my boss says we shouldn’t schedule email messages

A reader writes:

I not infrequently schedule email messages in advance. If I’m working in the evening, I might write a message but schedule it to go out the following morning, or if I’m writing to a colleague in a different time zone I might schedule it so it arrives at the beginning of their work day rather than in the middle of the night for them. I feel like this ensures messages show up when they’ll be most useful (and less likely to be buried in someone’s inbox by the time they see it) and I don’t want people to think I’m expecting a response at 9 pm just because I message then.

I mentioned to my boss that I do this, thinking it was no big deal, and he had a negative reaction. He said it’s fine to send messages in the middle of my coworker’s night because they won’t be checking their email then anyway, and that it could look deceptive if someone ever realizes I scheduled a message to send first thing in the morning (like I’m trying to look like I’m working then even if I get a late start). He also said that by delaying a message rather than sending it as soon as it’s ready, I could be causing more work for someone else — like if I write out an email with info on a project and schedule it to send the next morning but the recipient is working on the project that night, they’ll miss out on info they could have used earlier. I guess in theory that’s true, but I’ve always understood scheduling emails to be a normal tool that’s in wide use. What’s your take on this?

I’m with you: scheduling emails ahead of time is a useful tool.

In an ideal world, we’d all understand that people send emails at the time that works best for them and that receiving an email in the evening doesn’t mean a response is expected before the next work day. Also in an ideal world, people wouldn’t see colleagues emailing at 9 pm and start feeling pressure to work late hours themselves.

And those are good principles for offices to work toward establishing. In many offices, though, those principles are not established, and people do read into the timestamps on after-hours emails.

Your boss isn’t wrong when he says you could be creating an artificial delay in when someone receives info they could have used earlier, so you do need to take into account what you know about the coworker you’re messaging. But you’re not wrong about the rest of it.

As for his concern that it could look “deceptive” … if someone is giving colleagues a reason beyond this to think they’re not actually working and available when they should be, that’s a problem that their manager should tackle. But the mere scheduling of an email shouldn’t cause that in a functional workplace. (Is your boss by chance excessively worried about appearances in ways that don’t always line up with reality?)

All that said, if your boss doesn’t want you scheduling emails, you probably need to stop scheduling emails — or at least have another conversation about it where you explain how it helps your work.

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