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The 9-to-5 is fading, replaced by a fragmented cycle of early logins, late-night pings, and weekend catch-up. Microsofts latest Work Trend Index shows the infinite workday is no longer an edge case. Its the norm for many knowledge workers. Unfortunately, it seems the pandemic-era triple peak work patternmorning, afternoon, and an evening spikehas stuck. After-hours activity is rising. Meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16% year over year, and by 10 p.m. nearly one-third of active workers are back in their inboxes. Weekends are not off-limits: Among those working weekends, about 20% say they check email before noon on Saturday and Sunday. During the week, prime focus windows are being eaten alive. Half of meetings land between 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m.the very hours when many people are naturally sharpest. What feels like productivity is quietly fueling burnout, chaos, and replaceability The risk is fatigue and focus. When communication never sleeps, neither does context-switching, a leading cause of mental exhaustion. Microsofts telemetry finds employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes during core work hoursadding hundreds of pings a day among heavy-communication users. Its no surprise that nearly half of employees (48%) and more than half of leaders (52%) say work feels chaotic and fragmented. Samantha Madhosingh, a leadership consultant and executive coach with a background as a psychologist, says the issue is exacerbated by flexi-working while working remotely and trying to do it all. She says remote working makes it difficult for folks to have the strong structure and boundaries around their workday. And I see people really struggling. Theyre struggling to remain organized, to stay focused, and to not burn out. At Lifehack Method, weve seen this up close as we coach busy professionals to reclaim their time and do meaningful, fulfilling work. When new clients arrive, most are drowning in what feels like normal work like an overflowing inbox, constant notifications, and a booked-up calendar. Well ask them, Whens the last time you had two uninterrupted hours to do your actual job? The answer is usually nervous laughter. But when they start putting up strategic boundaries, the turnaround is dramatic. Heres how to set new boundaries around the infinite workday so that you can not only survive but thrive. What Frontier Firms do differently Some 53% of leaders say productivity must climb, yet 80% of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy to do their jobs. That mismatchrising demand versus human bandwidthcreates a capacity gap that organizations are racing to close. Microsofts Frontier Firms, which are early adopters deploying AI across the org, report better sentiment and headroom: 71% of workers at these firms say their company is thriving (versus 37% globally), and 55% say they can take on more work (versus 20% globally). Many leaders plan to upskill existing employees (47%) and use AI as digital labor (45%). Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella repeatedly posted on LinkedIn in August 2025 highlighting new AI tools that free people from drudgery and give them more time for highimpact work. He wrote that GPT5 integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot has become part of his everyday workflow, adding a layer of intelligence across apps, and praised the new =COPILOT() function in Excel that lets users analyze, generate content, and brainstorm directly in the grid. But AI is only part of the fix. It can automate tasks, but it cant make your choices for you. Your scarcest asset isnt talentits time. Go a month without clear goals or let each week fray into constant notifications, and you quietly become easier to replace. Thats because reactive work, jumping at every @mention or ping, keeps you busy without moving the needle. Push back on norms for big results Teams that tame the infinite workday reject the normal flow of work and actively redesign their calendars. For example, Shopify periodically purges calendars of recurring meetings with more than two people. Meta and Clorox have meeting-free days. Dropbox has core collaboration hours, a four-hour block of synchronous time across its workforce that relieves the pressure of all-day meetings and lets employees decline meetings outside this window. GitLab runs on asynchronous workflows (a favorite trick here at Lifehack Method) to reduce urgency and alleviate stress. If youre not in a position to flip the switch company-wide, here are some individual power moves: Swap meetings for screencasts. Most 30-minute info-transfer meetings could have been an email, or at least a shorter meeting. Record a Loom or Clipchamp, send it off, and let people listen at 1.5x speed. Boomyou just gifted yourself and your team back half an hour. Trade 1:1s for weekly office hours. You become more accessible, employees get a pressure valve for urgent problems, and you solve a pile of small issues in two to five minutes instead of bloating everyones calendar with half-hour blocks. The best leaders use office hours as a speed bump. If someone really needs a private 1:1, theyll earn that time after showing up in office hours first. Set a win-win communication policy. Uncertainty kills productivity. People dont need instant replies, they need predictable ones. Instead of winging it (aka defaulting to chaos), publish a simple rule: I check email at 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m., or I dont take meetings on Mondays because Im with clients. The magic is in the head-nodding clarity. People stop expecting and start respecting. Close the floodgates. There should be moents when people can reach you and moments when they cant. Otherwise, youre drowning 24/7. The best way to enforce those on/off cycles? Plan your week in advance. If you dont, the week will make a (bad) plan for you. Which leads to the next suggestion: Make weekly planning a ritual, not a wish. Pros dont win with fancy hacks, they win by doing the boring basics consistently. Thousands of our clients at Lifehack Method use weekly planning as their tip of the spear. If you want to win the week, youve got to plan the week. Prioritize your physical and mental health, before its too late. Madhosingh warns that work cannot take over your entire day and life. For a lot of people, thats what ends up happening. They dont know when to stop. Ultimately, your brain or your body will shut you down. . . . People end up really physically ill and sick because theyre not taking care of themselves. The infinite workday isnt your destiny If you dont set boundaries, your tools will set them for you, and theyll always choose chaos. Thats why the most competitive professionals and companies in 2026 wont be the ones who can stay logged in the longest. Theyll be the ones who deliberately carve out time for deep work, compress their collaboration windows, and enlist AI to strip away drudgery. The infinite workday is real, but its not inevitable. You can either accept it as the new default, or treat it as the wake-up call it is. Leaders who redesign their calendars, enforce boundaries, and invest in human focus will not only outlast the chaos, theyll outperform it.
