The Infinite Workday Need Not Be the Future of Work

Free will can help us do our best work and live our best lives.

Surely you've heard about the Microsoft study which describes the Infinite Workday.

The manifestation of it shows up as a tendency by some career professionals to take a meeting or a Zoom beyond the traditional 9 to 5 workday, and worse, to repeatedly check email and Slack (especially during overnight hours).

This week, the Infinite Workday story blew up on mainstream media. And the takeaway of some of the reporting I've read and watched is that many workplaces are broken from, you guessed it, flexible workplace arrangements.

I am sure that some old school company leaders, reading and watching as well, will respond, "and this is why we all need to return to the collocation, people!"

Don't get me wrong, the Infinite Workday story is real.

Be it the result of fear of missing out and/or a desire to control one's work day, some of us have effectively made the work we do stream like a 24-hour cable news channel.

But the Infinite Workday is not a work fit where work becomes a wonderful part of a day (our day) doing other wonderful things.

Work fit happens when we make important choices that we hold to, to occasionally break away from the workplace to live our best life experiences. It can mean taking an extended lunch date or watching our kid's swim practice during daylight hours, and also researching and drafting an important presentation at 9PM (or 2AM) if that's when you are at your best to do head down work (and it's your choice to do it then).

The antidote to the infinite workday? It's free will.

We careerists have to say NO to unreasonable requests and demands that, oftentimes, are well beyond our scope of work. In the modern workplace, the clock (and working long hours) is less important than our ownership of successful project completion, and, our pursuit of happiness.

Further, we need strong and supportive leaders enforcing their teams' expectations for how they will get their deliverables completed and done well, but also to allow team members to fully live their best lives.

When that happens workplace engagement scales upward, companies extend their revenues and ROI, and best talent retain longer in their jobs at great companies.

That's not the infinite workday. That's a work fit.

And when that happens our best days lie ahead.

Note: image rendered on ChatGPT 4o based on our prompts.

I’m Dan Smolen. As host and executive producer of WHAT'S YOUR WORK FIT? I help you make your work and workplace decisions result in better and more satisfying professional experiences and outcomes. I am also a Founding Member of The Future of Work Alliance.