Digitally mediated work permits organizational activity to cross conventional working-time boundaries with little friction, but technological reach does not establish legitimate authority to demand continuing availability. Existing evidence connects extended availability, response pressure, boundary crossing, and impaired recovery, yet these relationships are heterogeneous and often treated as individual self-management problems. This Original Governance Framework Article develops a non-empirical approach for designing temporal boundaries and recovery rights while preserving narrowly defined operational continuity. Its principal contribution is the proposed Temporal-Boundary Governance Framework, integrating protected nonavailability, transparent availability norms, an exception-legitimacy gate, restorative duties, distributed organizational responsibility, purpose-limited monitoring, and periodic review. The framework distinguishes technological capability from legitimate demand, autonomy from responsibility transfer, recovery opportunity from guaranteed psychological recovery, formal policy from enacted managerial practice, and continuity from routine responsiveness. It proposes that after-hours demands should be governed through explicit defaults, role-specific authorization, necessity, proportionality, limited duration, nonretaliation, and restoration following approved exceptions. Organizations should evaluate not only contact frequency but also predictability, power, workload, inferred urgency, employee voice, and cumulative recovery disruption. These propositions require multilevel, longitudinal, experimental, qualitative, and comparative testing. The framework does not establish legal entitlements, safe thresholds, causal effects, universal applicability, or implementation readiness. Its original value lies in recasting always-on work as an allocative and accountability problem: who may claim employees’ time, under what conditions, through which safeguards, and with what obligations after temporal boundaries are crossed.