Category:
E-Commerce
One of the most striking aspects of Sarah Wynn-Williamss best-selling memoir, Careless People, about her years at Meta, is the way she portrays Sheryl Sandberg. Contrary to Sandbergs carefully crafted public image as a levelheaded advocate for working women and their families, she is shown to be narcissistic, mercurial, and hypocritical. Whether you see Wynn-Williams’s book as an important exposé of Big Tech culture or a hit job by a disgruntled former employee, its hard to escape the sense that Sandbergs public persona was more fantasy than reality. The image of a fabulously wealthy executive and doting mother living her best life every hour of the day was always a bit over the top. There is clearly something unhealthy about the idealized images that we are constantly inundated with, as well as those equally curated versions that so many feel compelled to post on social media. Beyond the obvious psychological toll, the pressure to project constant perfection undermines the gritty, unglamorous work required to perform at a high level. The value of hacking away Were all familiar with the eureka moment from the movies. The hero, when confronted with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, suddenly stops and has a moment of epiphany. He slams his fist on the tablehe’s finally got it. The camera pushes in tight on his determined face as a montage depicting a frenzy of activity plays out, bringing the plan to life. As anybody who is involved with creative work will tell you, thats a myth. Things dont really work that way. Sometimes you get hit with an idea while driving your car or something, and might stop to write down a few notes. But most of the time youre just hacking away, working and reworking ideas, most of which dont amount to much. Kevin Ashton, the tremendously creative engineer who came up with the idea for RFID chips, put it well in his book, How to Fly a Horse: Creation is a long journey, he wrote, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they dont do is quit. One of the most useful things anybody ever told me about creativity is that you have to let the muse know that youre serious. You have to be there, every day, doing the crap work until you come across something worthwhile. Most people never do that, because crap takes courage. You have to dare to be crap. The power of doing the minimum One of the best ideas Ive ever had came to me at the end of college. I had been a Division I wrestler, so I never had much trouble staying in shape. But now I was embarking on a professional life that I knew would involve a lot of sitting in an office. I had seen friends who went completely to pot after just a few years. The idea I had was to commit to working out five minutes a daywithout fail. Of course, five minutes a day wouldnt keep me in shape, but it would make sure that I showed up, and thats half the battle. I later learned that Jake Tapper has a similar idea about writing. He commits to writing 15 minutes per day, and hes written a number of bestsellers. The truth is that people dont get out of shape because they go to the gym and dont work out hard enough. They get out of shape because things happen in their lives and they dont go for two weeks and that somehow turns into 10 years. The same is true about writing, learning a language, or almost anything else: Do the minimum and the maximum will take care of itself. Of course, in our hyper-optimized theatrical world, we rarely hear that basic truth. Our social media feeds are full of gonzo workouts, wacky diets, and secrets that will unlock a more successful, fulfilling life. But the truth is that while going extreme might feel rewarding for a few weeks or even a few months, in the long run its consistency that matters. So dont fall for internet hype and FOMO. If you want to achieve something meaningful, think about whats the minimum you can commit to and start there. The more you lower the activation energy, the more consistently youll be able to try new things and push the envelope. Sometimes you need to not be productive Like most people, I occasionally get blocked, which is incredibly frustrating. While sometimes my mind seems to be positively buzzing with ideas, other times I either feel that my brain is stuck in molasses or Im fixated on something going on in my life and no new ideas seem to be able to work their way in. In both cases, Ive found that the best way to get over these difficult periods is to not worry about them and do my best to relax and quiet my mind. Thats more difficult than it sounds, because being blocked can be maddening. But sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to recognize when to stop struggling. My friend Lu Ann Cahn wrote a great book about this called I Dare Me. Hitting middle age and feeling stuck in her job as an Emmy-winning TV news anchor, she set out on a mission to do something new every day for a year. What she found was the simple act of doing something differenteven just taking a different route to workrewires and refreshes your brain. So when youre feeling stuck on a project, the best thing to do is often to step away and do something else, at least for a few hours. Meet a friend for coffee, go to the gym, read a book, watch a movie, or do whatever will help you take your mind off of what youre doing. Ive found that once I stop trying to force ideas, they can start flowing again. Learning to muddle through You dont have to go far to fid someone advising you to live your perfect life: from self-help books and TED Talks urging us to find our why to people posting pictures of their spouses and children on social media while praising the perfection and nonstop joy their loved ones bring themand then, strangely enough, announcing their divorce six months later. Compare that to how best-selling author and TV anchor Fareed Zakaria describes his work: Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined, he says. When I begin to write, I realize that my thoughts are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them. Thats much closer to reality. Whether its writing a book or starting a business, you start off with an idea and that idea is always wrong. Sometimes youre off by a little, and sometimes youre off by a lot, but its always wrong. Your job isn’t to be right, but to embark on a Bayesian process of becoming less wrong over time. Eventually, you get it to the point that it can impact the world. The truth is that the world is a messy place. Marriages are hard. Kids are frustrating. Even stories of incredible success often contain within them tales of heartbreaking desperation. Thats why we need to look at the carefully cultivated images of perfection with a jaded eye, because they will distract us from the necessary struggles required to do something worthwhile. Not all who wander are lost.
