protect off work time from work apps
This identifier was used as an evidence-review target but was never published as a canonical Brali protocol. It is retained as provenance and deliberately does not link to a public route.
Evidence Ledger · Protocol candidate · reviewed 2026-09-05
Reducing Work-Related Screen-Time in Healthcare Workers During Leisure Time (REDUCE SCREEN) – A Randomized Controlled Trial
The reviewed source can support a conservative practical protocol.
Brali decision: Protocol candidate. This page summarizes a reviewed evidence boundary; it does not reproduce the source and it does not turn one paper into a universal prescription.
What the source supports
In this healthcare-worker sample, assigning a practical package designed to reduce work-related smartphone intrusion during a genuinely off-duty weekend produced a modest additional reduction in perceived stress versus an untreated off weekend and reduced reported screen time. Brali can therefore test a bounded off-work digital-boundary protocol: when a period is truly off duty, make non-availability explicit, remove or disable the easiest work-app entry points that are not required, and restore them when the off-duty period ends.
What it does not establish
- Uninstalling work applications by itself has been proven to reduce stress; component use was self-selected within the intervention group.
- Automatic out-of-office replies by themselves reduce stress.
- All screen time should be reduced during leisure, regardless of content or purpose.
- The intervention prevents burnout, depression, anxiety, medical errors, or workforce attrition.
- The effect generalizes unchanged to non-healthcare workers, shift workers, caregivers, or people who are on call.
- One weekend is an optimal dose or proves durable long-term benefit.
- People should disable channels needed for emergencies, on-call duties, authentication, safety, or required care responsibilities.
- A one-hour reduction in screen time is a universal target or causal threshold.
Important limitations
- About 36% of randomized participants did not provide the post-weekend outcome, so attrition could bias the modified intention-to-treat result despite similar measured baseline characteristics among completers and non-completers.
- The randomized intervention was a three-component educational package, so the causal contribution of automatic replies, general screen reduction, or work-app removal cannot be isolated.
- Which components participants actually adopted was self-selected; the apparently larger stress reduction among those who removed work apps is exploratory and vulnerable to motivation and selection bias.
- The primary outcome was self-reported perceived stress measured over a short off-work weekend; burnout and long-term recovery were not established.
- Screen time came from participant-reported operating-system summaries and did not distinguish work-related from leisure-related use.
- The study was conducted in US healthcare workers, where work urgency and after-hours obligations may differ materially from other occupations.
- The protocol must not be applied to periods when the user is formally on call or must remain reachable for safety-critical responsibilities.
Source context
Reducing Work-Related Screen-Time in Healthcare Workers During Leisure Time (REDUCE SCREEN) – A Randomized Controlled Trial
- Source type: primary-study
- Design: Preregistered pragmatic parallel randomized controlled trial conducted from November 2021 to November 2023. Eight hundred fifteen healthcare workers were randomized 1:1 before a selected work-free weekend to usual behavior or a three-component educational intervention. The trial was registered before enrollment (NCT05106647). Analysts were masked to allocation until the primary analysis; participants could not be masked. Because 295 randomized participants did not provide post-weekend outcomes, the main analysis was a modified intention-to-treat analysis among 520 responders.
- Population: 815 adult US healthcare workers who routinely used a smartphone and had a work email application installed. The post-weekend analysis included 520 respondents; the modal age group was 25-34 years, 57% were women, and participants included nurses, physicians, advanced practice providers, trainees and other healthcare professionals.
- Exposure / intervention: Before an off-work weekend, participants received education encouraging three strategies: activate an automatic reply to incoming work email, reduce leisure-time screen use, and uninstall work applications from personal devices. Participants could choose to implement all, some, or none of the components. Control participants received no intervention.
- Outcomes: Perceived Stress Scale-10 after the weekend adjusted for baseline; Change in self-reported device screen time based on operating-system screen-time summaries; Exploratory associations between chosen components and stress
Citation: Bartels K, Shah K, Sanchez Rodriguez E, et al. Journal of Medical Systems. 2026;50:11.
DOI: 10.1007/s10916-026-02338-9
What this changes in Brali
Editorial note: Protocol-design direction: for a user-chosen period that is genuinely off duty, first communicate the boundary (for example, an approved away status or handoff), then disable/remove optional work-app access from the personal device or sign out of it, while preserving any explicitly required emergency/on-call channel. Restore access after the protected period. Measure whether work checking actually falls and whether subjective recovery/stress improves. Treat this as a boundary experiment, not a treatment for burnout or a blanket anti-screen rule.
Use the boundary, not just the headline
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