Workers around the world are having a hard time keeping up with overflowing inboxes, late-night meetings and work that floods into the weekends, a new report from Microsoft reveals.
For many, the workday has become an exercise in navigating chaos.
In a typical workday, by 6 a.m., 40% of Microsoft 365 users are scanning message after message in Outlook, hoping to get ahead of the day’s priorities, the Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Special Report shows.
“By 8 a.m., Microsoft Teams overtakes email as the dominant communication channel, shifting the day into high gear,” the report states.
By 11 a.m. — peak productivity for many — the frenzy escalates as messaging activity explodes, with 54% of users active. The report states that’s the most overloaded hour of the day, “as real-time messages, scheduled meetings, and constant app switching converge, making focus on any one task nearly impossible.”
“The numbers were telling us that work is increasingly bleeding into the evenings,” Ray Smith said. Smith covers career and workplace issues for the Wall Street Journal and reviewed the new data.
“Meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% and many workers are checking emails later at night,” he added. Flexible working arrangements and geographically dispersed teams were responsible for much of that increase, the report found.
The software giant analyzed data from users of Microsoft 365 services globally between mid-January and mid-February. Data reveals that the average worker receives 153 Teams messages per weekday and 117 average emails each workday. Messages per person are also up 6% year-over-year globally.
“We were really struck by just how much we saw (the number of emails) go up,” Smith said. “I think people feel compelled to answer emails, even if they get them at night.”
The report also reveals that 57% of meetings happen on the fly without a calendar invite — and 1 in 10 scheduled meetings are booked at the last minute.
Burnout on the horizon
With such a frenetic pace of messages, interruptions and meetings, many employees are heading toward collapse, Smith said.
“We are definitely seeing burnout as one of the results of all this extra work,” Smith said. Smith said statistics from the job review site Glassdoor show that mentions of burnout by employees jumped 32% in the first quarter of 2025 from a year earlier — the highest level in nearly a decade.
Smith thinks some of the lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis have been lost, when more and more workers began to emphasize a work-life balance. Another lesson that’s been forgotten, he said, is the idea of “we’re going to own our nights and weekends and protect them.”
“That seems to have gone out the window,” Smith said.
Today’s slow labor market has most likely fed into this infinite workday phenomenon, Smith said.
“Companies have been slowing hiring, so that means that less people have more work to do,” he said. “A lot of us are overloaded with meetings, back-to-back, that take up a lot of time.”
As a result, most workers find themselves at the end of the day not having gotten enough work done.
“We now have fewer resources to do a lot more,” he said.
The study offered ways to cope with a never-ending workday. Some actions where employers can rein in the chaos includes following the 80/20 rule. That method has employees focus on the 20% of work that delivers 80% of a company’s outcomes.
The study also recommends redesigning organization charts into work charts, which are more of an agile and outcome-driven model where teams form around a goal.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
