The office used to have walls. Then the smartphone arrived and quietly removed them.
A message at 9:47 p.m. is rarely introduced as overtime. It comes dressed as a small favour: “Please check this quickly.” The task may take three minutes. The expectation follows you for the rest of the night.
This is how work expands in the digital age—not always through longer shifts, but through permanent possibility. The employee has left the building, yet the building remains in the pocket. It vibrates during dinner, enters the bedroom and waits beside the pillow like a supervisor pretending to be an alarm clock.
We praise this as connectivity. Much of it is simply unpaid availability.
The problem is not the phone. A phone has no ambitions. The problem is the culture built around instant reachability. Because a message can be sent immediately, we begin to behave as though it must be answered immediately. Convenience hardens into obligation.
The body, however, has not received the software update.
In 2021, the World Health Organization and International Labour Organization reported that working 55 hours or more a week was associated with higher risks of stroke and ischaemic heart disease. They estimated that long working hours contributed to 745,000 deaths worldwide in 2016. Those figures concern hours, not notifications, but the principle is difficult to ignore: work consumes health when it is allowed to consume time without limit.
The deeper damage is psychological. A person does not rest merely because no task is being performed. Rest begins when the mind is no longer waiting to be summoned. If every silence may be interrupted by a request, the nervous system remains at the gate.
This is especially cruel in economies where workers already carry long commutes, unstable power, rising costs and the private burden of making broken public systems work. The phone then adds a new shift—one without transport allowance, closing time or even the dignity of being named.
Europe has debated a formal “right to disconnect”: the right of workers not to engage in work-related digital communication outside working hours without punishment. The phrase sounds radical only because intrusion has become normal.
Of course, modern work sometimes demands urgency. Hospitals cannot silence emergencies at five. Founders know that servers possess a wicked sense of timing. Journalists cannot ask breaking news to return tomorrow. But an exception is not a management philosophy.
A healthy workplace distinguishes crisis from poor planning. It does not convert every senior person’s impatience into everybody else’s emergency.
Workers also have a part to play. Some of us have trained people to expect permanent access because we answer everything immediately, even when no answer is required. Boundaries rarely announce themselves. They are taught through repetition: delayed replies, disabled notifications, clear working hours and the courage to let a non-emergency remain one.
Being unreachable for a few hours is not laziness. It is maintenance. Machines require downtime; apparently, only human beings are expected to remain online until they malfunction.
The future of work should not be measured only by how easily labour can cross distance. It should also be measured by whether dignity can survive the journey.
The office may now fit inside the phone. Closing time must fit there too.
- Abraham Ikongshul
Sources: WHO/ILO joint estimates on long working hours; European Parliament resolution on the right to disconnect.
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