Triple peak workday

Courtesy the Covid19 pandemic, Work-from-home has expanded from being a double-peak workday to a triple-peak workday!

Microsoft Research team has done research on workday productivity.?Traditionally, Knowledge workers had two productivity peaks in a workday – before and after lunch.?When the pandemic introduced work-from-home at a global scale, a third spike emerged just before bedtime.?While the third peak is not as high as the first two peaks, 30% of the people were working almost as much at 10pm as they were at 8am.

As per the research, the reasons for the emergence of the third peak varies from person to person - Parents who tend to their children in the afternoon make up for that time by working in the evening. Others optimize newfound work-from-anywhere flexibility by varying their hours. Some just require the extra breathing room at night, away from pings and business calls, to really focus.

Is the third peak about flexibility or is it about encroachment into one’s personal hours???Any way the data is sliced, the boundaries between “office hours” and everything else became thinner this past year and a half:

• For example, the average Teams user now sends 42 percent more chats per person after hours.?
• The positive spin is that flexible, remote work allows people to match productivity to inspiration.?
• The negative consequence is that the average workday has expanded by almost 13% (about an hour more!) and average after-hours has expanded by 2x.?
• Number of online meetings have also soared by 250% from 2020, and continue to grow.?This also is pushing other activities – coding, email etc – to later in the day.

At home, work is especially leaky:?leisure bleeds into labour (checking facebook during a Teams call) and work seeps into leisure (answering emails at dinner).?As work becomes more life like, it also becomes more of life.?

The future of work requires us to think what work should be realtime and what should be anytime…