In offices, concentration now seems impossible or almost. Employees are interrupted on average every two minutes during their working hours (between 9 am and 5 PM), according to a Microsoft report published on Tuesday, June 17, 2025 by analyzing Microsoft 365 user data.
Meetings, emails, notifications, a matter of a colleague … There are many interruption factors. And that “does not take into account the opening of WhatsApp, Spotify or YouTube,” said Alexia Cambon, Microsoft research director. “These are additional signals that probably contribute to disturbances.”
“A non -handcrapted chaos flood”
According to the study, employees receive an average of 117 emails per day, most of which are traveling in less than 60 seconds. Mass emails with more than 20 recipients increased by 7% during the past year, while individual exchanges have dropped (-5%).
And it is not the only channel by which employees are permanently bombarded. They also receive 153 equipment messages per day on average. Therefore, we are not only attacked by notifications, but they often arrive during productivity peaks.
“It’s like assembling a bicycle before each output”
We receive a lot of applications around 11 am, however, it is also the maximum productivity time for many people, according to another study published by Havard Business Review.
“According to our telemetric data, it is the most overloaded time of the day, because real -time messages, scheduled meetings and constant changes of applications converge, which makes the concentration in a task almost impossible,” write the authors of the Microsoft study.
They also notice a “process disorganization (or flexibility) that leaves little space for deep concentration beaches.”
Therefore, 57% of the meetings are spontaneous instead of planned calls and a scheduled meeting of 10 is reserved at the last minute. A sign of a certain disorganization, during the 10 minutes prior to a meeting, PowerPoint modifications explode (+122%).
Afternoon mail at night
In addition, we observe a struggle of the limits between professional life and personal life with more and more employees who work outside office schedule.
According to Microsoft Data, meetings after 8 pm increased by 16% in one year. And they are not just meetings: on average, employees send or now receive more than 50 messages outside working hours, and 10 pm, almost a third (29 %) of workers return to their mailbox.
Therefore, it is not surprising that almost half of the employees (48 %) and more than half of the managers (52 %) claim that their work is chaotic and fragmented, according to the World Survey of Microsoft trends.
Source: BFM TV
