We Have A 24-Hour Workday

Despite legal requirements that limit many workdays to eight hours, most workers today can never really disconnect from their jobs.

The Big Picture: Today’s average worker has a workday that starts before they wake up, continues after they’ve gone to sleep, and even dominates their weekend. Remote workforces and corporate communications apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams have trapped people in a perpetual work loop — a recipe for burnout.

Clocking In: Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report has some troubling findings for employees everywhere.

• Jobs that require a computer ping their workers an average of 275 times per day, or once every 1.75 minutes.
• Globally distributed workforces require companies to hold 1 in 5 meetings out of their employees’ “regular” work hours, and the average employee either sends or receives over 50 messages outside of those same hours.
• More than half of all meetings are held without being scheduled in advance on a calendar, and 10% are booked without prior notice.

(Not) Clocking Out: The pandemic and the rise of remote work triggered this trend, but return-to-office mandates aren’t fixing or counteracting it. The 24-hour workday is the new state of labor, and it’s likely to cause burnout more quickly than the 9-to-5 cycle did.

Prediction: If companies don’t work to solve this problem, expect higher employee turnover to further accelerate AI’s replacement of humans in the workforce.