Of course, it’s not going to alter how we work overnight, but it might just be the start of a revolution that forces us to rethink the role and importance we place on work, often to the detriment of everything outside it.

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We are not alone in contemplating these tricky questions. Almost a decade ago, France mandated that every company with more than 50 employees establish clear guidelines for after-hours communication, followed by countries from Spain to Slovakia, Argentina to the Philippines.

Many good workplaces would already have their own version of a ‘right-to-disconnect’ in place, based on transparent conversations with mangers and healthy boundaries. But for not-so-good workplaces, there’s now a legal reminder that people need to have a life outside of work, and that time should be fiercely protected.

The point of the law is not so workers can be lazy, shirk responsibility or give two fingers to their bosses. The extremely logical reason for them is that happy workers are better workers. If you want a content and healthy employee in the workplace, you need to give them space and time to be content and healthy outside it.

I’m an optimist at heart, which means I choose to see through the fog of uncertainty around this new law to recognise the hope on which it is built. I hope that the right-to-disconnect can be the start of an overdue conversation we need to have around genuine life-work balance.

I hope it means that every workplace will learn how to treat employees with the respect they deserve, especially around the number of hours they’re contracted. I genuinely hope that it will foster long-term changes to how we as a nation currently think about overtime and overwork.

But I’m also a realist. I know it’s going to take time for workplaces to grapple with it all. It might be full of tension at the start, but eventually the fabric of our workplaces will remould themselves around the happiness of workers, and that’s when we’ll know that the revolution is here.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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