Greggonomics 16: No more emails anymore (well, after 5pm and at weekends…)

One evening in December 2025 I was sitting at home scrolling through work emails on my phone.

Nothing particularly urgent had arrived, but I was still checking.

That was the moment I realised something wasn’t quite right.

Not in a dramatic sense. Just the slow accumulation of pressure that comes from a long stretch of difficult work. I was dealing with a temporary increase in complaints. Most were routine enough, but a handful had turned unpleasant in the way complaints sometimes do – personal, accusatory, and persistent.

Anyone running an independent dispute service will recognise the pattern. You deal with one issue and another arrives. You draft a response, send it, and start thinking about the next one.

Even when the laptop is closed, the conversation keeps running in your head.

One evening, after another long day of it, my wife and I had a simple discussion: what would happen if I just removed my work email from my phone?

Like most people in professional services, I had always assumed constant access was simply part of the job. Something urgent might come in. A client might need something quickly. It felt responsible to stay connected.

Still, I took it off the phone. Just for the Christmas period, I told myself.

The effect was immediate.

Within a few days I realised something slightly uncomfortable: I hadn’t been checking email occasionally – I had been checking it constantly. Waiting rooms, trains, evenings, weekends. Even when nothing new had arrived, I was still scanning for the next problem.

And when there wasn’t an email, there was the quiet rehearsal of replies for the next day.

Three months later the email app is still not on my phone.

Now the boundary is simple. I log off around six in the evening and that is the end of work activity until the following morning. No checking. No “just a quick look”.

It turns out something rather surprising happens when you do that.

The world does not collapse.

Clients still receive responses the next day. Work still gets done. In fact, during the day I am far more focused because I am dealing with things properly rather than reacting to them in fragments.

Evenings feel different too. There is a novelty in being properly present when you are actually at home. Conversations happen without the background hum of a phone lighting up every ten minutes.

Weekends are even better. Entire days pass without the faintest awareness of work email.

I suspect some people would see this as risky, perhaps even unprofessional. There remains a quiet assumption that constant availability signals commitment.

I’m no longer convinced that is true.

Very often it simply signals that work has been allowed to spread into every available space. Like any substance, it expands to fill the container you give it.

The interesting part of this small experiment has been what followed. Once email disappeared from the phone, other habits became visible too – the small bits of time that quietly disappear under the banner of “just checking something quickly”.

Remove one source of noise and you start noticing the others.

Work matters enormously to me. I enjoy it and I take it seriously. But it works better when it occupies its proper hours rather than every hour.

That lesson has taken me about thirty years to learn properly.

And somewhere in the background of this small rebellion I kept hearing an old song lyric.

The Last Word

The title of this piece – and the cover image – owe something to a track that popped into my head when I realised how liberating it felt not to be permanently attached to my inbox.

“No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more”
-The Stranglers, 1977

The song wasn’t written about email of course, but the sentiment translates rather well.

For years many of us have quietly behaved as though constant availability is simply the price of doing business. Messages answered at all hours. Notifications checked without thinking.

Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way.

Switch it off at five. Leave it there at the weekend. The work will still be there in the morning.

And in the meantime, life carries on rather nicely without it.

See you next time, Gregg