At 10:47 p.m., a WhatsApp message arrives from work. It does not say “urgent.” It does not say “tomorrow.” It simply exists, glowing on the screen. The sender can see that it was delivered. Maybe, soon, they will see that it was read. Suddenly, doing nothing feels like a response. This is the small psychological trick behind permanent availability. The phone does not order us to work; it makes absence visible.
Pakistan did not invent after-hours work, and WhatsApp is hardly the only culprit. But the combination of cheap instant messaging, blurred office hours, hierarchy, and a culture that often treats responsiveness as courtesy has created a peculiar expectation: if you can be reached, perhaps you should be reachable. The green dot becomes less a technical status than a social one. “Online” can quietly start to mean available. “Seen” can start to mean acknowledged. A delayed reply can feel less like a boundary and more like a statement.
There is evidence that this is more than a minor annoyance. A 2024 study of 300 employees in Pakistan’s textile industry found that after-hours electronic communication expectations were associated with lower job satisfaction, with work-family interference and emotional exhaustion helping to explain the effect.
Another Pakistan-based study, using 205 supervisor-subordinate pairs in the technology and service sectors, linked job demands to late-night smartphone use for work and found that unchecked connectivity after hours carries behavioural costs beyond simple fatigue. The scale of the habit is visible in broader regional data, too. In March 2026, Dawn reported on a Kaspersky survey across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa in which 83 per cent of employees said they monitored office work outside working hours, while 85 per cent said they replied to work messages on instant messaging apps during off-hours.
The problem is not the occasional late message. Real work sometimes spills over. Emergencies happen. Deadlines do not always respect the clock. The deeper problem is when exceptional access becomes ordinary etiquette. Then employees are no longer deciding whether a message requires attention; they are deciding what their silence might communicate. That is where availability becomes a social obligation.
In many Pakistani workplaces, responsiveness carries moral language. The person who replies quickly is "committed." The one who stays visible in the group is "cooperative." A junior employee who leaves a manager on read may worry that a neutral delay will be interpreted as attitude.
In many Pakistani workplaces, responsiveness carries moral language. The person who replies quickly is “committed.” The one who stays visible in the group is “cooperative.” A junior employee who leaves a manager on read may worry that a neutral delay will be interpreted as an attitude problem. Nobody needs to issue a formal rule because the social rule is already understood.
This is especially powerful when WhatsApp mixes professional and personal spaces. Email at least looks like work. WhatsApp sits beside family groups, school updates, friends, delivery riders, and the person asking whether you are coming to dinner. Work is no longer entering a separate inbox; it is entering the same room as the rest of life.
The Friday Times has previously examined the health hazards of “WhatsApp offices.” The next step is to recognise that the pressure is not only technological. It is interpretive. Employees are constantly reading meaning into timestamps, typing indicators, blue ticks, and response gaps. This is why a right to disconnect cannot be reduced to telling people to mute notifications. A muted phone can still produce anxiety if the workplace culture says a good employee should have answered. The healthier question is not, “Can we contact people after hours?” It is, “What meaning do we attach when they do not respond?”
Managers can change that meaning surprisingly quickly. A late message can carry a simple line: “For tomorrow, no reply needed tonight.” Teams can distinguish actual emergencies from ordinary continuity. Leaders can stop rewarding instant responses as proof of loyalty. And employees should not have to perform online presence simply to prove they care about their jobs. There is also room for a more mature social norm. Availability should be negotiated by role and urgency, not inferred from the fact that someone owns a smartphone.
A Text Tease essay on turning “This Message Is Unavailable” into a boundary cue captures a useful idea in a different context: not every silence or delayed reply requires an explanation. Sometimes restricted access is the message. That sounds obvious until the green dot appears. Digital tools were supposed to make communication easier. They did. But easier communication also made non-communication more visible. We gained speed and accidentally created a new form of social accounting, where every delay can feel measurable.
The solution is not to romanticise the pre-WhatsApp office or pretend that modern work can return to nine-to-five boundaries. It is to stop confusing technical reachability with human availability. A person can be online and still be off work. A message can be delivered and still wait until morning. A delayed response can mean nothing more dramatic than a life happening elsewhere. The green dot tells us that a device is connected. We are the ones who decided it means the person is on call.