Here’s a quick question for you: it’s 6am, your eyes have just adjusted to the light pouring through the blinds and your groggy brain is slowly powering on. What’s the first thing you do? Well, if you’re anything like around half the population, you’ll reach for your phone and check your work email as part of your morning ritual.

OK, here’s another one: it’s 10pm and you’re about to switch off the bedroom light, what’s the last thing you do? Again, for around a third of us, we’ll check our emails as one of the final actions before going to bed.

We never completely switch off from work, from early light to late at night, and this growing trend even has a new name: the infinite workday.

Most workers fall into one of two categories – segmenters and integrators – depending on how adept you are at separating your work and life schedules. However, new research shows that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep the two apart as technology speeds up and expectations rise.

Every time you open an email, send a private message or type a sentence using a Microsoft product, that click is captured. These trillions of data points are then anonymously aggregated to give us fascinating insights about how real people are spending their workdays – and this year’s data is confronting.

The average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside core business hours.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report found that many office workers start checking their email in the early morning, before switching to instant communication channels such as Teams by 8am. Now, I don’t need to remind you of the additional problems this new technology brings, but research shows the number of messages a worker receives on Microsoft Teams is up 6 per cent year-on-year, averaging 153 per weekday.

The middle of the day, which was once thought of as our most productive window, is usually consumed by an avalanche of meetings in the calendar, with afternoons spent trying to keep up with the onslaught of information.

But the clearest indicator of the infinite workday occurs later on – yes, you can close your laptop screen, or travel home from the office, but work still stretches well into the evening.

There’s been a 16 per cent increase this year in meetings held after 8pm (primarily thanks to global teams working on ungodly time zones), and the average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside core business hours.

So, what exactly is going on here? In some ways, the infinite workday is an inevitable conclusion to our fight for greater flexibility. While a workday that never ends sounds instinctively abhorrent, it also contains elements of freedom if you want to make the best use of small pockets of free time whenever they arise.

For people who can integrate work into the in-between moments, the ability to fire off a work email at 9pm is a trade-off they’re willing to make, as long as they can take equal time off at other points throughout the day.

However, the inherent risk in a non-stop workday is that the difficult parts of your job, such as stress and responsibilities, now just follow us home as uninvited guests into our bedrooms. This can easily lead to overwork and burnout, all of which are rising alongside these longer working hours.

We have fully arrived in a world where work can be done from an infinite number of places outside the workplace – and that idea will either excite or horrify you depending on how you want to work and live.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.