Recently, Microsoft published Breaking down the infinite workday (via slashdot). It’s a short piece touting a larger research study. Two things really caught my attention:
Our telemetry data shows that, on average, employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.
Every 2 minutes? That’s terrible. How do people feel about the state of things?
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.
Sounds like a total shit show. This might be tolerable during work hours. But, increasingly, it doesn’t stop after punching the clock*. No matter the time or day, the notifications never cease.
My (totally unsolicited) advice to anyone feeling like they are getting swept away by the chaos is: Immediately turn off notifications for everything with the exception of meeting reminders. Then, deal with your email and chats a few times a day, on your terms. While you’re at it, set some regular hours for yourself**. These alone won’t eliminate the chaos, but they should give you some uninterrupted time that can be used to help tame it, one way or another.
What does the article recommend for chaos navigation? Not surprisingly, the advice there heavily features AI by, among other things, becoming an agent boss. Yes, the vision for our AI future is one where everyone is in management. We’ll be forced to use AI to write performance reviews for these agents soon enough.
The article also recommends applying the 80/20 rule: Focus on the 20% of that provides 80% of the outcomes. Not bad advice, nor unique. Though, I can’t help but wonder if a laser-like focus on the most important thing while letting so much fall through the cracks is becoming part of the problem. At times, I’ve seen organizations so focused on big wins that the details they didn’t sweat accumulates to a point where it’s difficult to get anything done.
An issue I have with the overuse of the 80/20 rule in this context is that it doesn’t always leave room for craftspersonship when that is precisely what’s needed. In a lot of cases, some the 80% people are forced to ignore is the invisible, structural support. When that structure is weak because people weren’t allowed the time to build it properly, everything is at risk of failing under the weight of those big outcomes.
* Not sure if anyone reading this ever used a time clock, but I like the term.
** If the nature of your role really requires immediate responses 24/7, this is career-limiting advice; you’ll need to do something else. Perhaps you can take a hard look at exactly which things require immediacy, and which don’t. Then adjust your notifications accordingly.