Designing for the Right to Disconnect
#019: Design choices, not just policies, will decide if workers can truly unplug.
In 2017, France passed a law giving workers the legal right to ignore work messages outside of official hours. It was celebrated as a step toward restoring work–life balance in a culture where smartphones had blurred the line between office and home. Since then, other countries — from Ireland to the Philippines — have followed with their own versions.
North America, however, has been slower to act. Ontario requires employers with more than 25 workers to have a written policy on disconnecting, though it falls short of creating an actual legal right. Canada’s federal government is moving in a similar direction, with Bill C-69 requiring federally regulated employers to adopt disconnecting policies. In the U.S., proposed “right to disconnect” bills have surfaced in California and New Jersey, but both have stalled in committee. For now, the right to unplug in the U.S. remains more of a conversation than a reality.
But even where laws do exist, they collide with a deeper problem: the tools we use every day are designed to keep us persistently connected when what we really need is respite.
Work Before the Ping
It wasn’t always like this. Before email and smartphones, work largely ended when you walked out the office door. You might get the occasional urgent phone call, but the physical boundaries of place and time did most of the work for you.
The arrival of laptops, then BlackBerry devices in the late ’90s, and eventually smartphones obliterated those boundaries. “Work hours” became a moving target. By the 2010s, many knowledge workers were living in what is now known as the “always-on culture”, where perpetual connectivity is normalized and availability is expected.
The Psychology of Boundaries
Beyond these always-on expectations, the internal psychological struggle is real. Notifications exploit variable reward loops and FOMO. Even if your boss says “don’t worry until tomorrow,” the fear lingers: What if I look less committed than my colleague who replies right away?
These invisible pressures make the “right to disconnect” less about law and more about lived experience. And the design of our tools can either amplify or relieve that pressure.
Unequal Boundaries
Another uncomfortable truth: the ability to disconnect isn’t distributed evenly. Senior leaders may have the privilege of choosing when to unplug, while junior employees, contractors, and gig workers feel the pressure most acutely.
A law on paper may protect everyone equally, but in practice, the unspoken rule is clear: some people risk more than others by logging off. The right to disconnect is as much an equity issue as it is a wellness one.
What Design Could Do Differently
If we want disconnection to be real, design has to support it. That doesn’t mean radical new inventions — it means small but meaningful shifts in defaults and patterns.
Quiet hours by default: Tools could automatically enable them based on time zone or labor laws.
Scheduled send as the norm: Gmail and Slack both support delayed sending, but only if you remember to turn it on. Why not make it the default?
Nudges before sending after-hours: Imagine a prompt: “This message will arrive outside Jane’s work hours. Send anyway or schedule for later?”
These aren’t big technical leaps. They’re deliberate design choices that could shift culture over time.
Case Studies in Disconnection
Some organizations have experimented with systemic approaches:
Volkswagen in Germany famously configured its servers so emails would stop routing to employees’ phones 30 minutes after their shift ended, resuming only the next morning. The policy was controversial at the time but sent a strong signal: you are not expected to be on call 24/7.
Microsoft Outlook’s “Focus Time” feature uses machine learning to automatically carve out uninterrupted work blocks on calendars, silencing notifications during that time. It’s not specifically about after-hours disconnection, but it reflects the same principle: productivity isn’t about constant availability, it’s about protected attention.
Both examples illustrate that design — whether at the platform level or the organizational policy level — can reshape norms more effectively than words in an HR handbook or legal document.
Quick Tips: Protecting Your Own Boundaries
Even if your tools and workplace aren’t designed for it (yet), there are ways to carve out your own space:
Set “Do Not Disturb” by default: Both iOS and Android let you automate quiet hours — no manual toggle required.
Use delayed send yourself: Schedule emails or Slack messages to arrive during normal working hours, even if you’re catching up late.
Batch notifications: Many apps allow digests instead of constant pings. Getting one summary every hour (or day) is often enough.
Make time visible: Share your work hours in your calendar and status message so others know when you’re on and off.
Model the behavior: If you’re in a leadership role, your habits set the tone. Logging off loudly (and unapologetically) gives others permission to do the same.
The Global Clock
Distributed teams complicate the picture. My midnight might be your 9 a.m. But even here, design can help. Some tools already tag messages with the recipient’s local time. Others could recommend asynchronous updates — Loom videos, collaborative docs, task comments — instead of defaulting to real-time pings.
The goal isn’t to eliminate communication, but to make awareness of time zones and boundaries part of the fabric of the tool, not an afterthought.
The Bigger Question
At its core, this isn’t just about technology. It’s about values. When we design products that make constant availability the easiest path, we’re not only shaping workflows — we’re shaping people’s lives.
The “right to disconnect” isn’t just a labor issue — It’s a design problem. And like most design problems, the solution lies in the details: in the defaults, the nudges, and the quiet choices that determine whether work stops at 5 p.m. or stretches endlessly into the night.