The Victorian Post Came Twelve Times a Day. Then It Stopped.
Load · The Britannica Series, Vol. 14 · 10 min read · how work stopped ending at night, what the right to disconnect laws actually say, and the version you can have without a law
Based on the published research of Leslie A. Perlow, PhD, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, whose book Sleeping with Your Smartphone reports her experiment in switching consultants off, one night a week, at the Boston Consulting Group. HBS faculty page · the experiment, in the Harvard Gazette · reference entry · Britannica
In 1879 a London letter could reach you twelve times a day, and after about eight in the evening nothing came at all. The off switch was built into the machinery. Ours was taken out, and the fix that works best so far is not a law.
The short answer: the right to disconnect is a legal protection for employees against having to monitor or answer work contact outside working hours. France introduced a version on 1 January 2017, but it does not ban email: it requires companies with fifty or more employees to negotiate rules on digital tools, or to publish a charter if they cannot agree.¹ Australia gave employees the right to refuse unreasonable out-of-hours contact from 26 August 2024, extended to small businesses in 2025.² In the United States, California’s 2024 bill was shelved in committee, and there is no general federal equivalent.³ The research explains why it matters: the expectation of being reachable, not the work itself, was linked to anxiety in employees and their partners.⁴ And the best-documented fix is a team one. At the Boston Consulting Group, Leslie Perlow gave each consultant one predictable night fully off, with colleagues covering, and the firm later spread the practice to more than a thousand teams.⁵
Nine forty on a Tuesday. You are on the sofa, the dishwasher is going, and the phone lights up on the arm of the chair. It is not urgent. You can see from the preview that it is not urgent. It is a colleague in another time zone asking whether you saw the deck. You did not answer it, which is progress, except that now you are thinking about the deck, and about whether not answering reads as disengaged, and the evening has quietly turned into a shift with the lights off.
So you type the question that has become a small search-engine genre of its own: is there a right to disconnect, and does it apply to me? Page one gives two confident and conflicting answers. One set of articles says France banned work email after hours years ago. Another says Americans have no such protection at all. The first is wrong about France, the second is right about America, and neither mentions the version that has actually been tested.
This is a reading of published history, law and workplace research. We are not historians, lawyers or clinicians; the findings belong to the researchers and institutions named and linked below, and the plain-English version is ours.
The skim version
- 1840. The Penny Post. Letters in Britain rise from 76 million to 169 million in a year.⁶
- 1879. Central London gets up to twelve deliveries a day, the last beginning about 7.45 p.m.⁷
- 2012. Perlow reports that among 1,600 managers and professionals, 92 per cent worked 50 or more hours a week and spent a further 20 to 25 hours a week monitoring work while not at work.⁸
- 2017. France’s right to disconnect takes effect for companies with 50+ employees. It requires negotiation, not silence.¹
- 2024. Australia’s right to disconnect begins; California’s bill is shelved.² ³
- The honest part: no one has yet published strong evidence that the laws themselves improve health. The best evidence is for changing expectations inside a team.
In this article: The 19th century: twelve posts and a closed door · The 20th century: the pager in the handbag · The 21st century: the right to disconnect · Three centuries of being reachable · Questions people ask
The 19th century: twelve posts and a closed door
It is tempting to picture the Victorians as blissfully unreachable. They were not. In 1840 the Penny Post introduced one flat rate for a letter anywhere in Britain, and the volume of letters more than doubled in its first year, from 76 million to 169 million.⁶ In London, the London Museum notes, there were up to twelve postal deliveries a day: “You could send your letter in the morning and it would arrive by lunchtime.”⁶
That produced something very close to the modern inbox, including the modern feeling about it. A nineteenth-century writer quoted in the Victorian Web’s history of London correspondence describes the waiting in one word. When the postman passes and “we do not hear the expected knock,” the writer says, what follows is “a pang.”⁹
Four years after the Penny Post came the telegraph. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines it as “any device or system that allows the transmission of information by coded signal over distance,” and dates the working American line to Samuel Morse’s Washington to Baltimore connection in 1844.¹⁰ Within a generation it carried prices, orders and news across oceans. The journalist Tom Standage later called it “the Victorian Internet”. It also opened one of the first respectable office careers to women: the historian Thomas C. Jepsen traced women working as telegraph operators from 1846 onward.¹¹
But notice the design. The post was delivered by a person on foot, and the person went home. Dickens’s Dictionary of London for 1879 gives the first central delivery at about 7.20 a.m. and the last at about 7.45 p.m.⁷ The telegram reached an office and stopped there. The Victorians were extremely reachable during the day and almost impossible to reach at night. Nobody had a right to disconnect. The machinery simply clocked off.
