"I check my emails on the toilet": Email Practices and Work-Home Boundary Management

Abstract

Email is widely used as a means of communication, a task \nmanagement system and an archive and it often seems impossible \nto live without it. Our always-online society expects us to be \navailable 24/7 at the cost of potentially blurring the boundaries \nbetween work and personal life. Furthermore, mobile and handheld \ndevices have made it even easier to be connected and \ntherefore increased the sense of needing to be available to respond \nat any time. Whilst research to date has focused on identifying \nemail practices on the desktop, little has been done to understand \nwhether and how the introduction of mobile devices has changed \nour way of handling emails. In this paper, we describe preliminary \nresults from an interview study that explored in particular the role \nof mobile devices in email management and work-home boundary \nmanagement. We found that mobile technology impacts even on \nthe most private of non-work moments. We provide examples of \nthe ways in which technology supports frequent switching \nbetween work and non-work contexts, and demonstrate the \nstrategies that people develop in order to manage these \nboundaries, by using what we call micro-boundaries (e.g. having \ntwo email apps on a phone).

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