Managing Email Boundaries in a Boundaryless World

Abstract

Despite the emergence and proliferation of sophisticated digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), work email remains a very popular tool for work communications. And we still do not know how to manage it effectively in our increasingly ‘boundaryless world’. In this provocation, we challenge dominant prescriptive advice in academic and practitioner literature that largely promotes, and at times enforces, the (re)assertion of (temporal) email boundaries in ways that may contradict the very purpose of contemporary digital communications. We argue that this ‘boundarylessness’ of email activity is largely owed to a communication-centric flow which seems difficult to govern, and we identify three complications (flexibility paradox, time zone trap, invisible metronome) that render existing advice unsuitable (or impractical at best). We then synthesise existing literature and propose three solutions (developing a shared temporal structure, implementing task–time mapping, managing the hybridity–liminality interplay) which are better aligned with the boundarylessness of the contemporary workplace. In closing, we recommend four areas of future research (going beyond work email, generational differences in work email use, the role of AI agents in email communications, and the paradoxical impacts of digital work on the future of work).