The rise of the 'infinite workday' is proof we need chronoworking now more than ever
Time for a change in how we approach the timing of work.
Our working hours are out of control. The line between work and life has been dissolving into a complete disappearance for a long time; you can point to the arrival of the internet, the rise of remote working, the cultural messaging that we need to über-productive and optimise every moment of the working day. Now, with the proliferation of AI, the idea of work being ‘done for the day’ is dead. Just look at Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, which describes the arrival of ‘the infinite workday’; a term that’s nauseating but gives a name to something so familiar that it’s kind of a relief to have a proper phrase for it.
Microsoft breaks down a bunch of stats to outline how our workdays have become ‘infinite’, but the general gist is that online communication and constant meetings are taking up so much of our time that actual work gets shifted to outside our contracted hours. “Focus time is a mirage,” says a Microsoft article. “The most valuable hours of the workday are often ruled by someone else’s agenda.” It notes that the bulk of meetings happen at the same time as when most people have a natural productivity spike; between 9am and 11am and 1pm and 3pm.
“For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos — reacting to others’ priorities and losing focus on what matters most. In a time when every hour counts, that drift could quietly drain energy and stall business progress.”
A few of those stats from Microsoft I mentioned:
1 in 3 employees say the pace of work over the past 5 years makes it impossible to keep up
Meetings after 8pm are up by 16% year on year
The average worker now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside of core business hours
By 10pm, 29% of workers have gone back into their work inboxes
40% of people who are online at 6am are looking at work emails to try to get a grip of what’s happening that day at work
The average time between being interrupted by a meeting, email or message during core working hours is just 2 minutes. Definitely not enough time to get anything done.
Microsoft proposes that the solution to this madness is, in large part, the use of AI. They’re not wrong. Once we start assigning much of the most time-sucking work tasks to AI agents, so much of the ‘bullshit’ part of our jobs will clear and this will, in theory, make room in our schedules for work that matters. But more is needed. We need a complete rethink of what work looks like; of how our jobs are structured, of how we value work, of what it means to be productive. And the starting point of that may well be chronoworking.
For WOP newbies, a quick explainer on chronoworking. It’s a term I coined back in 2024, which describes working in line with your body clock. “To chronowork is to tune into your natural energy dips and peaks throughout the day (or month, or year), and adjust your working day accordingly,” I wrote last year (yes, it’s weird to quote yourself). “It means letting go of the rigidity of the 9 to 5 and instead allowing for a more individualised working pattern that better chimes with people’s energy levels.”
Chronoworking is, in my mind, the acknowledgment of our human-ness. It’s accepting that our ability to get stuff done changes throughout the day and embracing the fact that we are not uniformly reliable work robots. If we task AI with doing all the stuff that’s genuinely best done by robots, that’s a portion of the battle of defeating the infinite workday. Chronoworking is another piece of that pie. So: letting go of the idea that ‘doing a day’s work’ equals rigidly working a 9-5 and swapping presenteeism for assessment based on the quality of someone’s work, or going for more of a ‘complete these tasks’ model rather than a ‘work these hours’ one.
We need to understand that different people’s energy and ability to do certain tasks will wave throughout the day, and to give people the autonomy to decide when is best for them to do said tasks. That will also require enabling workers to protect that time, with meetings and work communications contained in specific windows. So, for example, a worker might know that they are most suited to problem-solving after 3pm and want an hour where they can do just that. They should be allowed to block that time out in their calendar and not be bombarded with messages and meeting requests between 3 and 4.
When I initially proposed chronoworking, a lot of people had (valid!) doubts about how it would work in practice, and questioned whether working asynchronously would prevent collaboration. I don’t think we should ditch meetings and synchronised working entirely, to be clear. I think core hours – where everyone’s expected to be working and available for collaboration – are a great shout. But we definitely need to cut back those core hours and make sure they’re being used appropriately. It makes no sense, for example, to say that a team’s core availability hours are 9-5pm. If everyone’s expected to be open to chats and teamworking for the entirety of their working hours… when exactly are they supposed to do the individual, deeply focused work that makes up a significant portion of their job? What if instead there were three hours each day when there can be collaborative meetings, and the rest of the time was for workers to choose how to use best? And what if ‘the rest of the time’ could happen whenever workers felt was best; whether that’s an early morning shift or an evening flurry? Oh, and while we’re at it, if we find that we actually only need one hour of meetings a day, then a couple more hours here and there to get the work done, what if that was that; no need to keep slogging away?
Embracing AI is supposed to cut down on the amount of work there is to do and thus the amount of time we need to dedicate to working. That hasn’t happened yet. It needs to. And rather than creating more work to fill that time, we should chuck out the old way of doing things, spend a lot less time working overall, and be smarter about how we tweak the timing of work to better align with our bodies and minds. Death to the infinite workday, of course. But rather than simply asking for the old way of working back (just now with added AI), it’s time for the birth of something new.
Your regular reminder to pre-order Working On Purpose
My first ever book, Working On Purpose, is the ultimate guide to working in a better, healthier way. It’s out in August but you can pre-order it now:
Work-related reading recs:
How do you work with someone you don’t like without losing your mind? Stylist has the ultimate guide.
I am very keen to read Fake Work by Leigh Claire La Berge! Also out in August.
Over in the US, is the summer job dying?
Interesting explainer on the ‘ghostworking’ trend. I really do think tackling presenteeism is the answer here…
The CIPD’s Good Work Index has landed and is well worth a read.