As described by data from Microsoft's platforms, office work is a relentless stream of emails, meetings and notifications that stifle concentration.

Raise your hand if you've never reached the end of a working day feeling utterly exhausted, yet unable to explain exactly what you actually accomplished. Because, between one meeting, one email and one notification after another, the hours slipped by without leaving any room for concentration. And concentration is precisely what allows us to understand priorities, find solutions and achieve results. This rather disheartening portrait of office work in the 2020s emerges from the millions of data points that Microsoft collects daily through its platforms, aggregated in the Work Trend Index 2025.

For a full 40 per cent of office workers who use Microsoft systems, the working day begins at 6 in the morning with a first check of their inbox. Each day, every worker receives an average of 117 emails: with that kind of volume, it comes as no surprise that in many cases reading one takes less than sixty seconds. It is increasingly rare for an email conversation to involve just two people (down 5 per cent on the previous year), and increasingly common for it to involve at least twenty (up 7 per cent).

From 8 in the morning onwards, exchanges shift to the Microsoft Teams platform. Chat messages are quicker and more immediate, but also more frequent: each worker receives an average of 153 of them every working day, a figure that is growing by 6 per cent globally compared to the previous year. For office workers, the most productive time slots are between 9 and 11 in the morning and between 1 and 3 in the afternoon — but these are also the slots in which half of all meetings are scheduled. Meetings are often arranged at the last minute (in 57 per cent of cases) and cluster predominantly on Tuesdays (23 per cent), far less so on Fridays (16 per cent). Between calls, notifications and emails, the average is one interruption every two minutes.

In the evenings and at weekends, the pace slows — without, however, fully making way for rest. Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2025 highlights that, over the course of just one year, there has been a 16 per cent increase in the number of meetings scheduled after 8 in the evening. On one hand, this is the price to pay for working with increasingly flexible teams, which include freelancers and colleagues connecting from different parts of the world across different time zones. On the other hand, it means never switching off. The same Microsoft report reveals that, on average, each employee sends or receives more than 50 work-related messages outside standard working hours. By 10 in the evening, around one in three checks their inbox again. The weekend is not much better: nearly 20 per cent of employees check their emails before noon on Saturdays and Sundays, and just over 5 per cent do so again on Sunday evenings after 6.

It is no coincidence that the right to disconnect is being discussed with growing urgency — a principle that can be enshrined in law or through policies that individual companies impose on themselves. In Italy, there are regulatory reference points, starting with Law No. 81 of 22 May 2017, followed by a ruling from the Garante della privacy and the national Protocol on agile working in the private sector, signed by the Ministry of Labour and trade unions at the end of 2021. All of these, however, address the right to disconnect in the context of so-called smart working — leaving aside all cases of traditional office work, with a fixed location and set working hours.

So what is to be done? Microsoft is making significant investments to enrich its software with artificial intelligence, presenting it as an opportunity to automate repetitive, mechanical and routine tasks and redirect people's energy to where it is truly needed. This is the well-known Pareto principle: 20 per cent of activities generate 80 per cent of results. Artificial intelligence can also help to redesign teams, by making skills available on demand, at the precise moment they are needed.

But Microsoft itself makes clear that artificial intelligence, on its own, can only go so far. What is also needed is something deeply human: a cultural shift, to truly leave these frantic working rhythms behind — rhythms that are counterproductive both for people's wellbeing and for their very productivity. The same conclusion is reached by another more than authoritative source: the recent report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter: "It is possible to break free from these mechanisms — on condition that we begin to prioritise wellbeing over the endless race for economic growth."