“Right to Disconnect” Laws and How You Can Reclaim Your Free Time After Work

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Discover the “right to disconnect” laws implemented around the world. Learn 5 ways you can unplug after work and improve your well-being. | SUCCESS

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A woman sits in meditation pose next to a closed laptop and phone.

When’s the last time you didn’t think about work? Most people no longer clock out at the end of the workday, so work-related thoughts might be on a continual loop in your mind. This can cause stress and burnout, which take a toll on your well-being.

Australia’s Fair Work Commission recently implemented a new “right to disconnect” law, which “protects employees who refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable.” This type of legislation is being implemented in many countries globally with the aim of helping employees truly log off from work at day’s end to enjoy other facets of their lives.

The right to disconnect law helps ease employees’ fears of retaliation from their employer for not being available after working hours. However, the law also mentions specific factors that are taken into consideration regarding an employee’s refusal to engage in work matters, including whether the employee is being paid extra money to be available for work-related issues and what their role and level of responsibility is within the company.

Senator Murray Watt, Australia’s minister for employment and workplace relations, explained the crux of the law on X. “It’s really about trying to bring back some work-life balance and [making] sure that people aren’t racking up hours of unpaid overtime for checking emails and responding to things at a time that they’re not being paid,” he says.

Several other countries have right to disconnect laws in place. These include France, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. Additionally, the U.K.’s labor government is working on a “right to switch off” plan that enables employees to ignore emails and phone calls related to work after hours.

The United States does not have a similar law at the federal level. California proposed a bill that enforces employees’ right to disconnect, but the bill is currently stalled.

Being busy at work has become a badge of honor in American society, and being asked “What do you do for a living?” is the universal precursor to small talk. It’s as if our identity is wrapped up in what job we have.

We spoke with experts about the importance of having a multifaceted identity that flourishes beyond your job. Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work, says that “we should diversify our identities…. Our work might not always be there, [and] if you’ve over-identified with just one aspect of who you are and then that aspect goes away, you can be left asking, ‘What’s left?’

“We are all more than what we do for work,” he adds. “We are also artists and travelers and neighbors and friends, and all of these other identities need to be invested in as well.”

It’s wise to broaden your view of your identity, but you might be wondering how to do it. Cherylanne Skolnicki, founder and CEO of The Brilliant Balance Company, helps women “re-engineer their lives… while protecting restorative time for themselves.” She explains that “we all play so many roles within our families and communities that it can be helpful to think of ourselves as having a hyphenated title (I’m a wife-mother-daughter-owner-runner-volunteer)….

“Intentionally giving each of those roles its turn to be front and center as we move through the week (and noticing when we’re transitioning from one to the other) really helps to anchor them into our identity,” she adds.

Disconnecting from work can help you reclaim your free time so you can blossom beyond the office. But switching gears isn’t going to be as simple as closing your laptop at 5 p.m. Many of us, especially remote workers whose work-life boundaries easily blur together, lack the ability to truly power off our brains from work mode—and many feel obligated to work beyond normal working hours.

You can leave work behind at day’s end by following these expert tips:

Celeste Headlee, journalist, speaker and author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving, suggests “writ[ing] down your opening and closing times. If you go to a store, oftentimes they’ll have hours listed on the front door… I want everyone to do the same for themselves.”

“At what time does your store open?” she continues. “That’s when you start work. At what time do you close? That’s when you stop working. And that means you stop checking your e-mail inbox… It also means trying as much as possible to stop thinking about your work or worrying about your work.”

“The most effective approach to getting yourself to unplug from work is to have something else you are really looking forward to that requires you to log off,” Skolnicki says. “If I know I’m meeting a girlfriend for a walk by the river or hosting friends for dinner on our patio or taking my daughter to see a play, I am far more likely to shut down my work than if I have nothing going on… We’re so wired for connection (and accountability) that including others in our after-work plans really does increase the odds that we’ll stick to them.”

You can also try going off-grid with pastimes. “I want people to find hobbies that are just for pure enjoyment,” Headlee says. “They’re not meant to be featured on your Instagram page. They’re not meant to be something you would list on your CV or something that might build your brand. The kind of hobbies that I’m talking about are things like rock polishing or macrame knitting that [don’t] become an Etsy side business. Find stuff to do that you just like to do, that you simply enjoy, and then set aside time to do it.”

Stolzoff advises honing in on activities that require undivided attention. “There’s this concept that I really like called a time sanctuary,” he says, “which is that you can carve out space in your weeks where work is not an option.

“One of the benefits of going for a run or going to a yoga class is that they prevent you from multitasking. They make you just focus on the activity at hand,” he adds. “[So] carve out space in your days, in your weeks, in your life, where you structurally can’t work and be intentional about how you want to fill those with activities that reinforce your values.”

Smartphones have become synonymous with perpetually being on-call, and they may cause the compulsion you feel to answer emails, texts or phone calls after hours.

“Get into the practice of leaving your phone and not taking it with you everywhere you go,” Headlee advises. “I know this is difficult for a lot of people. If they walk out [of] the house and the phone is not in their hands, they experience a flash of fear or panic… but start small and maybe take one walk around your block without having your phone. Or when you sit down to watch a movie, leave your phone in another room or put it on ‘do not disturb.’”

Whether you have legislation guarding your downtime or not, everyone deserves the right to unplug from work and separate from their work identity. According to author Rick Warren, “We are human beings, not human doings”—so take some time to enjoy just being.

Photo by sattahipbeach/Shutterstock.com

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