The 20th century: the pager in the handbag
The twentieth century removed the off switch one appliance at a time. The telephone moved into the home. The fax arrived. Then in 1999 the Canadian company Research in Motion released a device that pushed email to a handheld. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the BlackBerry as a series of devices made from 1999 to 2016 “that were among the first popular smartphones.”¹² For the first time the office could reach you at the school gate, the dinner table and the bedside, silently, at any hour.
Leslie Perlow, a professor at Harvard Business School, set out to measure what that did. Her survey of 1,600 managers and professionals, reported in her 2012 book, found 92 per cent working at least fifty hours a week and a third working more than sixty-five, and they reported monitoring work for a further twenty to twenty-five hours a week while not working.⁸ That adds up to a second part-time job made entirely of watching a screen in case something happens.
If your evenings have become a watch with no end time, the question worth asking is what the reachability is costing you, and that is worth ten quiet minutes. Start here.
The 21st century: the right to disconnect
The research then found something that explains why the evenings feel so heavy even when you do not answer. William Becker of Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business and colleagues from Lehigh and Colorado State reported in 2018 that the mere expectation of monitoring email after hours, not the time actually spent on it, was linked to anxiety, and that the strain reached employees’ spouses too.⁴ “‘Flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,'” Becker said, “compromising an employee’s and their family’s health.”⁴
That is the insight behind the right to disconnect laws. France went first. Reporting for the Library of Congress in January 2017, Nicolas Boring summarised the law: companies with at least fifty employees must negotiate with employee representatives on the use of digital tools to protect rest time and family life, and if they cannot agree, the employer must issue a charter setting out the right to disconnect.¹ The popular version, a ban on email after 6 p.m., appears nowhere in it.
Australia’s version is more direct. Since 26 August 2024, the Fair Work Ombudsman explains, employees of larger businesses “have the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact (or attempted contact) outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable,” and employees of small businesses gained the same right on 26 August 2025.² An employer can still send the message; the law protects the person who leaves it unanswered.²
The United States does not have it. California’s Assembly Bill 2751 would have required employers to set out a right to disconnect, and in May 2024 it was held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, which the Society for Human Resource Management reported as ending it for the session.³
“It’s about learning to cover for each other. One person will be off today, another person will be off tomorrow.”
Which leaves the version that does not need a legislature. Perlow’s experiment at the Boston Consulting Group gave each member of a consulting team one scheduled night a week completely off, with colleagues covering, and the team talking openly about how it was going.⁵ It worked well enough that the firm replicated it across more than a thousand teams worldwide.⁵ Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found something similar at the individual level: when people were cut off from email for a work week, their focus rose significantly and their stress fell.¹³
What the research found
It is the expectation, not the email. Anxiety tracked the expectation of being reachable after hours, and it spread to partners.⁴ Where a team made time off predictable and shared, the practice held and spread.⁵
The history fits. The Victorians were as reachable by day as we are, but the night was protected by the machinery: the last post came in the evening and the telegraph ended at the office.⁷ ¹⁰
The limitation: the Becker findings were presented at a conference and describe associations. The BCG experiment was run with consultants in one firm, and its results are reported by the researcher rather than a randomised trial. We found no strong published evidence yet that right to disconnect laws themselves improve health, and none of this research focused on women in midlife.
The source for this piece
Leslie A. Perlow, PhD
Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School. Her research is on how people can do better work and live better lives, and how the two reinforce each other, using close ethnographic study of teams. Her doctorate is in organisation studies from MIT; she is a management researcher, not a clinician or lawyer.
