Time management: when does the working day really end?
In international teams, the end of one person's working day often coincides with another's busiest hours. The management question is specific: how can availability outside working hours be bounded without compromising operations that genuinely need to continue?
What the literature establishes
Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz (2007, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology) distinguish four recovery experiences: psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery experiences and control over leisure time. Their questionnaire development and validation research shows that these dimensions are distinct. For time management, this distinction matters: having a free evening does not necessarily mean having stopped thinking about work.
Recovery matters beyond the evening
Sabine Sonnentag (2003, Journal of Applied Psychology) observes, in a daily diary study, an association between recovery during nonwork time and work engagement the following day. Engagement is also associated with proactive behaviours, including taking initiative and pursuing learning. These findings suggest that time away from work should be regarded as more than a reserve for finishing the previous day's tasks.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that banning evening messages is enough to improve the following day's work. These studies do not test that intervention and cannot guarantee its effects. The useful distinction is between sending information, expecting a reply and requiring action: these three situations do not impose the same demands on availability. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not settle
Validating a questionnaire does not demonstrate the effectiveness of a disconnection policy, and daily observations are not sufficient to establish causality. These studies define neither a universal finishing time nor an optimal level of availability for pharmaceutical production, life sciences or logistics. Counting messages alone would also miss implicit expectations: receiving no messages does not necessarily mean feeling entitled to stop checking one's inbox.
A practical check in Bâle
As part of SHR's “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, a Basel team in pharma, life sciences, Rhine logistics or international R&D could test an explicit rule: outside each person's agreed working window, only predefined emergencies require a response, through a dedicated channel and an identified on-call arrangement. Over two baseline weeks followed by two trial weeks, the team would record the proportion of out-of-hours requests requiring a reply before work resumes, alongside the number of operational incidents linked to a deferred response. A brief, voluntary record the following day would complement these records by asking whether the person had been able to stop thinking about work. This comparison would not prove causality, but would make an initial trade-off verifiable: lower expected availability without observed operational deterioration. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Basel
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