AI Raised the Bar, and Sunday Quietly Became a Workday

Posted on in Productivity

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AI was supposed to give us our weekends back. According to Owl Labs’ tenth annual State of Hybrid Work Report, it may be doing the opposite. The survey of 2,000 full-time U.S. knowledge workers found that 74% do some work on a typical Sunday, and 21% say it amounts to a full or near-full workday. The report sums up the mood in one phrase: time has become the real office currency.

More productive, and expected to be

AI use is now the norm: 82% of employees use it at work, and daily use rose from 27% to 32% year over year. The benefits are real for many. 69% say AI has made them more productive, and 66% say it has boosted their confidence. 61% say it freed up time for personal tasks, and 58% say it created room for extra paid work outside their main job, a trend the report calls “polyworking”.

But there is a catch. 62% say AI has raised how much they are expected to accomplish in a day, and 46% say it has sometimes hurt their productivity. The report also warns about “cognitive offloading”, where relying heavily on AI may weaken the thinking a role requires. And 33% admit to using AI tools their employer has not approved, which turns personal efficiency into an IT headache.

Meetings, still the usual suspect

Meeting fatigue affects 38% of employees, blamed on long meetings (45%), too many meetings (41%) and meetings that could have been emails (39%). Meetings take an average of six minutes just to start, and 18% say starts regularly drag past ten minutes. 66% lose time to technical problems such as bad audio or not being able to see faces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 61% are interested in “microshifting”, breaking the workday into shorter, flexible blocks.

For leaders, the data point to an uncomfortable trade-off. If AI makes people faster but the bar rises just as fast, the extra output arrives on Sunday afternoons. Deciding what the saved time is for may be the most important productivity decision a manager makes this year.