It's difficult to stay focused during formal business hours. Knowledge workers are interrupted by a ping from an app — such as email, calendar or messaging — every 1.75 minutes, or 275 times, during the official eight-hour work day, finds the analysis, which looked at data from 12-month period ending February 2025. Meanwhile, as workers are more distributed around the country and world, thanks to the rise of remote work, 1 in 5 meetings are now happening outside "regular" work hours.Meetings after 8pm are up 16% from last year, and the average employee now sends or receives 50-plus messages outside of core business hours.These folks aren't sleeping in come the morning, either. A "broad base" of workers are up at 6am working, says Colette Stallbaumer, cofounder of Microsoft WorkLab and the general manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot.Microsoft argues that artificial intelligence can help offset some of this work, but so far it doesn't seem to be making a dent.
