End of “Infinite Work Days”

Hello, please let it work.

June is the perfect meeting/meeting/event season before people disappear during summer holidays. This week I spoke to York University about loneliness at work. And most importantly, I celebrated my father’s 90th birthday. (He was an FT leader for about 65 years!)

If you feel overwhelming, you are not alone. The average worker receives 117 emails a day, with nearly a third of us plunging into our inbox after 10pm. We cannot stop ourselves. Read more about these “Infinite Workdays” and how to set better boundaries and even rethink your work. It may not be “double” before summer holidays, but you never know.

Send me your ideas, workplace issues, and stunning office views. This was early in the day from the city office of United Mind, a management consultant.

Infinity and Beyond byth: Our work never ends

Did you know that on average workers are suspended? As future expert Christine Armstrong pointed out the FT women at this week’s business summit, the figures don’t even include all the notifications from our personal lives, such as WhatsApp messages and emails from children’s schools. I wonder what kind of work he does.

The two-minute interruption statistics come from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, and are even more frightening, drawn from trillions of anonymous productivity data points from Microsoft 365 users. (These logs are whenever there is a message, meeting, email, etc.). This week, the software giant delved deeper into the data, coming up with a vision for workers who are engaged in “seemingly endless workdays” and always on. My favourite fact: 40% of people online at 6am are “scanning your overflowing inbox in hopes of moving forward.” Yes 🙋‍♀️.

The term “Infinite Workday” nails the reality of many knowledge workers. A day characterized by a lack of control due to endless requests. Microsoft says that nearly half of its employees (48%) and 52% of its leaders feel their work is “chaotic and fragmented.”

The Microsoft WorkLab team spoke to Colette Stallbaumer, who produced these reports. As Colette sees, AI’s promises help reduce this overload. “Can we use AI to help focus time and help us lose our job or take away what we call ‘digital debt’? When we were asked in elementary school, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Instead, she said, “The hope and purpose of AI is to go back to those times. Let them get back to work days.” It’s good to get back some focus times as a step-by-step point for retrieving our days. Microsoft describes focus time as “Mirage.” This is because 11am, the peak productivity time for many people, is also a peak overload time for messages and meetings.

As Colette points out, setting boundaries can help wherever we employ AI. “We’ve had to learn to really come down to how we’re in control of our work days over the past five years.” You can also overlay AI hacking.

An example? “You don’t need to take notes on the meeting again,” says Colette. “You can transcript meetings and earn action points.”

I actually do this – and the transcription of AI interviews changed my life. Which AI hacks are already helping you*? Please email me: isabel.berwick@ft.com.

*I know that AI is more than just a set of neat tools. But I was old enough to remember the desktop computers that arrived at work and we started to like them as they were timesavers. The existential one came later.

Five Top Stories from the World of Work

According to Openai, Meta is trying to poach staff with a $100 million sign-on offer. Hanna Murphy and Christina Criddle report on allegations that Meta is trying to poach engineers and developers from Open Ally with a massive sign-on bonus and wage package.

The tragedy of non-competitive clauses: These clauses prohibit employees from joining their rivals or starting similar businesses after an employee leaves their job. Sarah O’Connor reports that some countries and the United States are working to limit or ban them. Florida is heading in the opposite direction.

Career boosting: New research tells us what we already know. Pilita Clark reports that employees with “emotionally competent” spouses have many traits that bosses cherish.

Can a startup be taught how successful it is? While earning an MBA or business school qualification is not traditionally associated with emerging life, there are more business schools offering entrepreneurship in their curriculum, reports Andrew Jack.

HSBC is considering bringing all staff back to the office three days a week. Global Bank is considering issuing global missions for all competitions to work in the office three days a week, in order to replace the “policy patchwork.”

One more thing. . .

Andrew Palmer, an economist Bartleby columnist and boss class Wry host, his outstanding leadership podcast, has also launched the newsletter. Bartleby is “Your Guide to the Affair of Office Life” for Economist subscribers. It’s interesting and insightful – and I think we can deal with two workplace newsletters in our inbox.

Book Giveaways is back (finally!) 📚

Due to my own inefficiency (i.e., the very wise mantra of Guru Cal Newport, who doesn’t pay attention to productivity: “Do less. Do better”) we have a great book marking their return: Good Anger: How to Rethink Rage can change our lives by Sam Parker. I’ve heard Sam speak inspiringly about why he wrote the book and how he embraces the dark side of his emotions (in a good way) and how he embraces his life. If you want to grasp anger, this book is for you.

We’ll return to Sam and in another newsletter we’ll return to our anger and many of its impacts on our working lives. In the meantime, you’ll have a chance to enter this form and win one of the 10 copies. The deadline is 5pm on June 20th. Winners will be selected at random.

Before you go. . .

Are we trying to see a massive reversal on the types of carriers that are valued and paid high? It is a subsac essay by Carmen van Kerkhove, entitled “Your work was used to impress people. The era is just over.” As she said, “We built an entire social structure around the idea that the work we are ‘thinking’ is thinking about the idea that we are ‘at work’. That degree is more important than skill. “Is it all about to crash? Carmen (who works in marketing) doesn’t come to a solid conclusion, but it suggests that unlike what we all saw before, we need to be prepared for a “flip.”

The rise of skilled trading as an AI proof carrier is something I’ve been talking to Gen Z kids. (If you can’t get a graduate job, do you need to train in practical things?) The “flip” of highly paid types of jobs is more than just a change in the concept of financial security.