Microsoft research lays bare the rise of the ‘infinite workday’

Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index Special Report, Breaking down the infinite workday, warns that the traditional boundaries of the working day have dissolved under a flood of emails, messages and meetings. Drawing on anonymised telemetry from Microsoft 365, the study argues that the contemporary knowledge worker now faces a “seemingly infinite workday” that begins before dawn and stretches deep into the evening. The day often starts before breakfast: 40 percent of users who are already online at 6 a.m. are triaging overflowing inboxes, and the average employee receives 117 emails a day—most scanned in under a minute. Mass emails sent to more than twenty recipients have risen by seven percent over the past year, while one-to-one threads are in decline.

By 8 a.m. Microsoft Teams overtakes email as the primary channel of communication for people who use Microsoft365. Workers now field an average of 153 Teams messages each weekday, with volumes rising fastest in the UK and several other regions. Each alert may appear trivial on its own, the report notes, but together they set a frenetic tempo that shapes the rest of the day.

Prime working hours offer little respite. Half of all meetings now take place between 9–11 a.m. and 1–3 p.m.—exactly when most people experience a natural productivity peak—while real-time message activity surges at 11 a.m. Employees are interrupted on average every two minutes during an eight-hour shift, amounting to 275 pings per day.

Meeting sprawl contributes further to the fragmentation of attention. Fifty-seven percent of meetings happen without a prior calendar invite, one in ten is scheduled at the last minute, and large gatherings of 65 or more participants are the fastest-growing category. Nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones, and edits to PowerPoint decks spike by 122 percent in the ten minutes before a call begins.

Working hours increasingly extend deep into the evening. Meetings starting after 8 p.m. are up 16 percent year-on-year; outside core hours the average employee now sends or receives more than fifty messages, and by 10 p.m. almost a third of active users have returned to their inboxes. Weekends are no longer sacrosanct either: nearly a fifth of employees check email before noon on Saturday or Sunday, and more than five percent resume work on Sunday evenings.

Survey responses gathered alongside the telemetry underscore the human cost: almost half of employees and a majority of leaders describe their working day as chaotic and fragmented, while one in three respondents believes the pace of work over the past five years has made it impossible to keep up.

The report concludes that while artificial intelligence may offer a route to redesigning work, organisations will need to rethink the very rhythm of the working day if they are to break the cycle of fragmentation that now characterises knowledge work.

Image: Antonio Zanchi – Sisyphus, c1660-1665