention is difficult; our attention keeps lingering on the previous task (what Sophie Leroy calls “attention residue”). Every time I checked my work email, my attention stayed on work matters for a while, especially when a message brought up something emotionally charged or stressful. Of course, I was also anticipating what other messages might be coming in, so I was constantly activating work-related emotions even when I wasn’t getting any new messages.

All this meant that I wasn’t detaching from work. On Sunday evenings, I felt like I had been working the whole weekend even if I had only answered a few messages. Because I wasn’t relaxing, I was already tired at the beginning of each work week. And—adding insult to injury—because I hadn’t actually been working, I hadn’t gotten any work done. I was getting all the costs of working weekends and none of the benefits.

That seems dumb.

So how do I fix it? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about individual hacks, like turning off email notifications. But as Becker, Belkin, and others note, an individual approach won’t be enough. We need to address this problem on an organizational level. In particular, they argue that we need to:

• Manage norms around email communication after work, establish formal policies and rules, and avoid ambiguous flexible policies which can make the problem worse.
• People with power need to avoid sending conflicting signals. If they send messages on weekends, they reinforce a norm of constant availability regardless of the formal policies they endorse.

I fully agree. But don’t let me and other faculty off the hook by assuming that this means that it’s up to college administrators to fix this problem. They play a key role of course. But we faculty members aren’t just victims but also co-creators of this work culture. I got texts asking about work on the weekend, but I was sending them too. And the messages I get outside work hours are almost always from students or other faculty, not from administrators.

Those of us who are co-creators (even in small ways) of our on-call culture should be able to do something to help. So what can we do?

• Recognize the cost of constant accessibility and factor that into our own decisions about when and if we send weekend messages.
• Clarify expectations about availability and urgency and have honest conversations about them when possible. Research by Giurge and Bohns suggests that people overestimate how available others expect us to be and how urgent individual email messages really are (texts even more so, I suspect). Let’s not be on call unless it really is necessary (and it rarely is).
• When possible, model behavior that will protect our own health and that of others.

I have tenure and I’m a full professor, which means that I have enough power to make some changes. Here’s what I’m doing:

• I’ve gone back to checking emails no more than once or twice over the weekend, and I’m explaining why to my students. So far, they have been understanding—they too are feeling the need for boundaries and self-care. It turns out that their emails weren’t as urgent as I thought.
• I’ve started to object when colleagues ask me to deal with work on weekends. Reactions are mixed. Some are understanding; others are annoyed. So far though, everybody has made at least token gestures towards respecting my work/life boundaries. And hopefully, I’m making it a little easier for the next person who raises the issue.
• The next time I’m in charge of a group of faculty members, I won’t contact them about the project outside of work hours. I’ll explain why in our first meetings, and I’ll try to persuade them to do the same.

Some people do need to be on call. Actual fires and medical emergencies can’t wait until tomorrow. But firefighters and doctors aren’t on call every weekend; they take turns. And since philosophy faculty aren’t dealing with actual fires, we may not need to be on call at all. Most of our urgent issues can wait until Monday morning. Let’s take advantage of that luxury and get some real rest.

Anna Lännström

Anna Lännström is professor of philosophy at Stonehill College where she teaches philosophy of religion, Asian philosophies, and ethics, as well as courses which integrate yoga, mindfulness, and Indian philosophy.  She’s the author of Loving the Fine, a book on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as well as several articles on the religion of Socrates.  More recently, her research interests have shifted towards the scholarship of teaching and learning: How can we broaden philosophy to include insights from other traditions and disciplines, and how will doing so change our understanding of ourselves and the world?  She also writes popular philosophy, asking how we can better integrate theory and practice, using philosophy to live better lives.  Why are we all increasingly stressed, distracted, lonely, and angry? Can techniques like yoga and meditation from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions help us live better lives, and if they can, how do we address the ethical challenges involved in borrowing such techniques?  She blogs for The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Medium and Thrive Global