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The late, great novelist Douglas Adams used to say that time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so. If so, our illusory midday break is slipping away.
A group of researchers at Microsoft has been crunching data about how work habits have shifted over the past few months, using all sorts of anonymized data from the company’s own workforce. It turns out, as you may have already experienced, there is a lot more work activity through the lunch hour than there used to be. And it’s not just meal time getting squeezed. Work activity, as measured by emails, instant messages, and meetings, has increased after 6 p.m. and on weekends. Overall, people are working four more hours per week on average.
The researchers have a theory to explain the shift: People have had to become more flexible during traditional working hours, blurring work-life boundaries and leaving a larger pile of undone work looming over the off hours.
“Employees said they were carving out pockets of personal time to care for children, grab some fresh air or exercise, and walk the dog,” they wrote. “To accommodate these breaks, people were likely signing into work earlier and signing off later.”
It’s a shift that hopefully will not stick. We’ve known for a long time now that excessive flexibility about work hours becomes a cover for just way more work, and how bad it is for people’s mental health and particularly tough on working mothers.
Some changes in the current economy, however, may be more welcome. At least in the group studied, meetings of an hour or longer dropped 11% compared to the months before lockdown, while meetings of 30 minutes or less jumped 22%. That’s another one that we’ve known for a long time—shorter meetings are more productive.
The Microsoft study didn’t delve into the different ways that work has changed for different groups of people during COVID-19, however.
Some statistics suggest that women have been disproportionately hurt by the sudden rise in unemployment, accounting for 55% of job cuts in March and April and only 45% of new hires in May. And women are still taking on the majority of the burden for at-home tasks like child care during lockdown. The bottom line, as my colleague Kristen Bellstrom noted in Fortune‘s Broadsheet newsletter last week, is that working from home can hurt women’s careers. The economic crisis sparked by COVID-19 has also disproportionately hit Black and Latino workers.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that, after this most dangerous phase of the pandemic, we will need to seriously think about the changes it has wrought in how we work, and which should be embraced and which need to be reversed.
Aaron Pressman
NEWSWORTHY
Offline but not by choice. Speaking of flexible work hours, you may have been able to take advantage of Friday afternoon's Internet outage to relax a little bit. Turns out that critical Internet plumbing provider Cloudflare suffered a glitch that put many web sites offline for a few hours. And in news of other Internet screwups, Twitter reported that the hacker attack last week breached a total of 45 accounts and downloaded personal data from eight. Twitter has not identified the culprits, but New York Times reporters Nathaniel Popper and Kate Conger appear to have convinced the gang to talk to them, and they're not exactly the most sophisticated bunch: "It was done by a group of young people—one of whom says he lives at home with his mother—who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6."
Rocketman. Have we mentioned that IPOs in China are doing really well lately? Success attracts success. Billionaire Jack Ma’s financial payments arm, Ant Group, is aiming to go public in Hong Kong and on the Shanghai stock exchange’s STAR board. Last valued at $150 billion privately, Ant wants a public valuation of at least $200 billion. In other news of big finance in tech, eBay is close to selling its classified ad unit to Norway’s Adevinta for $8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Dear men, what is preventing you from looking like this? And a lack of success attracts...a need for more cash. Uber is reportedly seeking to raise $500 million from outside investors for its Uber Freight division. At the same time, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on Friday pledged to double the company's Black leadership by 2025.
Touch of evil. The mystery of the gruesome murder of Gokada founder Fahim Saleh ended quickly. Police arrested Saleh's 21-year-old personal assistant, Tyrese Haspil, on Friday in New York after they identified him as the alleged murderer caught on surveillance videos.
Relax, don't do it, when you want to go to it. Finally, poor billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who just wanted to hit the waves and not get sunburned. Now people are mocking his perhaps excessive use of sunscreen.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Reliance Jio, India's top wireless carrier, has been making headlines for weeks now as it amassed a treasure chest of outside investment totaling $20 billion from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Silver Lake. Counterpoint analyst Neil Shah has been tracking the money flow and has an analysis of what's going on with the company and its billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani.
We believe Reliance Jio or Jio Platforms is transforming into a Super Operator which is no longer a dumb pipe. With a platform approach, it is laying a strong foundation to play a key role across the users’ digital lives and businesses’ digital transformation journeys. None of the operators we can think of globally promises to build, offer and control what Jio is capable of.
Jio’s strategic partnerships with key companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, the three biggest tech giants, will help it drive Commerce, Communication and Cloud areas, respectively, where it had been weak in terms of capabilities, reach and adoption...With 5G around the corner, Jio can lay out a fully-controlled greenfield network to build the software stack via Radisys in fixed as well as wireless networks. It remains to be seen if there are any other big moves on the Radio Access Network (RAN) hardware side or it will depend on the long-term partner Samsung.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Veterinarians are turning to virtual visits to care for Fido By Danielle Abril
How Fitbit and other wearables can help detect the spread of COVID-19 By Aaron Pressman
Meet the new dating app for parents and people who want kids By Michal Lev-Ram
How one toy store owner used his PPP loan to pivot online—and saw sales soar By Anne Sraders
1 in 3 Amazon Prime members are likely to subscribe to Walmart+ By Lance Lambert
Why brands should use TikTok—even if it’s at risk of being banned By Justin Kline
Why this health care startup felt launching early during a pandemic was the best business strategy By Rachel King
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
If you check out Google today, you may notice the Google doodle of a woman looking up at a starry sky. It's nothing to do with comet NEOWISE. Rather, it's meant to commemorate the life of Dilhan Eryurt, a Turkish astrophysicist who died in 2012. Eryurt was a NASA scientist in the 1960s who studied the evolution of stars and proved that the sun is getting cooler and will eventually die out. That will really put a damper on lunch time! Have a great start to your week.