What we read: accounts of her predictable time off experiment and survey in the Harvard Gazette and Knowledge at Wharton, alongside the legal sources and research below.⁵ ⁸
Where to follow her work: Harvard Business School · interview at Knowledge at Wharton · Sleeping with Your Smartphone
Three centuries of being reachable
| 19th century | 20th century | 21st century | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How work reached her | Letters, up to 12 a day in London⁶ | Telephone, fax, then the BlackBerry¹² | Everything, everywhere |
| When it stopped | About 7.45 p.m., the last post⁷ | When you left the office, mostly | It does not |
| What protected the night | The postman going home | Custom | Law in France and Australia,¹ ² none in the US³ |
| Hours spent watching for work | Listening for the knock⁹ | 20 to 25 a week, among professionals⁸ | The expectation alone is linked to anxiety⁴ |
| What worked | Infrastructure | Leaving it at the office | Predictable time off, shared by a team⁵ |
Who else has measured this
William J. Becker, PhD, then Associate Professor of Management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, led the 2018 study “Killing me softly,” with Liuba Belkin of Lehigh University and Samantha Conroy of Colorado State University, on after-hours email expectations and well-being.⁴
the findings, at ScienceDaily · Virginia Tech News · Worklife Hub interview
Gloria Mark, PhD, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span (2023), measured focus and stress when people were cut off from email.¹³
UC Irvine profile of her research · her site · APA Speaking of Psychology
Nicolas Boring, writing for the Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor, summarised what the French law requires and what it does not.¹
Library of Congress report · the article in the French Labour Code
Thomas C. Jepsen, historian of telegraphy, documented women’s work in the telegraph office in My Sisters Telegraphic (Ohio University Press, 2000).¹¹
review at Project MUSE · review in Isis
Encyclopaedia Britannica supplies the two anchors: the telegraph that began it and the BlackBerry that took it home.¹⁰ ¹²
Britannica on the telegraph · Britannica on the BlackBerry
The Victorian postman went home. Nobody told your phone.
What this actually changes
It moves the problem out of your character. The heaviness of the evening is the predictable result of an expectation, and the research found that the expectation does the harm whether or not you act on it.⁴ You cannot fix an expectation by ignoring the phone harder. You fix it by changing what is expected.
It also tells you where you can push. In the United States you are not going to get a statute this year. But the most successful intervention on record did not need one. It needed a team to agree, out loud, that one person would be properly off on a given night and someone else would cover.⁵ If you lead people, you can offer that. If you do not, you can ask for it, and asking for a trial is much easier than asking for a policy.
The one move
This week, pick one evening and make it predictable. Tell the two or three people most likely to contact you: “On Thursdays I’m offline after 7. If something truly can’t wait, call [name].” Then offer to cover their evening in return.
That is the Victorian last post, rebuilt by agreement. One night, named, covered, and known in advance, which is the part that removes the watching.
The right to disconnect: questions people ask
What is the right to disconnect?
A legal protection for employees against having to monitor or respond to work contact outside working hours. The details vary by country: France requires larger companies to negotiate rules on digital tools,¹ while Australia lets employees refuse unreasonable out-of-hours contact.²
Did France ban work email after 6 p.m.?
No. The 2017 French law requires companies with fifty or more employees to negotiate with employee representatives about the use of digital tools and rest time, or to issue a charter if no agreement is reached.¹ Some individual companies and sector agreements set cut-off times, but the law itself sets none.
Is there a right to disconnect in the United States?
Not as a general law. California’s Assembly Bill 2751 proposed one in 2024 and was held in committee.³ Some employers set their own policies, and some union contracts include limits.
Can my employer still email me after hours in countries that have the law?
Generally yes. Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman notes that the right “does not prohibit employers from contacting their employees”; it protects the employee’s right not to respond unless refusing would be unreasonable.²
When is being always on worth talking to a doctor about?
When you cannot switch off even on holiday, your sleep is broken most nights, you feel dread at the sound of a notification, or you have lost interest in things you used to enjoy for more than two weeks. These can be signs of burnout, anxiety or depression, and all are treatable. A useful sentence to bring: “I haven’t been able to switch off from work for [how long], and it’s affecting my sleep and mood.”
