How to combat an always-on work culture?

The first time a teammate asked if it was acceptable to turn off Slack after eight in the evening, I said yes and secretly hoped they would not. I wanted to sound reasonable, yet a critical partner deal was in flight and I craved real time responses. That kind of mixed signal is how an always on culture begins. It rarely starts with a formal policy. It begins with one leader who says one thing and rewards another. For a while the outcomes look like commitment. Messages receive instant reactions. Meetings multiply and calendars fill from morning to night. But the real costs emerge quietly. Replies get faster while thinking gets slower. Decisions get made, then remade, then unmade. People grow fluent in every channel and forget what it feels like to have an hour of uninterrupted work. I know this pattern because I built it. I also learned what it takes to dismantle it.

When I finally acknowledged that our pace was not sustainable, I noticed there was no single villain. Part of the pressure came from me. Part of it came from investor folklore that confuses availability with hunger. Another part came from customers across time zones who expected answers before their next cup of coffee. The last ingredient was pride. We liked being needed. We equated responsiveness with value and we wore exhaustion like a credential. The fix began with a public admission. In an all hands I told the team that late night messages were usually a symptom of my poor planning. That small piece of honesty changed the room. It made permission visible. People needed to hear from me that speed is not a substitute for strategy and that real work often looks like quiet concentration rather than constant motion.

From there I moved to the operating system that shaped our week. I am not referring to software. I am talking about what the company chooses to count as work. In an always on culture the only work that counts is what pings. Silence looks like laziness. So we did something symbolic and practical at the same time. We declared deep work a deliverable. We put it on calendars. We treated those blocks with the same seriousness as a board meeting. Not a perk. Not a wellness add on. A core input to shipping useful products. Once thinking had a protected place to live, projects started to move again. The change was not mystical. It was simply the effect of reducing context switching and giving people enough uninterrupted time to bring an idea from rough outline to a clear decision or a working draft.

Communication needed new rules as well. We introduced a ladder that taught people to match channels to the weight of the request. If something could wait, it belonged to asynchronous updates. If a decision was needed within a day, it went to a tagged message with full context. If it was truly urgent, it warranted a direct call. At first this felt rigid. Soon it became liberating. The ladder made it socially acceptable not to answer everything at once. It also revealed how little was genuinely urgent. Most companies do not have a chaos problem. They have a classification problem. Once teams learn to classify requests, they can defend their attention without guilt and still honor the few moments that do require immediate action.

None of these shifts would have worked if I kept modeling the opposite in private. I used to draft messages at midnight and add a harmless disclaimer that people should ignore them until morning. No one did. People will always read the real signal, which is what leaders do when it is inconvenient. So I changed my own habits in public. I scheduled delivery for daylight. I stopped praising heroic all nighters in retros and started celebrating teams that protected focus windows and still shipped on time. Stories are the currency of culture. The tales you praise become the standards everyone learns to meet.

We redesigned our meeting rhythm around attention rather than availability. Mornings were for inputs and focus. Afternoons were for coordination and outputs. Status updates moved to written documents that had to be read in advance. Live time became a scarce resource reserved for decisions, risks, and tradeoffs. When a meeting delivered two weeks of low energy in a row, we cut it. A room that cannot justify its existence does not deserve your people. The result was fewer gatherings that mattered more. There is a compound effect to this. As decisions concentrate in smaller windows, people can plan uninterrupted stretches of work with more confidence. That predictability becomes a quiet form of morale.

Customers, not surprisingly, were the hardest group to retrain. I feared that if we stopped replying late at night, they would walk. They did not. They adapted to clarity. We published regional support windows. We built genuine escalation paths for enterprise cases and measured responsiveness by first meaningful action rather than the first emoji. To my surprise our reputation improved. Clients trust teams that manage energy because those teams make fewer avoidable mistakes and deliver cleaner work. Calmer systems produce fewer quality incidents, which clients feel even if they never see the dashboards.

On call used to feel like a permanent state. We rebuilt it into a clean rotation with one person per function each week, a clear backup, and a short reset the following Monday morning. When the pager is everybody’s job some of the time, people stop living as if it could ring at any moment. When they know it is not their week, they recover fully. Empathy also rises. Colleagues think twice before lobbing a last minute grenade into another person’s evening because they remember exactly how that felt when their name was on the schedule.

