The following is a brief question for you: It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, your eyes have just adjusted to the light flowing through the curtains and your nervous brain slowly. What is the first thing you do? Well, if you are like about half a population, you will reach your cellphone and check your work email as part of your morning ritual.
Okay, this is another one: It’s 10 pm and you will turn off the bedroom lights, what is the last thing you do? Once again, for about one third of us, we will check our email as one of the final actions before going to bed.
Checking email is one of the final actions for many of us before going to bed.Credit: Ljubaphoto
We have never been fully deadly from work, from early light to late at night, and this developing trend even has a new name: an infinite working day.
Most workers are included in one of two categories – segments and integrators – depending on how proficient you are in separating your work schedule and life. However, new research shows that it is increasingly difficult to separate the two when technology increases and expectations increase.
Every time you open an email, send a private message or type sentences using a Microsoft product, the click is captured. This trillions of data points are then gathered anonymously to give us interesting insight into how real people spend their working days – and this year’s data is confrontation.
The average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside of core working hours.
Annual Report of the 2025 Work Trend Index Microsoft found that many office workers began checking their emails in the morning, before switching to instant communication channels such as the team at 8 am. Now, I don’t need to remind you of the additional problems brought by this new technology, but research shows the number of messages received by workers in the Microsoft team rose 6 percent of the years-to-year, on average 153 per working day.
At noon, which was once considered as our most productive window, usually consumed by landslides meetings in calendars, in the afternoon spent trying to follow the information touched.
But the clearest indicator of an unlimited working day occurs later – Yes, you can close your laptop screen, or go home from the office, but the work still stretches until night.
