Psychological standby time: how anticipated work claims quietly constrain evenings without any work being done

An employee can spend an entire evening without answering a single work message, completing a single task, or opening a single email, and still feel that the evening was never fully their own. They may skip the film they wanted to watch, cut a walk short, or keep their phone face-up and audible, all because work might arrive. A new conceptual paper published in Frontiers in Human Dynamics on 26 October 2026 argues that this experience deserves a name of its own: psychological standby time (PST), an off-job state in which no substantive work is performed yet part of a person’s attention and behavioural freedom remains reserved for a possible organisational claim. The author, Nthabeleng Innocentia Mdhluli of the Department of Industrial and Organisational Psychology at the University of South Africa, proposes the construct as a way of explaining why digitally connected employees may find their non-working time only conditionally usable even when nothing actually happens.

The paper builds on a well-established body of research showing that after-hours availability carries real costs. Studies of work-related extended availability consistently associate being reachable outside working hours with impaired recovery, greater work-life conflict and poorer wellbeing, and recent syntheses indicate that off-hours smartphone use for work is reliably linked to work-life conflict. Related constructs have refined this picture: workplace telepressure describes a preoccupation with, and urge to respond quickly to, message-based communication; organisational e-mail monitoring expectations capture perceived demands to monitor work communication after hours and have been linked to anxiety, attention-allocation conflict and impaired detachment; and psychological detachment research examines how fully employees mentally disengage from work during their free time. What these perspectives leave less clearly specified, Mdhluli argues, is the immediate experiential condition through which off-job time becomes constrained when no substantive work is taking place at all.

PST is defined as an off-job experiential state in which employees remain mentally prepared for a possible work demand and vigilant about remaining reachable while performing no substantive work. The author is careful about what the construct is not: it is not a period of time, not a job demand, not a behavioural outcome and not an organisational expectation. It is a psychological state that may occupy part or all of an off-job period, with an intensity reflecting the strength of experienced readiness, a duration reflecting the length of a standby episode, and a frequency reflecting how often such episodes occur. Crucially, once an employee begins reading, composing or acting on work-related content, the interval is reclassified as after-hours work rather than pure standby. The construct also differs from formal on-call arrangements, in which readiness is contractually designated, scheduled and often compensated; PST instead captures informal readiness generated through organisational norms, digital cues and expectations of continual accessibility.

The proposed state comprises two components. Anticipatory readiness is the cognitive-affective element: maintaining preparedness for a possible work demand while reserving some attentional capacity for it, so that a person feels unable to become fully absorbed because part of their attention stays reserved. Reachability vigilance is the attentional-behavioural element: sustaining awareness of one’s accessibility and of the channels through which a work claim could arrive, without engaging with work content, for example keeping the work phone audible and nearby while remaining alert to possible contact. The author prefers ‘vigilance’ to ‘monitoring’ precisely because monitoring could imply active checking, which would breach the defining boundary that no substantive work is occurring. Neither component requires overt checking behaviour, and an expectation to remain available does not by itself constitute PST unless it is accompanied by experienced readiness or vigilance.

The most distinctive behavioural prediction of the framework concerns what Mdhluli terms activity foreclosure: the selective non-initiation, postponement or modification of non-work activities because anticipated interruption would be costly. The mechanism is anticipated interruption cost rather than a simple active-versus-passive leisure distinction. Activities requiring continuity, temporal commitment, social obligation, physical distance from communication channels or costly restart, such as watching a film, attending a live performance or undertaking a complex craft project, become less attractive under standby, whereas a short interruptible walk near home remains feasible. The framework therefore avoids assuming that passive leisure is uniformly less restorative; recovery depends on the experiences an activity affords, including detachment, relaxation, mastery, control and meaningful social connection, and foreclosure should impair recovery only when it removes access to activities the employee experiences as restorative, meaningful or socially important.

Across repeated episodes, the theory proposes a cumulative consequence: a narrowing of the activity horizon, meaning the range of non-work activities an employee perceives as realistically available. This narrowing is not expected to occur through deliberate withdrawal but through gradual non-initiation, as activities whose completion becomes uncertain lose their appeal. The author links this to theories of adaptive goal disengagement, which hold that people reduce investment in goals that become persistently difficult or costly to pursue. Because the adjustment may develop slowly, employees may not readily recognise how anticipated work demands have shaped their activity repertoire, and conventional wellbeing measures rarely capture activities that were never started because interruption was anticipated. The framework also suggests that recurrent anticipatory readiness may make immersive flow experiences harder to achieve and may render social commitments provisional, leaving family and friends with an employee who is physically present but only partially available psychologically, though these remain theoretical expectations rather than established effects.

