Why the infinite workday is really a conversation-to-execution problem

At Earmark, we did not begin with a grand theory about the future of work. We began with a moment we knew personally. I have spent more than two decades building and leading software and product teams, and for much of that time there was a familiar point when the last meeting ended, the calendar finally opened up, and only then could I begin the work I was supposed to finish that day.

You still need to write the requirements discussed three calls ago. Someone has to turn the engineering conversation into tickets. The decision from the product review needs to be documented. Your boss needs a status update. The customer call produced three follow-ups sitting somewhere between your notes, your memory, and Slack.

The meetings are over. The work they created is just beginning.

When we started talking to product managers and product leaders while building Earmark, we heard versions of that experience again and again. People wanted more time with customers and more space to think. Instead, their days were consumed by internal conversations, followed by the work of translating those conversations into something the organization could use.

After more than 100 discovery conversations, it became difficult to see this as a personal productivity problem. Too many capable people were describing the same shape of work.

Microsoft has a useful name for the larger pattern: the infinite workday. Its research, based on trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals and a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, describes a day with almost no natural boundary. People check email before they are out of bed, spend their most productive hours in meetings, and return to focus work at night or on the weekend.

Microsoft found that the average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each weekday. Employees in its highest-volume cohort are interrupted every two minutes during core working hours. Half of all meetings occur during periods when many people naturally reach peak productivity. By 10 p.m., nearly a third of workers who are still active have returned to their inboxes.

It is tempting to diagnose this as a calendar problem: too many meetings, too many messages, too little focus time. That is all true. But it misses an important part of what makes the workday feel endless.

Meetings do not merely occupy the hours in which work could have happened. They create more work that someone must complete later.

Every meeting leaves a bill

Think about what follows a reasonably productive product meeting. Decisions must be recorded, requirements clarified, tasks created, owners confirmed, and stakeholders updated. The reasoning behind a decision needs to survive longer than the memories of the people who made it.

None of this is incidental. It is how conversation becomes execution. Yet most organizations treat that conversion work as an invisible personal responsibility.

This was one of the most important things we learned during Earmark’s discovery. People did not only resent the time spent in meetings. They resented having to reconstruct the meeting afterward—often from incomplete notes and memory—before the downstream work could begin.

The calendar accounts for the meeting. It does not account for the 30 minutes required to turn the meeting into something the rest of the organization can use. Multiply that across five or six conversations a day and the open space on the calendar begins to look fictional.

This helps explain why people can spend the entire day working and still feel as though they have not done their work. In an earlier Microsoft Work Trend Index, 68% of respondents said they lacked enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. Microsoft’s usage data showed the average employee spending 57% of their time communicating in meetings, email, and chat, compared with 43% creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Communication and creation appear separate because our work systems have made them separate. We discuss the work first. Then someone turns the discussion into the work.

A successful conversation can still produce failed execution

Bad meetings waste the scheduled hour. Good meetings can consume the hour and still create a long tail of additional labor.

In a survey of 5,000 knowledge workers, Atlassian found that 54% frequently left meetings without a clear understanding of the next steps or who owned which task. Seventy-seven percent said they frequently attended meetings whose outcome was another follow-up meeting. In Atlassian’s broader meeting research, 78% said meeting volume made it difficult to complete their work, while 51% reported working overtime at least a few days a week because of meeting overload.

That is not simply a meeting-effectiveness problem. It is an execution-design problem.

We have built sophisticated systems for hosting conversations and tracking work, but the bridge between them is usually a person. A product manager, engineering manager, designer, or team lead reconstructs what mattered, translates it for several audiences, and manually enters it into the systems where work is expected to live.

The human becomes the integration layer.

Once we saw the problem this way, familiar frustrations began to look connected: the PM rewriting an engineering discussion for an executive, the leader repeating a decision’s rationale because its context disappeared, and the team scheduling another meeting because nobody could determine what the previous one resolved. These were symptoms of the same missing layer between conversation and action.

This is expensive in the obvious sense: highly skilled people spend hours performing administrative translation. It is also cognitively expensive. Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue found that when people move between unfinished tasks, part of their attention remains with the previous task and their performance on the next one suffers. A day built from meetings, partial follow-ups, messages, and repeated context switching does not merely leave less time. It degrades the quality of the time that remains.

Notes made the conversation searchable, not executable

The first wave of AI meeting tools made capture dramatically easier. Recordings, transcripts, summaries, and action-item lists are now widely available. That is real progress.

Earmark’s own evolution made this distinction impossible to ignore. We explored transcripts, summaries, and real-time assistance. People found them useful, but the question underneath their feedback was more consequential: what does this allow me to stop doing?

They did not need another place to revisit the conversation. They needed the stakeholder update written, the decision preserved, the requirements shaped, the tickets created, and the follow-ups ready to move. The transcript mattered only insofar as it helped produce those outcomes.

A summary is still another object to review. An action-item list must still be verified, assigned, and moved into a system of record. A transcript still asks someone to search through what happened and decide what matters.

A better record of the meeting does not eliminate the work after the meeting.

This is where AI risks accelerating the wrong system. Microsoft makes the same broader warning in its infinite-workday report: applying AI without redesigning the rhythm and process of work can simply accelerate something already broken.

If AI gives us ten times as many summaries, documents, and messages without reducing the work required to interpret and operationalize them, we have not solved information overload. We have industrialized it.

The meeting should produce the work

The more interesting question is not how to make people process the aftermath faster. It is why the aftermath needs to exist in its current form at all.

When a team makes a decision, why should someone document it later? When requirements are discussed, why should a product manager start again from a blank page? When owners and next steps become clear, why should they remain trapped in a transcript until someone manually moves them elsewhere?

Conversation is already where much of the organization’s reasoning happens. It is where people introduce facts, debate tradeoffs, clarify ambiguity, establish intent, and make commitments. The work systems surrounding that conversation should be capable of producing the corresponding artifacts as the understanding takes shape.

That does not mean every sentence should become a ticket or that humans should surrender judgment to automation. It means the default should change. People should review, refine, and approve finished work - not repeatedly manufacture it from raw conversation.

A productive meeting should end with more than shared understanding. It should leave behind the decisions, requirements, owners, follow-ups, and communication necessary to act on that understanding.

The conversation should produce the work.

That became the central thesis behind Earmark. Our bar shifted from helping people capture more of what happened to eliminating the work required to turn what happened into what happens next.

A different standard for the workday

Much of the advice for fixing meeting overload focuses on declining invitations, shortening meetings, blocking focus time, or moving more communication asynchronous. Those practices can help. But they place most of the burden on individuals to defend themselves from a system the organization created.

The larger opportunity is to remove the manual translation step that forces work into the edges of the day.

The more time we spend with product teams, the stronger our conviction becomes that this separation is temporary. Within a few years, a meeting that produces no usable work by the time it ends will feel as outdated as one where everyone takes handwritten minutes. Not because meetings will disappear, but because the separation between conversation and execution will.

That is what is compelling us to build Earmark: conversations that become decisions, artifacts, and action while the context is still alive. We have lived the problem, watched product teams quietly absorb its cost, and now have the tools to redesign the workflow rather than merely make its aftermath more tolerable.

The goal is not to help people survive the infinite workday more efficiently. It is to eliminate one of the reasons the workday became infinite in the first place.

Sources

• Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday”, June 17, 2025.

• Microsoft WorkLab, “Will AI Fix Work?”, May 9, 2023.

• Atlassian Team Anywhere Lab, “New research: better meetings start with a page”, May 31, 2024.

• Atlassian, “Workplace Woes: Meetings”.

• Sophie Leroy, “Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009.