The 'Infinite Workday'? What it is + why we don't want it (thanks)

I’ve been asking myself a lot recently why I do what I do.

And it keeps coming back to the same thing: I want people to have a good experience of life. And for me - that means having a not-terrible experience of work.

Because, let's be clear. It’s really hard to enjoy life if your workdays leave you drained and anxious. Or, worse, feeling like a half-version of yourself.

Too often I see brilliant, talented, hardworking people give so much of themselves to work. And guess what? Work doesn’t love them back.

Now. If you are a Humanitarian Aid worker or in a role where you literally save lives, I get it. That's all-consuming. But for the rest of us? No job is worth your life. No company would ever (should ever) expect you to lose yourself in stress, sleepless nights, or that creeping sense of never being done. And yet? It happens all the time.

The Infinite Workday (and Why It’s a Problem)

This week, two things collided for me:

1. I ran a resilience workshop for a team at a Legal Firm. This reminded me how easy it is to give so much at work that there’s not much left over for yourself.
2. I read Microsoft’s Breaking Down the Infinite Workday article.

At first, I thought... Oh, nice 'Infinite Workday' - this is going to be about how AI will be working round the clock so we don’t have to. (Wouldn’t that be nice?)

Nope. Not that. Turns out - this is an article about us working round the clock.

Emails at 6am. Messages pinging through lunch. Meetings that fill the only hours we’re naturally wired to focus (all that peak performance wasted). Evenings where people finally “catch up” on the work they couldn’t do during the day because they were in meetings about the work.

Sound familiar?

Microsoft’s data shows:

• The average person gets 117 emails a day.
• 153 Teams messages every weekday.
• People are interrupted every 2 minutes.

EVERY TWO MINUTES? And one in three people say the pace of work in the last five years has made it impossible for them to keep up. This doesn't feel like: "Oh, we're super busy." This feels broken.

As Microsoft put it: “The modern workday for many has no clear start or finish.”

Resilience Isn’t a Magic Potion

And it's not like we can add “resilience” to our weekly shopping list or click “Buy Now” on Amazon (if we could - I'm sure they'd have found a wey to packag and monetised it already).

Because resilience isn’t something you order. It’s something you build. It comes from rest, from setting (and keeping) your boundaries. Resilience is in the moments of stillness and connection (hello, fancy Japanese word for forest bathing).

Resilience is code for remembering that you’re a human being, not a perpetual motion machine.

In that Resilience Workshop I facilitated? We talked about the basics:

• Rest. Recharge. Respond (vs. react).
• Focus your attention.
• Hold your line.

None of it is rocket science. But none of it is easy either. Even more so when you’re swimming in a tide of alerts and updates. Jumping from meeting to meeting with no time to focus, no time to get the things done that you actually need to do.

So What Do We Do?

I’m an optimist, sure. But I'm not an idiot either. Deep in to my own professional career, and I know work is complex, demanding and full of contraditions. It also means when I see something that’s not right, I’ll raise a hand and say: “Hey, we can do better than this.”

• We can design our workdays to end.
• We can build habits that put people (not pings) at the centre.
• We can challenge the myth that being always-on is the same as being effective.

And we can start asking better questions:

• Do I really need to be in that meeting?
• What time of day do I do my best work. And am I protecting it?
• What boundaries do I need to feel like myself again?

Because the truth is, none of these fixes require a MBA or fancy tech. What they do require is awareness. And a big, fat dose of courage to say “enough”.

The state of work concerns me. But I’m also hopeful (back to that optimism...). Because the more we talk about this, the more chance we have of changing it.

Better work doesn’t just make for better business. It makes for better lives. Full stop.

So take a breath. Step outside. Close your laptop before bed.

And remember. Life YOUR life. Not just your job.

📄 Microsoft’s “Breaking Down the Infinite Workday” report is worth a read

#WorkCulture #Leadership #Resilience #FutureOfWork #EmployeeExperience