A work message arrives after dinner. There is no deadline, no demand for an immediate response. The notification preview reveals enough to understand what it is about. The phone goes back on the table. A minute later, the sender’s name is checked again.
An app is opened twice in five minutes, even though nothing new has appeared. The phone is picked up not because anything requires attention, but simply because it is there.
A deadline, oddly enough, can make things easier. “I need this before 9 tomorrow” is clear enough. What is more irritating is the document forwarded with a question, or an old email thread that suddenly comes back to life after dinner. Someone replies with a simple “Thanks,” and suddenly the whole group is copied in. Someone else responds. Then nothing happens for twelve minutes.
At work, people tend to figure out fairly quickly who answers at night and who does not. Three replies within 10 minutes can tell a new employee more about the culture of a workplace than any formal policy ever could.
The message has been seen. Sometimes a reply is typed, reconsidered, and deleted because answering might simply invite the next question.
There are stranger things to study on a phone at night. The battery percentage, for instance. Or why 9:30 somehow feels much later than 9:10 when the name above the message belongs to a department head.
“Can you look at this?” is only five words. Yet even the question mark begins to receive more attention than punctuation probably deserves.
The question has occasionally ended up in court. In France, for example, the Court of Cassation ruled in 2024 on disciplinary warnings issued to a road-transport worker who had failed to answer his personal phone during rest periods. The court found that failing to be reachable on a personal phone outside working hours was not, by itself, misconduct.
Few people need a legal ruling explained to them to recognize the situation underneath it. The familiar part is much smaller: a phone lights up at an hour when work was supposed to be over.
The old telephone had a physical location. If nobody was nearby, the call went unanswered, perhaps ringing in an empty room until it stopped. The caller could try again later.
Today's phone follows its owner around, including into rooms where work once had no obvious reason to intrude.
Work email now sits alongside photographs, maps, and messages from friends. There is also the alarm for tomorrow morning. Before bed, the alarm gets checked – and the work notification is still sitting above it.
A bad meeting could occupy an evening long before smartphones existed, and deadlines have always followed people home. What has changed is how little effort it takes to send something new. Six words can be typed while waiting for coffee, sent, and forgotten by the person who wrote them. At the other end, they may be read twice or left unopened for a while. Often, there is not even a conversation.
An evening email thread picks up a couple of acknowledgments. Tomorrow morning would have been perfectly fine. The sender may already be back at dinner while someone else from the same office is still checking the screen.
Notifications can be turned off. The phone can be left in another room, which works until someone goes to get it. Advice about reducing screen time does not quite address this.
Typing a response may take 20 seconds. The uncertainty can last much longer. Sometimes the phone is put down without a reply, and ten minutes later, the same message is still there. By morning, it may look surprisingly ordinary.
The reply begins: “Sorry for the late reply.”
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Cüneyd Er is a lawyer and entrepreneur with extensive experience in public international affairs and charitable organizations.