The theoretical architecture rests primarily on conservation of resources theory, which explains why psychologically reserved off-job time may be consequential: employees may nominally possess free time yet be unable to invest it confidently in recovery, relationships or valued pursuits, while anticipatory readiness and reachability vigilance themselves demand continued cognitive and self-regulatory investment. Standby thus simultaneously restricts resource replenishment and continues resource expenditure, and repeated episodes that disrupt replenishment across successive recovery periods may contribute to cumulative emotional exhaustion. Attention research supplies the within-episode account: anticipatory readiness involves maintaining a partial attentional set for a possible future signal, a process that resembles but is distinct from attention residue, which concerns lingering attention from a previous task rather than prospective allocation towards a future demand. Research on interruptions suggests that uncertainty about potential disruptions can increase cognitive load, and the framework extends this logic by proposing that costs may arise before any interruption occurs. The job demands-resources perspective serves a third, separate function, organising antecedent conditions: availability ambiguity, unpredictable after-hours demands, persistent digital cues and responsiveness norms may act as demands, while clear availability expectations, boundary-respecting leadership and recovery-supportive climates may act as resources.

The paper sets out seven formal propositions and, importantly, specifies the conditions under which the construct would fail. PST should predict activity foreclosure on evenings when no message is received and no work is performed; higher evening PST should predict poorer next-morning recovery after accounting for work-related extended availability, telepressure, psychological detachment, monitoring expectations, anxiety and actual after-hours work; and its behavioural effect should be selective, targeting activities with high anticipated interruption costs rather than producing a general shift in leisure. If telepressure, detachment, monitoring expectations, anxiety and enacted after-hours work fully account for the proposed activity-choice and recovery pathways, the author concedes that PST would amount to relabelling rather than theoretical extension. Support would be strongest where employees perform no actual work and feel little immediate response pressure yet still preserve interruptibility, avoid high-interruption-cost activities and show poorer recovery, a pattern that makes the claim directly falsifiable.

On measurement, the author proposes assessing anticipatory readiness with items such as feeling a need to stay mentally ready in case work arose, and reachability vigilance with items about remaining alert to possible contact, while measuring activity foreclosure separately so the state is not defined by its own consequences. Daily standby would be captured through intensity and duration, whereas chronic exposure should be derived from repeated observations across days or weeks using episode frequency, average intensity and cumulative duration, rather than inferred from a single global retrospective item. Diary and experience-sampling designs are highlighted as particularly suitable for capturing within-person fluctuations, same-evening activity choices and next-morning recovery, with longitudinal designs needed to test whether repeated standby precedes narrowing of the activity horizon or emotional exhaustion.

The practical implications are framed as theoretically informed propositions rather than established interventions. If future research confirms that PST independently impairs recovery, then reducing uncertainty around after-hours availability may help even when the volume of actual after-hours work is low: explicit response windows, defined periods of non-availability, delayed message delivery, notification buffering and reduced after-hours visibility are all suggested as testable design options. Leadership behaviour is likely to matter, since managers define the meaning of after-hours communication, and predictable routines plus explicit reassurance that delayed responses are acceptable may reduce uncertainty. Formal right-to-disconnect policies, however, do not necessarily eliminate telepressure or implicit reachability expectations, so their effectiveness should be judged by whether employees actually experience less readiness and vigilance rather than by whether a policy exists. Individual practices such as silencing notifications may help some employees but are unlikely to suffice where organisational norms continue to signal that constant availability is valued. Every relationship in the framework remains subject to empirical validation, and the author’s central question is deliberately modest: whether the conditional reservation of off-job time is a distinct and consequential feature of digitally mediated work, or whether existing constructs already explain everything it describes.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework proposing psychological standby time as an off-job state linking digital availability to constrained non-work activity and employee wellbeing

Article Title: Time held in reserve: psychological standby time and the link between digital availability and employee wellbeing

Article References: Mdhluli, N. I. (2026). Time held in reserve: psychological standby time and the link between digital availability and employee wellbeing. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, 1962159. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1962159

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1962159

Keywords: psychological standby time, digital availability, employee wellbeing, recovery, activity foreclosure, workplace telepressure, psychological detachment, conservation of resources theory, job demands-resources, after-hours communication, work-life boundaries, organisational e-mail monitoring expectations