Category:
E-Commerce
Costco is famously adored by its fans, and its leadership wants the discount big-box chain to remain beloved. Costco co-founder and former CEO James Sinegal so fervently believes in keeping customers happy that hes driven to profanity to express the strength of his feelings. You cant say People are our most important product, and hang signs all over the place that say People are our most important product, and then treat them like shit. Your customers or your suppliers are going to see that you dont really mean it, he recently told an interviewer. Which is why a recent policy change by the retailer is so fascinating. Starting this month, Costco began enforcing a new benefit for executive tier members, who pay $130 annually rather than the $65 for Gold or Businesses membership. Those who pay extra now get an extra hour to shop in relative peace in the morning (except for Saturdays, when they only get an extra half hour), separate from the hoi polloi at the chains often crowded stores. It might sound like a small change, but it illustrates not only a key choice business leaders committed to customer happiness, like Sinegal, have to make but also something fascinating about the direction the U.S. economy seems to be heading as a whole. The plus sides of tiered pricing From a straight revenue maximization perspective, the new rules make sense. Executive tier members make up 47 percent of Costco shoppers but drive 73 percent of its revenue. Add to that fierce competition from the likes of Sams Club and BJs, and locking in more customers with a premium membership is a clear economic win. Costcos early-access benefit for Executive Members represents more than a customer perkits a smart application of behavioral economics. By leveraging exclusivity and loss aversion, Costco creates perceived value that can justify the $65 premium between membership tiers, explains Fortune. Industry analysts suggest the move could accelerate Executive Membership conversions. And obviously, the new perks delight many premium members. It is such a relaxing shopping environment and not survival of the fittest, enthused one Reddit user. I could make a return without waiting in the giant line and then went and spent $200 elsewhere. Win, win! wrote another. Not everyone is happy with Costcos new policy But for every pleased premium member, there is another shopper unwilling and unable to pay double to shop at Costco. They are not so pleased. I immediately canceled my membership for a 100 percent refund. The company breached the terms in which I took out the membership. I burned up a gallon of gas to get there at what was the normal time, had trouble walking and no consideration. I was told to wait 1/2 hour. Ill stick with BJs and continue to be treated with respect, grumbled one on Facebook. Some Costco workers also complained about the move to open earlier to cater to premium members. We struggle to get open [at] 9:45. I can imagine its going to be fun every morning in merchandising, reads one representative Reddit comment. As Sinegal himself observed, people notice when you dont treat them with respect. For some employees and customers, a move to tiered membership clearly treats some people with more respect than others. Goodbye middle class, hello premium pricing Only time will tell whether Costco loses more customers like the irate Facebook poster above than it gains from new premium memberships. But other business leaders considering offering premium services that make the experience of their product relatively worse for other customers should be mindful of these tradeoffs. Its a decision that more and more leaders seem to be weighing. As management consultant Daniel Currell noted in a fascinating essay in The New York Times on the rise of pricey upgrades at Disney theme parks, companies are increasingly looking for ways to cater toand extract more profit fromtheir most upmarket customers. More and better data and AI assistance enable companies to target and reach these customers. But the real driving force behind the rising popularity of premium pricing is a fundamental shift in the American economy. That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing powerand the wealth of our top earners has so explodedthat Americas most important market today is its affluent, he writes. What Costcos new policy says about the economy Currell observes that while a lot of core economic data, like unemployment and household income levels, have looked good on paper over the last few years, consumers have reported feeling incredibly negative. Its a puzzle, he says, that may be partially explained by tiered pricing like Costcos new policy. People notice when you treat them like shit. And watching others with more resources literally skip to the front of the queue certainly makes many people feel like shit. It might be good short-term business strategy to say the hell with it, let them stew, and pocket the proceeds. The question of what this bitter dynamic will do to a businessand a nationlonger term remains to be seen. Jessica Stillman This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
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