A lot of people have expressed gratitude and admiration for these two simple sentences in my email signature:

Note: Please note I am sending this email at a time that is convenient for me. Please read and respond at a time that is convenient for you.

I added these lines after my sister mentioned seeing notes like this a lot in her work with Human Rights Watch, to the point where she added it to her own email signature.

I always thought this was just standard email etiquette: people send emails when they can; people reply when they can; people know to wait a minimum of 48 hours or up to a business week for a reply, out of consideration for other people’s lives and circumstances. (Well, reasonable people know to wait, anyway; Stephanie and Zafir—with their habitual weaponization of email for abuse and egocentric, self-important demands—keep proving me wrong.)

But when I made this unspoken rule explicit in my email signature, I was surprised by all the messages I got from colleagues, friends, and random contacts, thanking me for making it visible and asking if they could borrow my language for their own signatures (which, yes, of course). It’s shown me how much I think about protecting my time—how much I have to, because the vagaries of disability make me time-poor, constantly, in ways that academia refuses to understand—or maybe how little others think about protecting their own time, because academia privileges hyper-productivity at all costs.

Are there assholes who ignore these two sentences? Absolutely. But I’ve come to realize that a written disclaimer is a good way to protect my time. It gives me something to point to if I have to defend the temporal rhythms of my email communication.