Take Email Off Your Phone
Take Email Off Your Phone
I want to share something that will make a few people want to argue with me before I have even finished the sentence, and that is fine, because I used to be one of those people. So before the objections start, I am going to ask you to put them down for a moment and hear the whole thing, and then decide what you make of it.
A meeting in 2016
Let me take you back to 2016, to a moment I did not recognise as pivotal at the time but absolutely was. I was in a leadership role, and every single day I took my laptop home, checked my emails before bed and again first thing in the morning, not because the work demanded it but because I had absorbed the idea that a good, committed person stays reachable, just in case. Around that year I started to notice that I was not okay, and when I went to my GP and described what my days and nights actually looked like, one of the things he suggested, which felt radical in 2016, was that I stop taking my laptop home and simply leave it at work. I remember asking him whether that was even an option for someone with a job, and he asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since, which was whether I ever really received an email at night that could not wait until the morning, and the honest answer was no.
So I tried it. I made sure I checked my inbox the moment I walked into the office and again as the last thing I did before I left, even on the days our meetings ran until after five, and then I left my laptop on my desk and went home to my life. And then one morning I arrived just before eight, having left at twenty past five the evening before, and a leader came looking for me, alarmed that I had not read a particular email, and I explained that I had gone home the night before and did not take my laptop with me, that of course anyone could reach me by phone in a real emergency, but that an email sent after hours was simply not something I would see until I was back at my desk. Later that same day, in a meeting about that not-very-urgent email, a comment was made about my professionalism and my commitment to the role, as though the two could be measured by how quickly I answered messages from my bed.
What actually happened
Here is the part that matters most, and it is almost boring in how undramatic it is, because nothing happened. In all the years I stayed in the working world after that, across that job and the ones that followed, no one ever called me with an emergency that could not wait, because the real emergencies of working life are rare, and when they do come they arrive as a phone call, not as an email you were meant to catch at eleven at night. The boundary that had been treated as a risk turned out to cost the organisation nothing at all, and it gave me back my evenings, my sleep and a great deal of my peace.
The change I would love to see
So when people ask me what a workplace could actually do that would make a real difference to how people feel, my answer has become almost embarrassingly simple, and it is this: stop endorsing email on personal phones. I can hear the reaction from here, because I had it too, that small wave of panic at the thought of not being able to glance at the inbox while you wait in the supermarket line, or stir the dinner, or sit in the car at your child's Saturday sport. But imagine a workplace that said, plainly, that it does not expect or want email living on your phone, that instead you check it at sensible points in the day, first thing to catch anything that shapes your morning and last thing before you leave, and that anything truly urgent is flagged as such so that everything else can sit comfortably inside a forty-eight hour window.
Some of the organisations and schools I work with could adopt something like this next week, and others would need to build clearer ways of working first, because what this really asks of us is to stop being quite so reactive, to stop treating every message as though it demands an answer this very minute. We now have right to disconnect laws here in Australia that protect people who choose not to monitor and answer unreasonable contact outside their hours, which is a meaningful shift, but a law can only hold a line that the culture is willing to hold alongside it, and culture is built in the small, ordinary decisions we make about where we let work reach us.
We made this, so we can unmake it
If any of this still sounds impossible, I would gently remind you that there was a time when email did not exist and work still got done and people were fine, and then a time when email existed but lived only on a desktop, and people were fine then too. We built this always-on expectation between us, slowly and mostly without deciding to, which means it is entirely within our power to build something different in its place.
So the question I would leave you sitting with is this: what would it really cost you, or your team, to take email off the phone — and what might it give back? I am closer than I have ever been to deleting the app for good, and I have a feeling I already know the answer.
The Wellness Paradox — available now
The Wellness Paradox explores the six paradoxes that keep us trapped in a version of success that was never designed to make us well. It's not a checklist, and it's not another self-care plan. It's an honest look at the systems we've inherited, and an invitation to start living differently.
It's for anyone who is tired of being told to do more.
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About Amy Green
Amy Green is a futurist, keynote speaker, and author of The Wellness Paradox. She is the founder of The Wellness Strategy and has spent years studying the intersection of how we work, how we live, and the systems that shape both. Her work reaches educators, executives, and leaders who are ready to think differently about what success really means.
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