If you’ve ever complained that the modern workday is unending, you may be right.
According to a new report from Microsoft, employees are now experiencing an “infinite workday” of constant emails, meetings and notifications. They check their emails as early as 6 a.m., juggle meetings through the afternoon and then stay online well into the night.
Simply put, “it’s a very long day,” says Alexia Cambon, senior research director at Microsoft.
Beyond the extended hours, workers are beset with notifications. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday.
As a result, people are feeling overwhelmed: 48% of employees and 52% of leaders reported that work feels “chaotic and fragmented” in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey, and 80% of global workers said they lack sufficient time and energy to do their work.
“We know from survey data that people are feeling very burnt out,” Cambon says. “The multiplication, the intensity and the length of the workday is really creating a lot of friction for a lot of employees.”
According to Cambon, part of the root cause of the infinite workday is that work models haven’t evolved with the times.
Take meetings, for example: “It used to be that a meeting was the only way for us to really exchange information and progress items forward,” Cambon says.
Now, workers can easily connect asynchronously, but synchronous meetings still take up a significant part of the workday. Nearly a third of meetings take place across multiple time zones, and meetings that take place after 8 p.m. have increased by 16% year over year.
“I think we’re working with a lot of outdated modes,” Cambon says.
Additionally, technology has given us near-constant virtual access to each other, making it difficult to truly detach from work. On average, workers send or receive over 50 messages outside of “core business hours.”
Cambon says that the remote work boom caused by the pandemic “erased some of the boundaries between work and life.”
“All of the signals that we usually relied on to tell us when to begin work and when to end work were no longer there,” she says.
Because of all these competing demands on our attention, Cambon says, “we really can’t spend our precious time and energy – which are very finite resources – on the things that matter.”
Based on Microsoft’s data, Cambon predicts that workplaces will mitigate these issues by shifting certain responsibilities from human employees to AI agents.
“By deploying AI and agents to streamline low-value tasks — status meetings, routine reports, admin churn — leaders can reclaim time for what moves the business: deep work, fast decisions and focused execution,” the Microsoft report says. Microsoft has invested heavily in artificial intelligence.
Cambon echoes the sentiment: “A lot of the work that we are doing now, a lot of the pain that we are feeling, we will pass on to agents.”
In the meantime, she emphasizes the importance of setting boundaries and making time for human connection to avoid burnout. Taking breaks and chatting with colleagues “is actually essential to work – it’s not separate from it,” Cambon says.
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