Why You Shouldn’t Work on Labor Day

It’s Saturday morning and your boss emails you a question that can wait until Monday. What do you do? If you’re like me, you read the message while walking out of your yoga class and respond before lunch. 

This work culture makes the U.S. an outlier among high-income economies. Since 2017, countries including France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Australia, Slovakia, Greece, and Argentina have legislated some form of a right to disconnect. The European Union is working on a policy that could take effect as soon as 2028. In Australia, employees have the right not to read or respond to employers outside of work hours. In Portugal, mid-size employers risk fines of over $10,000 for contacting employees when they’re off the clock.

As we think about the employment landscape in the U.S. this Labor Day, we should consider a similar approach that protects the right of employees to not work when they’re not officially working. This could solve a lot of problems for families and communities while actually improving job performance. Since the pandemic, the boundaries between work and home have all but collapsed. With many workers still doing a lot of remote work, many of us send our first email early in the morning and our last late at night, creating what Microsoft calls the “infinite workday.” We squeeze in a load of laundry, parent-teacher conference, and family dinner somewhere in between.

Being pulled in so many directions at the same time is awful for our health and the quality of our work, for a simple reason: The human brain can’t multitask. 

“Each time we are exposed to a new stimulus and engage in the sequential process of disconnecting and reallocating our attention, we are expending valuable metabolic energy,” University of California, Santa Barbara technology management professor Paul Leonardi writes in Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life. “Our attention is fragmented. We lose focus and become easily distracted. We can’t get things done as quickly or as easily as we should be able to, and often quality suffers.”

Humans just didn’t evolve to keep switching between tasks as quickly and regularly as we do today, Leonardi warns. This explains why so many of us are exhausted and burned out. It also explains why we spend so much time working: We aren’t as efficient as we could be.

When I don’t work on the weekend, I unquestionably show up as a better employee on Monday morning. That’s because spending time with friends and family, exercising, getting outdoors, and volunteering in my community leave me refreshed and energized. What’s more, when I get my kids’ permission slips filled out and the fruit and veggies chopped on the weekend, thoughts of unfinished business aren’t floating through my head while I’m working. That means I can achieve a state of what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously termed “flow,” getting completely absorbed in my work and reaching peak performance.

Allowing workers to disconnect would therefore make them better employees. It could also solve several public policy problems. Our children need present caregivers. It only takes seconds for a child to fall or drown while we’re distracted by a manager’s latest missive. When parents spend more time on screens, their children also develop poorer language skills. And, of course, children are unlikely to open up about their problems while we’re distracted on our phones.

Plus, if workers disconnected during their off-hours, they’d also have more time to nurture the offline connections that our country desperately needs. I would agree that we’re experiencing what psychologist Marisa Franco calls a “friendship famine.” Since 1990, the percentage of American adults who say they have no close friends has quadrupled, according to last year’s American Perspectives Survey. That is crushing. The quality of our friendships and social connections is one of the strongest predictors of our health, happiness, and how long we’ll live, according to the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s more important than things like our cholesterol, genes, and salaries. And being lonely is as toxic for our health as alcoholism or smoking.  

Of course, as Americans know one another less, we help one another less. This can explain why volunteerism has also been declining. That’s particularly sad because banding together has long been a central part of our national character, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote in Democracy in America. It’s especially important in a country like ours where people can’t rely on a strong social safety net when they hit hard times.

Labor Day is an obvious prompt for U.S. lawmakers to consider a right to disconnect. In the meantime, we can change our behavior and our workplaces. Employers should take the lead. Even without a national law, they should develop their own policies about disconnecting and publish them prominently on their websites so prospective employees can consider them even before accepting job offers. Volkswagen pioneered this approach in Germany in 2012 when it stopped sending emails to employees who weren’t senior managers 30 minutes after their shifts ended and resumed 30 minutes before their next shifts began. 

A series of studies published in 2021 found that when people receive non-urgent work emails outside of work hours, we tend to think we need to respond faster than the senders believe is necessary. Receiving these types of emails also increases our stress and decreases our wellbeing, but senders underestimate the degree to which their messages stress us out. Indicating in the email that a response wasn’t expected right away reduced the pressure on recipients. An even better strategy could be schedule-sending emails so colleagues receive them when they return to work.