A VP of Engineering I mentor spent 40 minutes of our last session telling me, in detail, how he protects his team’s focus time. No meetings before 10 AM. No Slack after 6 PM. He built the rule himself, and it gave his team real relief.
Forty-one minutes in, his phone buzzed. He glanced at it, apologized, and started typing a reply. It was 9 PM.
I asked who it was from. “Nobody,” he said. “Just answering something quick.”
I said, it is 9 PM, and you told me an hour ago that nobody on your team should be working right now.
He went quiet. Then he said the sentence I hear in different words, from different people, every single week: “Yeah, but that’s different. That’s me. I’m a leader. I need to reply.”
This is not an article about telling your team to unplug. You already know how to say that. This is about what you actually do when nobody’s watching, or more accurately, when everybody’s watching, because you’re the one they learn from.
The Pattern I See Constantly
Most of you got genuinely good at the language of sustainable pace. You’d never tell a direct report to answer a client email at midnight. And yet you do it yourself, constantly. Three reasons show up over and over in my mentoring sessions. Check if you recognize yourself in one, or more than one, of them.
Identity fusion. For a lot of you (myself included, years ago), being the person who’s always reachable is how you built your reputation. It’s how you went from senior engineer to lead, to manager, to director. Somewhere in that climb, availability got rewarded, and the wiring never updated even after the job changed.
The fear that something breaks if you unplug, and it’s your fault. Not “the system failed,” but “I failed to catch it.” A heavy kind of responsibility, and mostly self-assigned.
The one people don’t want to admit: disconnecting feels like losing relevance. If you’re not first to respond, are you even still needed at this level? That question sits under a lot of 11 PM replies that could have waited until 9 AM.
None of these are character flaws. They’re unexamined agreements you made with yourself a long time ago and never renegotiated.
And the data backs up how widespread this has become. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that meetings booked after 8 PM have risen 16% year over year, and the average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside standard business hours (Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday”). It’s not a you problem. It’s a systemic one, and leaders are the ones who set the norm, whether they mean to or not.
That last part matters more than most leaders realize. Research on work connectivity behavior after hours found that when a team’s leader models constant availability (what researchers call leader workaholism), it directly predicts higher psychological distress in the people reporting to them (Dong et al., Frontiers in Public Health, 2022). And a separate study out of Lehigh University found that it’s not even the time spent on after-hours email that exhausts people. It’s the expectation of being reachable, whether or not anyone ever says it out loud (ScienceDaily summary of Belkin et al.). Your team doesn’t need you to announce the expectation. They just need to watch when your messages get sent.
Why “Set Better Boundaries” Doesn’t Work
Most people think contracting is something you do with your people or your stakeholders. It’s not only that. You can have an unspoken, unexamined contract with yourself, and that’s exactly what’s running here.
When did you agree that “available” means immediately, at any hour? You didn’t consciously agree to it. It formed by default, three or five or ten years of reward and repetition, and it’s never been renegotiated, even though your role, your team size, and your responsibilities have completely changed since then.
Contracting is not a vague intention to “have better boundaries.” It’s a specific, spoken agreement. What hours are actually protected? What counts as a true emergency, versus something that just feels urgent in the moment? Who else needs to know the new terms? This is where Communication Intelligence (CQ) applies just as much to the conversation you have with yourself as it does to the ones you have with your team.
Your PCM Base Is Rationalizing Your Overwork
This is where it gets personal, and specific. Different personality bases in the Process Communication Model rationalize overwork in completely different ways. If you don’t know your own base, you’ll keep mistaking the symptom for the cause.
If your base is Thinker or Persister, overwork often shows up as proving you’re indispensable through sheer volume of visible output. Rest can feel like invisibility. Or it shows up as an inability to leave something incomplete, even when “incomplete” just means “not right this second.”
If your base leans Harmonizer or Rebel, overwork often shows up as answering instantly so nobody feels neglected or deprioritized, even at your own expense. Call it people-pleasing with a Slack icon.
None of these are wrong instincts. They’re real psychological needs. But left unexamined, they drive behavior that contradicts everything you’re telling your team about sustainable work. Naming your own pattern is the first move you can actually act on, because you stop treating it as a discipline problem and start treating it as the specific need it actually is.
What To Do About It This Week
Not next quarter. This week.
1. Write down your current, real contract with yourself. Not the aspirational one, the one you’re actually living by. “I answer anything within 15 minutes, any hour, because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t.” Be honest. Nobody is checking.
2. Name your PCM driver underneath it. Is it about being seen? About leaving nothing unfinished? About not letting anyone feel dropped? The boundary that actually holds is the one that answers the real need, not a generic one.
3. Renegotiate one specific term, not the whole system. Try to fix everything at once and your brain goes into a stress response, and you’ll be right back to the old pattern within a week. Pick one. No replies after 8 PM unless it’s a defined emergency. One fully offline evening. Choose the thing that drains you most.
4. Tell someone the new term out loud. Your team, your manager, your partner. A contract that only exists in your head is a wish, not a contract. Saying it out loud is what makes you accountable to it.
If you’re already carrying signs of running on fumes rather than just overworking, it’s worth reading about shadow burnout, the version of burnout that hides behind still-hitting-your-targets. And if the always-on habit is tangled up with an inability to say no to new requests in the first place, this piece on saying no as a leadership skill is the natural next stop.
The Boundary You’d Give Someone Else
Think about the boundary you’d immediately tell a struggling direct report to set if they came to you exhausted and always on. You’d know exactly what to say. So say it to yourself. Set that boundary this week. Tell one person, so it’s real.
Because your team isn’t learning sustainable leadership from what you say in your one-on-ones. They’re learning it from what time your Slack messages get sent.
So, what’s the one boundary you’d set for someone else in a heartbeat and haven’t set for yourself yet?
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