Work Messages After Hours: How Much Should You Put Up With?

The 9:23 PM KakaoTalk

I was lying on the couch watching YouTube after dinner. 9:23 PM. A KakaoTalk notification appeared.

Manager: "Any chance you could put together the API spec before tomorrow morning's meeting?"

I read it. The read receipt was already gone — no pretending I hadn't seen it. I had to respond.

I started typing "sure, no problem" — then deleted it. Honestly, I didn't want to do anything after work today. But saying "I can't" felt... wrong somehow. I ended up sending "sure, I'll come in early tomorrow morning and do it."

After sending it, YouTube stopped being fun. My brain had already started organizing the API spec. By 10 PM, I was on my laptop.

Work KakaoTalk Is a Cultural Thing in Korea

I told a friend who works at a foreign company about this. "Why not just look at it tomorrow when you get to work?" he said. In theory, he's right. After-hours work messages are an intrusion on personal time.

But in Korean IT companies, doing that makes you "the person who's slow to respond." Nobody says anything directly. But it quietly affects your reputation. "That person's unreachable after hours" — that kind of thing.

Slack is at least a bit better. You can set your status to "away" and people will understand. But KakaoTalk is different. It's a personal messenger being used as a work tool, so there's no boundary.

Group Chat Hell

Individual KakaoTalks are one thing, but work group chats are the real problem.

In our team group chat, messages come in at 11 PM. "Please check this." "Sharing tomorrow's meeting agenda." "Can someone look at the server logs?" If you don't read them, red numbers pile up. The next morning, you scroll up trying to catch up on the thread.

One weekend, 64 messages had accumulated in the group chat. Reading them all Monday morning took 23 minutes. Of those, 2 were relevant to me.

(But to filter out those 2, I had to read all 64, so it amounts to the same thing.)

Is Refusing Even Possible?

Legally, yes. The "right to disconnect" from after-hours work communication is being discussed, and countries like France have already codified it into law.

But practicing it in reality is tough. Especially in startups or small teams. If I don't look at it, someone else has to deal with it. That makes me feel guilty. Guilt means I end up looking.

I tried it once. Turned off Slack and work KakaoTalk notifications after hours. Did it for two weeks.

Result: work was fine. Actually urgent things came via phone call, and everything else could wait until the next day. But the problem was my own head. "What if something critical comes up?" — that anxiety never left. Even with notifications off, I found myself opening the app to check.

Whose Fault Is This?

I can't just blame the manager. The manager doesn't want to be sending KakaoTalks at 9 PM either. Someone above them made an urgent request, or they realized too late that materials were missing for tomorrow morning's meeting.

It's a structural problem. Timelines are always tight, there's no slack in the system, so work overflows past working hours. This isn't something one person can fix.

Still, tonight I read the KakaoTalk and opened my laptop. The reason I did it tonight instead of coming in early tomorrow was so I could have a relaxed morning.

Whether this choice was mine or manufactured by the environment — I'm honestly not sure.