Does your workday feel longer or crazier? It seems that often when I talk with people post-pandemic, they have a better work-life balance is they work from home or have a hybrid schedule. They're busy, but they get the chance to manage their workload and don't feel free. That might mean they work a longer day, but have more breaks during the day.

I wondered about this while reading the global work trend index report from Microsoft, which looks at a bunch of data from their customers. One of the interesting things called out from the report in this piece is there are three peaks a day for work, according to O365 data. Lots of people start their workday by 6am and then have the before and after lunch peaks of work. However, there are an average of 50 messages sent or received outside of work hours and an increase of meetings scheduled after 8pm. Perhaps that's indicative of people spread around the globe and working together, or maybe it's a sign of companies pressuring people to overwork.

Lots of us in technology have gotten used to working long hours at times, and more than a few of us have suffered some amount of burnout. We've also felt plenty of pressure to meet (often, artificial) deadlines and milestones from management. At the same time, I feel that more people have learned to either push back, or they get some flexibility to deal with life issues during the workday and push work to other hours.

What I'm not surprised about in the report are a few stats: 53% of leaders want more productivity, but 80% of everyone says they're lacking the time and/or energy to get everything done. This might be the unrealistic expectations of organizations, but certainly everyone I speak with feels they have more work than ability to do it.

The report is aimed at pressing AI as a helper, with a focus on frontier firms, those that are using AI agents with humans to meet their targets. Either in pairs or teams, we have agents doing the work that humans direct them to do. The goals seem to be to have humans doing the creative work and setting direction with agents actually carrying out the detailed work. I think that's ambitious and likely to work better for some tasks than others, but I would certainly welcome a "smart" AI that might be able to handle some simple tasks, especially those emails that might not require complex input from me. I don't know how many of those emails I get, but I suspect a few of the ones I receive could be handled by an agent, or perhaps a response and course of action proposed for me.

At the end, there is a great quote: "If you have a people problem, you will have an AI problem.". Most people aren't great managers of others, and I see few organizations that do a great job of training managers. I can see the deployment of agents becoming a problem, not only for management but also for individuals that struggle to task their helpers in ways that actually make a difference. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the problems of people learning to manage others and their time will get exacerbated with AI agents.