Microsoft has published a study which says that traditionally, knowledge workers have had two productivity peaks in their workday: just before lunch and just after lunch. But since the pandemic, a third and smaller bump of work has emerged in the late evening. Microsoft’s researchers refer to this phenomenon as the “triple peak day.”
For the new study, workers allowed Microsoft to track their “keyboard events” such as sending emails or engaging with productivity applications on a work computer. While most people didn’t show a third mountain of work in the evening, 30 percent did. They were working almost as much at 10 p.m. as they were at 8 a.m.
Several underlying phenomena are pushing up this third mountain of work, says Microsoft. One is the flexibility of at-home work. For example, parents of young kids might interrupt their workday or cut it off early for school pickup, dinnertime, bedtime, and other child care. This leaves work that they finish later. Other workers are night owls who get their second wind just before bed.
That’s the positive spin on Microsoft’s findings: flexible, remote work allows people to move the day around and match productivity to when they work best. But the triple peak isn’t all positive. Microsoft has also found that the pandemic has simply led to more overall work. According to company research, the average workday has expanded by 13 percent—about an hour—since March 2020, and average after-hours work has increased by twice as much.
An opinion piece in the Guardian newspaper argues that flexible working/working from home runs the risk of creating a new “industrial divide” between those who can work from home and those whose jobs require that they turn up at their place of work every day.
The New York Times reports on the impact remote working is having on the economy of New York City, with Mayor Eric Adams urging the city’s roughly 1.3 million private-sector office workers to return to their desks. “You can’t stay home in your pyjamas all day,” Mr. Adams has said. But, says the Times, he may well be “shouting into the wind, as society changes around” him.
