Traditional boundary advice assumes work is a discrete activity tied to specific locations and hours. Clock in, do the work, clock out, go home. Knowledge work violates this assumption completely because cognition can’t be geographically or temporally contained.

In fact, a lot of the most valuable cognitive work often occurs in diffuse attention states rather than scheduled focus blocks. Ask anyone who's wasted a couple of focus hours only to have a eureka moment on a Saturday in the park with their friends (me, ask me).

That said, there’s plenty of research to back that a complete lack of boundaries between work and life leads to chronic stress, decision fatigue, and degraded thinking quality. I mean things like interrupting personal time to work on a PRD, or taking calls during dinner with friends. In these cases, boundaries may as well be walls of cardboard that don’t serve you or the work. And ironically, rest is necessary for the kind of subconscious processing that produces insights, creating a paradox where "not working" is actually essential to working well. 

So where can a knowledge worker find some balance around here?

What engaging “after hours” can look like

In my experience, there are three types of after-hours cognitive engagement with work:

Productive processing, where subconscious processing generates novel solutions or orthogonal insights.

Anxiety loops, where repetitive rehearsal produces stress without progress. If you’ve checked your email or Slack repeatedly or impulsively, remained hung up on an upcoming review, or rehashed the same problem even in your off time without moving forward, you might be here. 

Reactive availability, where there's knee-jerk responsiveness to communication from work that fragments your attention. The ding that pulls you out of dinner. The Slack thread you jump into even though it's 9PM on a Friday and it's really not urgent. 

This last one is especially destructive for knowledge workers. More than being distracting, it prevents you from ever building the mental models that complex work requires. One interrupted deep work session can equal lost progress especially when you’re in a flow state. Chronic interruptions mean never building complex mental models at all, which means only being able to do shallow work.

This cascades: you stop taking on complex problems because you know you won't have the uninterrupted time to solve them.

In my experience, it helps to discern which type you're engaging in. You want to cultivate the first, minimise the second, and set clear constraints around the third. Of course, the factors that determine this shift constantly: your individual psychology, your workplace culture, your position in the org, your manager, and so on. No man is an island, and knowledge workers even less so. 

Discernment requires practice and attention to your levels of interest and curiosity, current boundaries, and how any "violations" make you feel.

The first and rather obvious indicator is that there’s a felt difference between the three. Productive processing has a playful, exploratory quality. You're genuinely curious about the problem, and you’re willing to put in the time and effort to solve it. Anxiety loops and reactive availability feel compulsive and draining, because you're essentially rehearsing without making progress.

Here's how I think about it: if you decided to stick to a no-work Saturday plan, but spent three glorious hours debugging code and felt really satisfied about it, how does that make you feel? How would it make you feel if you had to do this every Saturday instead of once in a while? How does it feel when it's a choice versus an imposition from a manager, or a situation where you aren’t compensated in money or time? 

Drawing from that: what are your non-negotiables? These often work as operationalised values about what kind of life you're constructing. For example, I might be willing to work on a problem of my own accord on a Saturday, but that doesn't extend to joining reviews or meetings on a Saturday. That's a clear line in the sand. 

Questions like these, applied to your boundaries and possible violations, help unblur how you engage with work after hours. 

Aiming for intentional permeability

It took me a while, but I finally arrived at a way of working and living that had a nice little compounding effect on my growth. I call it intentional permeability: boundaries that let work make my life richer, and life make my work richer.

Think back to biology classes about the cell membrane. It lets some things in and keeps other things out, adjusting what passes based on what the cell needs. My cognitive boundaries work similarly. Some inputs I let in, like a relevant article someone sends me, or a Sunday morning breakthrough. Others I keep out: Slack messages during deep work hours, work calls on the weekend, and so on. What passes through changes based on what cognitive state you're in. 

This is the opposite of hard boundaries, which try to perfectly separate work from everything else. 

In my opinion, hard boundaries fail for knowledge work because you can't firewall your consciousness. But no boundaries at all leads to burnout and resentment. 

Intentional permeability is the middle path—being deliberate about what (to beat a dead metaphor) crosses the membrane and when.

Managing expectations at work

Setting boundaries, however permeable, with those who direct your work is more often a negotiation than straight-up communication.

Boundary-setting doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have to take into consideration your company culture, team expectations, and role requirements. Your organisation's larger culture will inevitably influence how you perform and show up to work, so don't discount that even if your manager trusts you to set your own working method.

Remember that the bigger the workplace, the more likely you are to interact with people who come in with completely different notions of work and what it means to “be at work”. For some, presence = commitment. Others might expect uninterrupted stretches of deep work. You might often have to compromise while negotiating with this complex system of boundaries, which is where knowing your non-negotiables helps. 

The second half of the battle, of course, is building trust in yourself and your work. There’s several ways you could do this, and they all interact with each other.