Ten quiet minutes, when you want them
The one move
One evening a week, named in advance, with someone covering. Then return the favour.
And if the idea of being unreachable for one evening makes something in your chest tighten, that reaction is worth ten quiet minutes of its own. No advice, no programme, just the document. Start here.
The last post used to come at a quarter to eight. You are allowed to have one again.
Related reading: why you are still solving it at eleven at night, what constant interruptions cost even on a day nothing slips, and why something in you starts a timer when you sit down.
On the sources. This volume rests on museum and historical accounts of the Victorian post, one historian’s study of women telegraphers, two encyclopaedia entries, one legal report from the Library of Congress, official guidance from the Australian Fair Work Ombudsman, a trade body’s report on the California bill, and three researchers’ published work on workplace communication. We name the page-one claims we are correcting and do not link them, because a link is a recommendation.
Disclosure
This article is informational and reflects published history, law and research. It is not legal or medical advice. For your own employment rights, check your contract, your employer’s policy or a qualified adviser.
We are not historians, lawyers or clinicians. We read published research and translate it into plain English. The findings belong to the researchers and institutions named and linked above.
Blue Leaf Journal has no affiliation with, and no endorsement from, Professor Leslie Perlow, Harvard Business School, the Boston Consulting Group, William Becker, Virginia Tech, Lehigh University, Colorado State University, Professor Gloria Mark, the University of California, Irvine, Nicolas Boring, the Library of Congress, the Fair Work Ombudsman, the Society for Human Resource Management, Thomas C. Jepsen, Ohio University Press, the London Museum or Encyclopaedia Britannica. Naming their work is citation, not partnership.
No commercial relationship. Nobody named above paid for or was paid for this coverage, and there are no affiliate links in this article.
Every figure was checked against the source listed below on 27 September 2026. If you find an error or a broken link, write to editor@blueleafjournal.com and we will correct it and date the correction.
References
1. Boring, N. “France: Right to Disconnect Takes Effect.” Library of Congress, Global Legal Monitor, 13 January 2017. See also Code du travail, article L2242-17.
2. Fair Work Ombudsman. “Right to disconnect begins today.” 26 August 2024; and “Small business employees now have the right to disconnect,” 26 August 2025.
3. Society for Human Resource Management. “Right-to-Disconnect Bill Defeated.” 2024. Source for AB 2751 being held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
4. Becker, W. J., Belkin, L. Y., Conroy, S. A. and Tuskey, S. “Killing me softly: Electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being.” Academy of Management annual meeting, August 2018. Summarised by ScienceDaily, source for the Becker quotation.
5. “When the smartphones turned off.” Harvard Gazette, May 2012. Source for the predictable time off experiment, its replication across more than 1,000 teams and the Perlow quotation. Perlow, L. A., Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
6. London Museum. “The Penny Post sparked a letter-writing revolution.” Source for letter volumes and the twelve daily deliveries.
7. “Frequency of Postal Deliveries.” Victorian London, quoting Dickens’s Dictionary of London (1879) and Murray’s Handbook. Source for first and last delivery times.
8. “Remaking the Workplace, One Night Off at a Time.” Knowledge at Wharton, 2012. Source for Perlow’s survey of 1,600 managers and professionals.
9. “Letters in London: Communication and correspondence in the nineteenth-century city.” The Victorian Web. Source for the “pang” quotation.
10. “Telegraph.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
11. Jepsen, T. C. My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846 to 1950. Ohio University Press, 2000. Review at Project MUSE. Standage, T., The Victorian Internet, 1998, reference entry.
12. “BlackBerry.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
13. UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. “Regaining Focus in a World of Digital Distractions.” January 2023. Source for the email cut-off study findings.
About the researcher
Leslie A. Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Her books are Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work (2012), When You Say Yes But Mean No (2003) and Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices (1997).
HBS faculty page · reference entry · Knowledge at Wharton interview · Goodreads
Her PhD is in organisation studies. She is a management researcher, not a medical doctor or lawyer, and nothing here is clinical or legal advice.
Written by Tomasz Nowak for Blue Leaf Journal.
