8 days a week
The other day I came across this fascinating research by Microsoft talking about the "infinite workday." The telemetry from M365 users shows that people are regularly doing email at 6am, having meetings at 8pm, and working through the weekends.
In theory, it's the time of year when work starts to slow down. The season of "let's circle back in the new year" has begun. The Microsoft research doesn't comment on seasonality, but I'm wondering: Does the infinite workday take a break for the holidays? Or do we have an infinite calendar too?
The infinite calendar in four pictures
Back when I was the CEO of Textio, our fiscal year aligned with the calendar year. Our final quarter (Q4) ran from October - December. Many of our customers were on this schedule too, which meant that Q4 was huge for our revenue; customers wanted to spend their budget before the new year rolled over, and like most B2B companies, we were ready to close deals.
As a result, our revenue was not spread evenly across the year. In fact, as our sales ramped up between 2016-2019, we earned 43% of our annual revenue during Q4. The majority of it was in December.
Unfortunately, you can't close revenue if the company is on vacation. Even as our engineering team would wrap things up for the holidays, our sales and finance teams were kicking into high gear. (The sales team used to complain that engineering had it easy, until we pointed out that eng was on call to wake up in the middle of the night if the site went down, all year long.)
Although the company was officially closed between Christmas and New Year's, we had sales calls and deal standup nearly daily to coordinate deal ops. Every week after Thanksgiving was scheduled wall to wall. For instance, here's a screenshot of my calendar from a typical week in early December:
It was even tougher during fundraising years. Of the four rounds of VC that I raised as Textio's CEO, two of them closed in December, which made the meeting load even more intense than usual. You could argue that this was a choice, but the heart (and the business) wants what it wants.
As a matter of fact, here's what my meeting load looked like month over month from 2015-2023:
Not only work not slow down for the holidays, December was actually my busiest month of the year. It wasn't just the meetings, either. December was when I wrote my annual wrap-up for the company and the board, and also when I built my deck for company kickoff in January. As my calendar above shows, I took my breaks at other times of year.
If you review your own work calendar for the last few years, the meeting distribution might surprise you. Whether or not you have an infinite workday, you might have an infinite calendar.
The post-Textio chapter
My calendar has looked quite different since I stepped back from being Textio's CEO. I've had more control over my work calendar. This is what my month-over-month meeting load has been like since January 2024 when I stepped down:
This looks a lot more like the seasonal distribution you'd expect: fewer meetings overall in a more consistent schedule, with breaks in the summer and at end of year. I write all year long, but I do that fully on my own schedule and I can do as much or as little as I like.
I only have one December's worth of data in the chart above, but you can see how significantly my meeting load has dropped. The venture firm where I have spent the last year working closes more or less completely the last two weeks of the year, and my founder clients generally punt meetings so they can focus on revenue.
To be honest, I don't know yet what December 2025 is going to look like. If you've made it to the end of this piece, check back next week for a life update that will turn my calendar upside-down. (Excuse me while I mic drop on out of here... )
Kieran
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