Working more on the weekends? It’s not just you

The average hours worked on Saturday and Sunday last year increased 5%, to 6.6 hours, according to ActivTrak, which analyzed almost 175 million hours of work across 134,260 anonymized users of its productivity-management software worldwide. While just 5% of all workers tracked toiled on the weekend, certain industries, such as technology and media, saw a spike of 25% or more hours worked in 2022 compared with a year earlier. “As people become more comfortable with flexibility, it’s acceptable to log off at 3 p.m. on a Friday and deal with the work on the weekend.” The weekend shifts are the latest example of the breakdown in long-held workplace norms wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, as demands for increased flexibility among employees clash with some employers’ desires to see workers in person at the office more often. The most common weekend warriors were technology staffers in computer hardware and services, according to ActivTrak’s data, along with media workers and those in consumer goods.