Why your workday never ends, and how Microsoft thinks AI might fix it

Turns out, Narayana Murthy might be winning – whether we like it or not. The Infosys co-founder sparked collective groans last year when he urged India’s youth to clock 70-hour workweeks. At the time, it felt like a throwback to the industrial grind. But reading Microsoft’s latest 2025 Work Trend Index, one starts to wonder if Murthy was just pointing out the obvious, that we’re already working that much. We just didn’t realize it.

The new data paints a picture that’s both sobering and familiar. According to trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals, the average knowledge worker’s day starts before sunrise and ends somewhere between inbox zero and a Sunday-night panic scroll. No punch cards. Just an unspoken understanding that your phone is always within reach – and so is your boss.

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Microsoft calls it the “infinite workday.” You and I might call it just a regular Wednesday.

According to Microsoft’s report, “infinite workday” is nothing but a full-cycle grind that begins even before we’re out of bed, peaks at the precise moment we’re meant to be most productive, and doesn’t really taper off until Sunday evening dread rears its head again.

Three sobering facts from the report deserve your pause:

1. Emails are now being checked before 6 am by 40% of users. We’ve trained ourselves to wake and scroll as though inboxes are breakfast.
   
2. The average worker receives 153 Teams messages daily – up 6% year-over-year. In other words, the tempo of our day is being set by pings, not by our own priorities.
   
3. Employees are interrupted every 2 minutes on average. Focus time? What focus time? It’s a mirage we keep on chasing but never quite seem to reach.

The report is damning in its findings, to say the least, suggesting how the modern worker isn’t just busy, but besieged from all possible sides. Evenings now come with an unofficial third shift – what Microsoft calls the “triple peak” workday – where inboxes flare up again by 10 pm. Meanwhile, weekends are no longer sacred. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint usage quietly spikes on Saturdays and Sundays as knowledge workers seek solace in undisturbed productivity, while nearly one in five people are actively emailing before noon on weekends. Long story short, they are no longer rest days.

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I see this in my own life to some extent, often feeling like I’m assembling a bike every time I want to take a ride – too much prep, too little movement. Microsoft’s point isn’t that this is the endgame, but that it’s unsustainable. They’re proposing a rethink with the help of AI tools.

The solution? Enter the “Frontier Firm” – Microsoft’s term for a new kind of organization where humans and AI agents work in tandem, and work itself is redesigned, not just repackaged. This isn’t just about faster automation but intentional transformation.

Here’s what Microsoft says needs to change:

1. Work smarter with the 80/20 rule

If you thought AI is going to eliminate all your work, you need to think again. Microsoft suggests using AI to isolate the 20% that drives 80% of the results. Use AI intelligently to cut the noise and streamline the churn. Let AI draft those meeting notes, crunch the baseline data, and sort low-priority emails. The goal is leverage, not labour. This will free up your time for doing real and rewarding work.

2. Shift from org charts to “Work Charts”

Forget rigid org charts where everything lives in departmental silos – marketing handles messaging, finance owns budgets, analytics sits somewhere down the hall. In the age of AI, that structure only slows you down, according to Microsoft.

Instead, Microsoft is proposing a “Work Chart” model – lean, AI-assisted teams that form dynamically around specific goals. For example, if a retail brand needs to launch a new summer product line, traditionally that means looping in a marketing strategist, a finance lead, someone from data, someone from product – and spending a week just scheduling meetings.

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Now imagine a product manager spinning up a nimble team with AI agents trained on historical campaign data, pricing trends, and inventory projections. Within minutes, the AI drafts a launch brief, proposes pricing tiers based on demand signals, and suggests optimal ad channels – no need to tap five separate departments for every piece.

That’s how agencies like Supergood (formerly Supernatural) already work. Employees use AI tools with deep domain knowledge to move faster, skip the back-and-forth, and stay focused on outcomes – not process. It’s a modular, outcome-driven way to work – and it’s coming for more than just ad agencies.

3. Become an “agent boss.”

This may be the most personal idea in the mix. An “agent boss” isn’t a manager in the traditional sense, but someone who augments their role with AI copilots. Microsoft researcher Alex Farach, for instance, uses three distinct agents daily – one pulls fresh studies, another analyzes data, the third drafts briefs. He delegates the drudgery to stay focused on strategic insight. It’s a compelling preview of the hybrid mind at work, one I can only hope becomes more prevalent as AI agents become mainstream.

To be clear, none of this means the end of long hours or late-night replies. But it does suggest a way out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves, which is mistaking busyness for effectiveness.

AI’s promise lies in its ability to rebalance – not just the workload, but the way we perceive time and purpose. It offers us a shot at reclaiming deep work, recalibrating rhythms, and making the hours we do spend actually count.

The real challenge, as Microsoft hints, isn’t whether work will change. It’s whether we will. That’s the only way the future of work won’t be about doing more, but about finally doing less – with better results.

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Jayesh Shinde

Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile