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

Digital work increasingly extends employees’ psychological availability beyond formal working hours, making the boundary between work and non-work more permeable. Research on work-related extended availability has consistently linked after-hours availability with impaired recovery, work-life conflict and poorer wellbeing. What remains less clear is how off-job time can become psychologically constrained even when no work is actually performed. This paper introduces psychological standby time (PST) as an off-job experiential state characterised by anticipatory readiness for possible work demands and vigilance about remaining reachable. PST arises during formally non-working periods in which no substantive work task is being performed, yet employees experience their time as only conditionally available for non-work life. Conservation of resources (COR) theory provides the primary explanatory framework by showing how standby can restrict resource replenishment while requiring continued cognitive and self-regulatory investment. Attention research clarifies the within-episode processes of readiness and vigilance, while the job demands-resources (JD-R) perspective is used to organise the work conditions and resources that may increase or reduce the likelihood of PST. The paper differentiates PST from work-related extended availability, workplace telepressure, psychological detachment, organisational e-mail monitoring expectations, after-hours work and formal on-call arrangements by advancing a specific prediction: anticipated organisational claims may constrain the usability of non-work time even when no message is received and no work is undertaken. The framework also separates PST from its consequences. PST comprises anticipatory readiness and reachability vigilance; activity foreclosure refers to the selective avoidance, postponement or modification of activities that carry high anticipated interruption costs; and repeated foreclosure may, over time, narrow the range of non-work activities employees perceive as realistically available. The framework distinguishes within-evening processes, next-morning recovery and longer-term outcomes, and offers testable propositions together with preliminary guidance for assessing PST as a fluctuating state and as a pattern of repeated exposure. The proposed relationships remain subject to empirical validation.