The rise of the infinite workday

Flexible work was the promise. The infinite workday is the reality

IF IT FEELS like your workday never really ends, that’s because it doesn’t. According to Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index report, we’re now in the era of the “infinite workday” — a reality where employees are working longer, being interrupted more often and struggling to find boundaries between their jobs and their lives.

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A trend that many started experiencing during the weird days of the pandemic appears to have taken root, Microsoft suggests. “The workday often begins before a lot of people are out of bed,” they wrote, with data to suggest that even by 6 a.m. many Microsoft users are going straight to their work email. Meetings all day are then chewing up all their focus time (noting that meetings are growing in volume and “sprawl”), and the data found that “remote workers now often see evening hours as a productive window.”

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On top of all that, the data found a “notable bump in weekend email usage,” with five per cent of people doing work emails on Sunday evenings after 6 p.m. “For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos ― reacting to others’ priorities and losing focus on what matters most,” Microsoft wrote. “Too much energy is spent organizing chaos before meaningful work can begin.”

“All of this is bad news for these workers and the people in their lives. It’s also bad news for their employers,” wrote Career Self-Care author Minda Zetlin. “Time away from work also makes space for greater creativity and the kinds of innovative ideas that only seem to come up when we aren’t at our desks. It’s clear that the ‘infinite workday’ is a bad idea all the way around.”

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Microsoft’s point in bringing this up isn’t just to bemoan poor work-life balance, but to point out the trend is coming at the cusp of an AI revolution and that the creep of bad work practices puts that at risk. “AI offers a way out of the mire, especially if paired with a reimagined rhythm of work,” they argue. “Otherwise, we risk using AI to accelerate a broken system.”

“AI can give us the leverage to redesign the rhythm of work, refocus our teams on new and differentiating work, and fix what has become a seemingly infinite workday,” Microsoft wrote. “The question isn’t whether work will change. It’s whether we will.” Kieran Delamont