I’ve been drowning in emails that ping my phone at all hours—stakeholder updates, random ‘urgent’ requests, you know the drill. Tried setting up some basic filters, but it’s like playing whack-a-mole. Recently experimented with triaging tools to auto-sort and delay non-critical stuff until morning. It’s helping, but I keep worrying I’ll miss something important. How do y’all balance responsiveness with actually unplugging? Any pro tips for setting guardrails without ticking people off?
lol ‘guardrails’… you new here? in the real world, stakeholders want your soul on a plate 24/7. set boundaries and they’ll just route around them. my ‘triage’ is deleting anything sent after 8pm. if it’s truly urgent, they’ll call. spoiler: they never do.
omg same!! I just set up triage rules last week and already slept better. pro tip: flag anything from execs as ‘urgent’ and auto-snooze other labels until 7am. still messing with settings tho—how do u handle cross-tz teams??
This requires both tooling and culture work. Start by aligning with leadership on SLA expectations—document what constitutes a true emergency. Configure your triage tool to escalate only those to your mobile, and share the policy publicly. I’ve found teams respect clarity. If someone abuses it, let their manager know politely but firmly. Protect your deep work hours ruthlessly.
You’re doing great!! 
Batch-check emails 3x/day max—trust the filters! People adapt faster than you think.
last year my partner threatened to hide my phone after I checked emails during a birthday dinner. Now everything non-API-related gets delayed til 8am. Took a month for stakeholders to stop complaining, but guess what? The sky didn’t fall. Still get the occasional midnight ‘ASAP’ though… classic.
Studies show context-switching to emails costs 23 minutes per interruption. My triage rules route non-critical threads to a digest view at 9am/2pm/5pm. Only VIPs and production incidents hit my inbox directly. Result: 72% drop in after-hours logins last quarter. Use hard metrics to justify your approach to leadership.