Why Your 9-to-5 Feels More Like 24/7, Report Says

One in three employees feels that the pace of work in today's world has become impossible to keep up with, new research by Microsoft MSFT found.

In its 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report, Microsoft charts the emergence of what it calls a "Frontier Firm," or a company that's "redesigning business processes around AI and agents to scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster than traditional companies." 

These new, ultraproductive companies will be hindered by one major roadblock: the seemingly infinite workday.

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This infinite workday "starts early, mostly in email, and quickly swells to a focus-sapping flood of messages, meetings, and interruptions," the report says. 

An average employee is online by six am, reviewing a fraction of the 117 emails they'll receive that day. By the time they're entering peak productivity hours, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. and again between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., they're knee-deep in meetings and receiving workflow interruptions every two minutes. 

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Things aren't winding down in the evening, either. Microsoft's data shows that there has been a 16% increase in meetings after 8 p.m. year-over-year. Additionally, the average employee receives 50+ teams messages outside of core work hours.

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All of this leads to a sense of exhaustion and an increased mental load. Just under half of all employees, 48%, and a full 52% of leaders say their "work feels chaotic and fragmented," thanks to the frenetic pace and constant digital noise.

Microsoft says that while the trend of the 24/7 workday is concerning, it doesn't have to be that way. "AI can give us the leverage to redesign the rhythm of work, refocus our teams on new and differentiating work, and fix what has become a seemingly infinite workday. The question isn't whether work will change. It's whether we will," the report reads.

Outsourcing mundane tasks is a good place to start. "By deploying AI and agents to streamline low-value tasks—status meetings, routine reports, admin churn—leaders can reclaim time for what moves the business: deep work, fast decisions, and focused execution," the report says.

But it's "agent bosses" or "human agent teams" that are the real future of work, the report says. This new generation of professionals will work smarter, not harder, by deploying AI agents to do the most routine aspects of their work so that they can focus on what matters most, "fast, high-quality insights that benefit the entire team."

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