Since the heydays of COVID, when remote work became the norm for millions whose jobs didn’t require being physically present, many companies have reversed course—summoning employees back to offices, either full-time or in hybrid form. On the surface, remote workers may appear to be the ones who “had it easy.” But in reality, it was often employers who benefited more. Why? Because remote work helped usher in a new reality: the “Infinite Workday.”And now, new research from Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index confirms it—our workdays aren’t just longer, they’re leaking into mornings, nights, and even weekends.
The Infinite Workday: A Reality, Not a Metaphor
Microsoft’s report, based on trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals, paints a vivid picture: the modern knowledge worker is always on. Forty percent of employees are checking email before 6 a.m.—often while still in bed. By 8 a.m., Teams messages have overtaken email as the dominant form of workplace communication. From there, the day spirals into a blur of back-to-back meetings, overflowing inboxes, and app notifications that arrive, on average, every two minutes.
This barrage of interruptions turns the very hours most conducive to focus—9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m.—into a carousel of context switching. That time, driven by natural productivity peaks, is increasingly hijacked by meetings and digital noise. Microsoft found that 48% of employees, and even more leaders, describe their work as chaotic and fragmented.
Meetings, Messaging, and the Disappearing Margin
The tools meant to keep teams connected—like email, chat, and video calls—are now crowding out the mental space required for deep, strategic work. More than half of meetings today are ad hoc, meaning they’re unscheduled and reactive. Nearly a third now span multiple time zones, complicating coordination and often pushing meetings into the evening. And just before those meetings, PowerPoint edits spike by 122%, a clear sign of last-minute scrambling.
After-hours work is up too. Meetings after 8 p.m. have increased by 16% in the past year, and nearly a third of employees are still checking email at 10 p.m. Microsoft calls this the “Triple Peak” workday—where productivity surges in the morning, afternoon, and again at night.
Even weekends haven’t escaped. Twenty percent of employees are actively engaged on Saturdays and Sundays, with a notable spike in activity on Sunday evenings—a measurable version of the all-too-familiar “Sunday Scaries.”
What This Means for Workers—and Work
While some remote workers use quiet evenings to catch up on focused tasks, hybrid workers often report that late-night work feels more like pressure than opportunity. This blurring of boundaries—between work and rest, weekdays and weekends—isn’t just a scheduling issue. It’s a cultural one.
According to Microsoft, one in three workers now believes the pace of work over the last five years has become impossible to keep up with. Leaders aren’t immune either. With flat budgets and rising expectations, they too are feeling the squeeze—forced to chase productivity in a system that increasingly rewards volume over value.
Redesigning Work, Not Just Automating It
The takeaway? The problem isn’t just how long people are working—it’s what they’re working on and how. Without rethinking workflows, AI risks becoming a tool to simply accelerate burnout. But used wisely, AI could help reverse the tide: taking low-value, repetitive tasks off workers’ plates and freeing them for more meaningful, strategic work.
Microsoft encourages organizations to adopt a “Frontier Firm” mindset—rethinking traditional hierarchies, focusing on high-impact tasks, and pairing workers with AI agents that can boost efficiency without erasing boundaries. It’s a vision of work where smarter, not longer, becomes the standard.
But that future is far from guaranteed. The question isn’t just whether work will change. It’s whether we will. Go beyond the headlines…
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