News Summary

• Work becomes inescapable.The bottom line is that the abrupt rise in digital interaction following the arrival of the pandemic made knowledge work more tedious and exhausting, helping to fuel the waves of disruption that have followed..
• Something deeper seemed to be unfolding.Beyond the showy disruptions generated by the pandemic’s arrival was a more subtle but arguably even more important trend: a sharp increase in how much time the average knowledge worker engages in digital communication..
• Meanwhile, time in online meetings increased by more than two hundred and fifty per cent between February, 2020, and 2022.It’s hardly surprising that the rapid transition to widespread remote work led to a greater quantity of digital communication..
• A recent report from Microsoft found that users of its office-productivity software now spend close to sixty per cent of their time using digital communication tools—e-mail, chat, and videoconferencing—with only the remaining forty per cent left for “creation” software, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint..
• But it’s striking that, even as work returned to a more stable rhythm, with more time spent back in physical offices, the amount of digital communication has remained high..
• But I also found a silver lining: perhaps the pain would force reforms that would make knowledge work more sustainable and satisfying in the long term..