Do you ever find yourself logging back onto work late at night? Just for one crucial email or message that needs to get sent? If so, rest assured, you're not alone.
The Triple Peak
By counting keyboard strokes Mary Czerwinski, a research manager at Microsoft, and her team have mapped the typical work day for a group of Microsoft employees. They found that employees were most busy hammering their keyboards in late morning, before productivity slowed around lunch time, after which they would hit a second peak of productivity at around 2:30-3pm.
But the most interesting data was the rise of the triple peak group — a finding we've reproduced from Microsoft in the chart above. Czerwinski and her team found that about 30% of Microsoft employees studied were logging back in and busting out another work session late at night.
The pandemic changed work for the better in so many ways, but an increased tendency to jump on emails at 10pm isn't one of them. If you're a triple peaker let us know. If you're a triple peaker on a Friday though... we wish you well.
Note: This triple peak didn't show up on the overall dataset of all the employees, instead it was only pronounced in the subset of about ~30%.
