By Ray A. Smith

If it feels like there aren't enough hours to get everything done during the workday, you're part of a growing club: More of us are working a second shift in the evening.

Workers slid into the habit of working at all hours during the pandemic, when many worked from home and could more freely change up their regular 9-to-5 schedules. Though fewer people are fully remote now, many are still toiling into the night -- and say an expanding load of meetings, emails and actual work are a big reason.

The number of meetings people logged after 8 p.m. over the 12 months through February, in fact, were up 16% from the year before, according to new data from Microsoft on the activity of millions of workers who use the company's business applications. By 10 p.m., nearly a third of them were back in their inboxes after pausing for dinner, the gym or home duties.

Ravi Desai, who manages a global customer-success team for a software company, says his days have become stacked with meetings, many of them with team members and clients on the East Coast. That often leaves evenings for catching up on work, emails and Slack messages.

He schedule-sends some of them for the next morning so that his reports don't feel pressure to start emailing at night, too. In his industry, though, that's tough, says Desai, who works remotely from California.

"There is a tendency to be generally connected all the time," he says.

That's nothing new in modern American work culture, but many workers say the intensity is rising as companies slow hiring, trim costs and add more tasks to existing roles. Though some are turning to artificial-intelligence tools to help, adoption isn't far enough along to lighten the load for most. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers said they don't use AI much or at all on the job in a Pew Research Center survey earlier this year.

Burnout on the rise

Mentions of burnout by employees on the job-review site Glassdoor, meanwhile, jumped 32% in the first quarter from the same period in 2024, hitting their highest levels in nearly a decade.

"A very common theme is workers who feel like they've had several years of mounting responsibilities," says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor.

After his department head left and wasn't replaced, Dan Quitério says he went from having no direct reports to managing several at his social media-marketing job in New York. Dealing with emails and Slack messages spilled over into his off-hours, and he would sometimes work later to assist co-workers also juggling heavy workloads.

"There were definitely situations where I, just as a single human being, couldn't do all the things," says Quitério, who recently left the job.

A cooling job market, especially for white-collar employees, has made it harder for others to push back on heavier workloads. In a Gallup survey of more than 10,000 workers in the third quarter of last year, 63% said they had been asked to take on additional responsibilities. That's up from 47% who said so in the first quarter of 2023.

Digital overload

The Microsoft data is part of the software maker's annual study of workplace-productivity trends, which provides the latest, and one of the largest, measures of how people actually spend their workdays. In particular, its report puts numbers to the crush of emails, messages and meetings that many people say consumes their time on the job and distracts from actual work.

The average worker, it found, gets 117 emails and 153 chats a day. Another reason so much digital communication spills over into off hours is a rise in cross-time zone collaboration. About 30% of meetings now span multiple time zones, up 8 percentage points since 2021, the report said.

Jason Widup, a senior vice president at an agency that specializes in AI-powered advertising, says he uses some hacks to help keep his work from sprawling into all hours. He blocks off time on a shared calendar for more focused work and uses AI tools to help write and brainstorm faster during those times.

Widup, who works remotely in the Seattle area, tries to leave the evening for catching up on emails and getting caught up on things like reading. Still, other work sometimes creeps up and he will plan ahead to work after-hours.

"It just needs to be the exception and not the rule for me," he said.

Write to Ray A. Smith at Ray.Smith@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 17, 2025 03:00 ET (07:00 GMT)

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