Rise of the «Infinite Workday» – 40% of Employees Check Email Before 6 a.m., Evening Meetings Up 16%

Professionals, are experiencing an «infinite workday» with 40% checking email before 6 a.m. and meetings after 8 p.m. increasing 16% year-over-year, according to a new Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report released today. The global study, which analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, including Switzerland among the 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets surveyed, reveals how the traditional 9-to-5 workday has evolved into a continuous cycle of digital communication.

The average employee now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily, with Tuesday emerging as the week’s busiest day for meetings (23%). The report identifies a «triple peak» workday pattern, with nearly a third (29%) of active workers returning to their inboxes by 10 p.m. Weekend work is also on the rise, with 20% of employees actively working on weekends checking email before noon on Saturday and Sunday.

The study reveals that employees are interrupted every two minutes – 275 times per day – by meetings, emails or chat notifications. Half of all meetings occur during peak productivity hours (9-11 a.m. and 1-3 p.m.), leaving little room for deep focus work. Additionally, 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without calendar invites, and PowerPoint edits spike 122% in the final 10 minutes before meetings.

From the article: 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without calendar invites

This behavior is infuriating. It's the same as self-centered asses who'd just tromp up to someone's desk and start right into what they need.

Thankfully, you can set Microsoft Teams so that you won't receive call notifications. No meeting - no call.

From what I've seen, the chat functions are for people lower performing individuals and those on mobile phones who are sitting in other meetings.

Short snippets, not well thought out, require back and forth volleyball to get to what the slacker really wants - all of which could have been avoided with one well-written email.

As it is, I often have to take some twit's chat messages, rewrite them for clarity and legibility, and then email them to someone else anyway - while courtesy copying the twit who sent the chat message.

Working from home was a big productivity improvement for me. No interruptions from people randomly walking around the office. No interruptions from loud phone conversations in adjacent offices. Almost no "meetings" where you are drawn into a conference room for no reason to listen to yammering that isn't getting your tasks done. No time lost to commuting to/from the office. More efficient meal breaks with the food in the kitchen instead of driving away from the physical office to a food joint.

There is a down side to "working from home". The down side is that you are always at the office. Co-workers in other time zones don't respect time boundaries on the work day. It's particularly bad when you have project team mates in Australia, Oregon, Ohio, Massachusetts and Paris, France while operating from Idaho. My last project had team members from Hawaii to Pennsylvania. Less stressful than the addition of Europe and Australia.

Working from home is a "win" for the customer. There is no overhead charge for a physical office for staff on the project. The staff members shoulder the expense for phone, internet connectivity, electricity, office space.

The narrow focus on "checking e-mail" is a nothing burger compared to updating 7 git repos with multiple gigabytes of download, then 40 minutes to rebuild the software suite to the point where you can just do the first login. By the time I returned to work last November, my i7 laptop with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB NVMe was insufficient to run the suite. Too few CPU cores. Too little memory. Beyond running out of budget to pay me, the hardware provided to support the project had been eclipsed. It was $8000 new and no longer up to the job. Almost everyone remaining on the project was going to need more capable hardware.

When I worked at PacBell, multiple productivity studies were conducted on the software development staff. The person doing the studies was Larry Constantine. His discoveries were published in "Peopleware". A key learning was productivity was very related to achieving "flow" in the thought process. Getting to flow state typically takes 15 to 20 minutes. An environment that interrupts getting to flow every 15 minutes destroys productivity. The more densely office staff is packed in an office, the more probable that noise from a phone or conversation will interrupt getting to "flow". Controlling interruption from phone calls is critical to productivity. At 46 square feet of floor space for an employee, the noise density destroys any hope of "flow".

Peopleware is in a 3rd edition now with DeMarco and Lister as the principals. The latest version builds on the original principles learned. Certainly worth having as both a software developer or team leader.

In the context of the modern office, a cell phone loaded with apps that send notifications falls squarely in the realm of controlling interruptions from your phone. If it is interrupting you at least every 15 minutes, your productivity is going down the toilet.

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