A hidden driver of the always on pattern is unowned work. When no one is clearly accountable for an outcome, everyone stays loosely engaged. Slack fills with commentary and questions float without landing. That fog compels people to keep checking, which drives more fog. We drew an ownership map. Every recurring flow received a single responsible owner. Not the loudest participant. Not a committee. An owner. Collaboration did not shrink. It became sharper because questions had a place to land and decisions had a person to make them. The number of half watched threads fell, and so did the ambient anxiety that those threads create.

Tools can be a cause or a cure. We trimmed ours to reduce the ambient hum. One hub for day to day work. One channel for high urgency with strict rules. One searchable home for knowledge that is easy to navigate. Everything else went quiet or into the archive. People rediscovered how much momentum hides behind the mute button. With fewer surfaces clamoring for attention, small tasks stopped stealing entire afternoons.

Beneath all the mechanics sat an emotional layer that needed daylight. Always on is not only a systems failure. It can be a self worth strategy. Many first time managers and new founders feel valuable when they are needed. They fear that clear boundaries will expose how replaceable they are. That fear fuels late night yeses. We named it openly. In a leadership session a senior engineer said that he chased urgency because it made him feel important. The honesty unlocked the room. Once we could say the quiet part out loud, it became easier to design rules without shame and to see boundaries as a path to better work rather than a retreat from responsibility.

Agreements replaced heroics. Companies that depend on last minute saves will never trust planned rest. We wrote personal operating manuals so teammates knew how to work with one another. We drew team charters that clarified time zones, response expectations, and handoff times. We documented company rules for launches, incident response, and blackout periods. These agreements removed the need for judgment calls at eleven at night. They turned preference into practice and gave new hires a map that matched reality.

Context mattered across regions. In Malaysia, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia we learned that hierarchy can mute healthy pushback and that evenings are shaped by different family rhythms. We compressed collaboration windows in places where prayer times and long commutes defined the day. We moved standups earlier in Singapore so parents could be fully present at bedtime. We staggered on call across time zones in Kuala Lumpur to reduce after hours noise. Regional sensitivity was not a perk. It was an operating advantage that let the same principles live inside different calendars without friction.

My turning point arrived when a product manager told me that her best ideas appeared in the shower because it was the only place she could not hear Slack. That is not a productivity anecdote. It is a trust signal. If people need running water to think, the system is loud, not strong. The fix is not a wellness webinar. The fix is fewer and clearer pathways for work to move. When channels match needs, when ownership is unambiguous, and when focus time is protected, creativity returns during business hours where it belongs.

If you are already underwater, the first step does not require a grand program. Run a one week experiment with a single team. Guard two blocks of deep work for everyone. Move status updates into a document with a simple template. Teach the communication ladder and enforce it for seven days. Then ask the team what moved faster and what felt lighter. The answers will be obvious rather than theoretical. You can expand from there without drama or slogans.

Emergencies will still happen. A client will escalate at nine in the evening. A deployment will crash. An investor will message during dinner. The goal is not to eliminate urgency. The goal is to treat urgency like a fire alarm rather than a doorbell. When alarms ring too often, the building has a design problem. You fix the wiring. You do not train people to sprint the stairs every hour.

In the end attention is the scarcest resource a young company controls. Protect it with the same care you give to runway and reputation. Do not allow anyone to withdraw focus without cost. Teach colleagues to make requests with context. Encourage them to batch questions. Ask them to choose the lightest channel that can carry their need. These habits look small in isolation and transformative in combination.

Months after we changed our rhythm a colleague messaged at seven in the evening to say he was turning his phone off for a family dinner. He did not ask permission. He simply stated a boundary because the system made that boundary normal. The work did not suffer. It improved. Handoffs became cleaner, defects fell, and features shipped with less drama. If your days feel like a wall of blinking lights, you are not weak. You are early. The culture you scale is the system you design now. People will not remember the speed of your late night replies. They will remember whether you built a place where good work is possible. Replace availability with agreements. Replace urgency with clarity. Replace noise with momentum. You do not need a different team. You need a different design.