I don’t like unread emails. They upset me. So too do voicemails, texts, Facebook messages, WhatsApp group chats, push notifications, letters, faxes and affidavits. Any correspondence I receive has to be opened, irrespective of time, place, circumstance or impact.

This has always been the case. Back in my PR agency days, I was the only member of my office allowed to forgo the popular ‘getting your inbox to zero’ training session. As I pointed out to the trainer, my inbox had never been above zero, and her time might be better spent elsewhere.

So I’m watching the ‘right to disconnect’ movement with interest, because if I get an out-of-hours message from my boss, or a client, or anyone, frankly, I am incapable of leaving it unopened. The only way to avoid pulling me out of my evening is to avoid sending me the message in the first place. A ban on all work correspondence after 6.00pm – sure, I could go along with that.

Or could I?

The challenge is that most desk-based professionals – especially self-aggrandising freelance types such as myself – are hypocrites. We don’t like receiving mid-evening or weekend messages, but we don’t have any problem sending them when there’s something weighing upon our own minds and tasklists. I usually start my Sunday afternoon emails with ‘Sorry for emailing at the weekend – please don’t reply until tomorrow’. But if the person I’m emailing is anything like me, it’s the receiving, not the replying, that’s the issue.

And even if the right to disconnect was carried into law, it wouldn’t address the relentless flow of personal correspondence from friends, family and peers who have become accustomed to an instant response. It wouldn’t stamp out the torrent of crap and irrelevant marketing correspondence that we receive at all hours of the day from companies we can’t even recall signing up to. GDPR my arse!

Rather than blaming other people for communicating with us at inopportune moments, the best thing would surely be to shut off our electronic devices as soon as work finishes and lock them away for the night. Except that a worrying number of us now rely on our mobile phones to tell us what the time is, to remind us when we’re supposed to go to bed and to wake us up in the morning.

We have created a culture in which devices are switched on even when their owners are switched off; in which our inboxes are always open for correspondence even when, mentally, the last thing we need is another incoming distraction. On several occasions I have tried to forge a new social contract (or rather, an ‘anti-social contract’) with my loved ones, encouraging them to refrain from contact at certain times or via certain channels. Each attempt has failed, because every other facet of the culture is pushing people in the opposite direction.

It doesn’t matter whether we were led here by smartphone addiction or social media behavioural manipulation, by the poor communications etiquette of our superiors or by a sense of obligation to keep up digital appearances with needy relations. The fact remains – we have arrived at this disturbing destination and we have locked ourselves in. What we really need is a right to disconnect from our fixed and mobile telephony infrastructure, or better still, from the national grid.

Now I sound like a crank. When all I really want is to be left alone.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash