The recent research on the “best” time to send an email – it’s Sunday 3pm to 6pm if you are a monster who doesn’t care about anything except getting your message read – has just highlighted for me how awful email is all the time.
As a new French citizen, perhaps I should insist on my legal right to disconnect out of hours. Ideally, I’d like no work-related emails before 10am, between midday and 2pm, after 6pm, at weekends, on bank holidays and between 14 July and 1 September. That doesn’t happen in even the most enlightened workplaces, but nothing makes me feel more patriotic than emailing a French company in summer, getting an out-of-office that sends me to someone else, that person also being en vacances and suggesting a third, whose out-of-office directs me back to the first person.