For example, if you block off deep work time in the mornings, you could publicly document what comes out of these mornings, and why it’s been beneficial. Or, you could double down on indicating your status or availability with complete clarity. I, for example, have been known to use the Slack status emoji option to indicate where I am both physically and in terms of my focus. A third way I’ve admired but haven’t gotten around to doing is setting up a Manual of Me: A document that tells people you work with exactly what sort of working style and lines in the sand they can expect from you. 

Another thing I find helpful when respecting my boundaries is positive reframing. Set expectations about when you will be available and what someone can do when you're not, rather than when you won't be available. A former manager once set up hour-long Office Hour blocks a couple of times a week, at fixed times. He sent an email saying he’s setting up these slots for anyone who wants to discuss anything career- or work-related with him 1:1 (which also happened to be the main reason people blocked his calendar anyway). Openly creating space for these conversations actually led to people booking less of his time outside of those hours.

Companies that measure "work" by meeting attendance or immediate email/ Slack responsiveness fundamentally misunderstand knowledge work. 

Your boundaries are partly testing whether your organisation understands this. When you assert a preference, you’re also gathering information on whether this is a workplace where these preferences can exist or will be penalised. 

Managing downwards and outwards

When managing down, your practised behaviour will define real boundaries far more powerfully than your stated policies.

As a manager, you can be under scrutiny from the top and the bottom. And so my rule of thumb has always been this: anything you do should be done keeping in mind that it can be interpreted as permission (or expectations) for someone else to do it too. If you send emails at 11PM, people will think 11PM emails are normal or expected. If you respond to Slack immediately on weekends, people will think weekend Slack responsiveness is part of the job.

Worse, they might think they might be disadvantaged if they didn’t do it. Your response to someone’s reaction to their boundary being overstepped is often more important than the boundary itself, because it's a clear representation of whether there are "penalties" associated with setting boundaries in your organisation. 

It's really important to keep in mind that the ability to maintain boundaries is not equally distributed. It correlates with seniority, perceived replaceability, and social identity. The same objective behaviour carries different psychological weight for someone secure in their position versus someone proving themselves.

As a manager, you need to actively protect boundaries for less powerful team members rather than treating boundary-setting as purely individual responsibility. For example, judging output by quality of thinking rather than hours logged or responsiveness, or not expecting instant Slack responses (or at least indicating when something is urgent). 

When managing outwards—with clients, stakeholders, or cross-functional partners—the same principles apply but the stakes are different. You're often negotiating on behalf of your team's cognitive space, not just your own. This means being explicit about response times and pushing back on expectations that treat knowledge work as instantly available service work. The goal is to create conditions where deep thinking is possible, which sometimes means saying no to urgency that isn't actually urgent.

Knowing when to re-negotiate

As life and work circumstances change, your boundaries might need to be recalibrated.

To that end, it's important to reflect on boundary sustainability at least at regular milestones like promotions, new jobs, life updates. Which boundaries continue to serve you? Which ones might hinder you from growth? Adjusting what’s necessary can feel deeply uncomfortable, even lowkey threatening. At this point, your emotional signals will tell you everything you need to know. Does adjusting a boundary feel like relief or like you're compromising something essential? Resistance can mean the boundary is protecting something important, but it can also mean you're holding onto something that no longer serves you.

In my experience, self-knowledge emerges through the ongoing process of boundary negotiation rather than preceding it. It’s knowledge work of its own calibre: You experiment, notice how things feel, adjust, experiment again. The boundaries themselves teach you about what you value and what you actually need versus what you think you should need.

System vs discipline

A lot of my suggestions have been individual-focused. But I can’t finish this essay without addressing the elephant in the room: for as long as we collectively think of “butts in seats” as a leading indicator of good work, we will not do knowledge work justice.

Systemic solutions would mean redesigning around outcomes that actually matter to knowledge work.

Here’s an example. Right now, the "workday" is the base unit. But for knowledge work, maybe it should be the "project" or "problem" with flexible time allocation. Some problems need three uninterrupted days. Others need 30 minutes daily for two weeks with incubation time between. Others need sporadic attention over months as subconscious processing does its work. What if organisations explicitly budgeted for cognitive recovery and incubation as part of project timelines? 

Or this: Knowledge work often involves significant "off the clock" processing. Either accept this and compensate accordingly (in fewer “in the office” hours or financial or temporal compensation), or create structures that truly contain work to scheduled time. The current model wants both: the creative insights that require diffuse processing and the 40+ hour weeks and the constant availability.

So the deeper questions remain: How do knowledge workers sustain themselves when their minds are their primary instruments? How do we preserve autonomous selfhood when our consciousness is partially claimed by work? How do we claim agency in systems that resist boundaries by design?

I don't have complete answers. But I've found that recognising these as individual and systemic design problems rather than purely personal failings opens us up to more interesting solutions. 

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