On the flip side, there are many of us who do their best work in the evenings. I find I get more done in a couple of hours after 5 (maybe 5-8) than I do in the rest of the day. I’d much rather start at 10 or 11am and finish late. Enjoy a sleep in, unrushed morning coffee, get stuck into work all woken up and motivated, get meetings out of the way and power through work from 3 or 4 until 7/8pm.

While working from home in the past I've experimented with a split work cycle, where I work from maybe 9am-1pm and 8pm-midnight. I'd do all my meetings and discussions in the morning, but my best programming work at night. It works pretty nicely and leaves the best part of the day open for getting outside. But it sometimes doesn't work with other people's schedules and you're forced to adjust your hours to take a midday meeting or when your dinner plans run long.

I have started thinking of a similar schedule to this for the coming school year. The majority of my co-workers are located in Germany, so I start at 0700 so that we have increased overlap. By 1100 they have all pretty much signed off and I can switch to working with my son on his school work (we are choosing to not send him to in-person classes). After dinner, I can work for the four hour balance.

I work remotely (and have done so since before Covid), and I get IMs at night (at least, in my time zone). But since we're used to working asynchronously, I just leave them until my next working hours unless I just happen to be really bored. It's not like it's a phone call, luckily.

I agree. Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help? I fight my keys inside the car, can you help me get in my car? Yes “everyone“ shops in line while at work, but few people are anti social robots. Point is you got a few hours to yourself after work, employers should respect that.

> Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help?

Our executives specifically asked middle management to be flexible to allow employees time to handle errands and favors during normal business hours. Within my team we've been stepping up to handle on-call coverage so on-call can handle family stuff during the day.

Management has been extremely flexible at my current company, and at one of the two companies I worked at before this one. It's been fine if people shift their working hours forward or back a few hours to avoid commute traffic or go off in the middle of the day to take care of personal stuff. This sometimes included things like "I need a lift" where one cubemate would go pick up another cubemate. Other times it would be phone calls, medical stuff, mental health breaks, double lunches an hour apart because someone was extra hungry/anxious/restless, weird errands like banking, walks outside around the block with coworkers, anything involving children, etc. In general at my salaried jobs I've found management to be more focused on team and individual output than input.

In exchange, I've had no personal qualms responding to coworkers if they emailed or messaged at 11pm and I happened to be awake to see it for whatever reason. Management certainly never expected people to work at these hours and generally actively discouraged it except during strictly-defined emergencies. I'd certainly have pushed back on any kind of expectation like this, and in all honesty I think when people work odd hours sometimes managers strongly question their time management skills. But some colleagues seemed to have odd working hours and I both enjoy my work and enjoy helping / chatting / troubleshooting with my coworkers. So if I wasn't doing anything else I'd usually respond and provide the info they needed to get past their blocker.

A key part of this though, is that I'm doing this with/for other employees at my level who happen to have asynchronous working hours, not at the insistence of management.

Also notable, was that the company that was very strict about clocking in/out using a fingerprint scanner when arriving, or while taking lunch, also never saw any employees working before 8:15am or after 5:15pm. In their case this seemed like dysfunction, due to their overall poor culture. But I could see in a hypothetical healthier culture that this could be a strong positive for many employees.

I think at the end of the day, employees should feel comfortable ignoring pretty much any communication they receive outside of working hours. I also feel like they should feel comfortable responding to off-hour communication if they find it rewarding, engaging, or simply not a hassle.

I often wonder if I am hurting my career by not responding to IMs/Emails after 6pm or on the weekends (unless there is a production emergency).

Probably, but that doesn't mean you should start.

The two biggest issues with current remote work for me are: my work day is now constantly stretched longer for many reasons (if everyone's on different schedules how are there boundaries?), and my house is just too small for two of us to work from home and it's taken over space that's supposed to be for other things.

Curious to know if anyone in a fully remote or mostly remote company: does your employer have even informal etiquette about “off-hours” messaging or is the stance more ad-hoc and left up to the employee to enforce those sorts of boundaries?

What’s the proper approach between the two, just looking for general opinion.

Automattic: off-hours contact is normal, just don't expect a response until they get back to work. My team is spread out around the world, there's always someone asleep while you're working. If it's an emergency (like you deployed broken code and closed your computer) you can probably expect a phone call and/or text message.

Edit: one of the benefits of getting a late-night IM is to read it and have plenty of time to think about a response. Though, many people do not have Slack installed on their phones and only on their work computers.

For us, it's pretty much "don't expect an answer", and DMs while away are sort of uncommon (i.e. people rather send an e-mail then, or wait until you are back).

We have people working all kinds of schedules in various time zones, but you typically have some idea when the people you directly work with right now are around, you pre-schedule times for meetings, and most people leave away messages indicating when they'll be back if they are away at normal work times.

GitHub: no expectation of an immediate reply even during your local "business hours". I'm new here and really appreciating the aggressively asynchronous culture.

How I deal with things like that is to ignore them, and if asked about it, politely point out that my contract does not require me to be available outside of working hours. If I am off work, I am truly off work. I will respond the next business day.

I was remote before this, and while I was a little light on hours at first, since the pandemic it’s been creeping up. At this point I figure that we are even, but I’m starting to feel a bit of burnout so I need to work on better work hygiene.

Perhaps the number was originally 4% of all messages, and now it is ~6%? The relative increase is large, but as percentage of total messages, it's likely still low. Kind of like how startups can have insane growth numbers because, originally, they had only a handful of customers.