MaratitaMicrosoft analyzed the working patterns of 31,000 people across 31 countries in 2025 in its Microsoft 2025 annual Work Trend Index. The amount of work people do is frequently interrupted.
Microsoft found the average employee receives 117 emails every workday, with mass emails rising 7% year over year.
Nearly half of those employees are online at 6 a.m., by 10 p.m. almost a third are checking emails and one in five checks messages before noon on the weekend.
Despite work hubs like Teams, and chats on WhatsApp email remains the leading way to communicate.
Microsoft also looked at the number of times people are interrupted during the day, the percentage of meetings that are ad hoc, and the number of chat messages sent outside the working day.
As all leaders reading this know, the open-door policy is a wonderful thing for quick discussions and quick solutions, but there is no way you can predict how well or how little it will be used on any given day in the office.
Since the survey is by Microsoft it contains almost messianic chapters on AI, although the argument for easing pressure on all of us is persuasive. And if you talk to anybody who espouses AI, they’ll tell you all you need to know about the advantages and the saving in time.
You just have to figure out how to use AI to save you time, or use it to help meet your goals.
Microsoft talks about “human-agent” teams – the agent being a trained assistant. “As leaders assemble human-agent teams, they’ll need to get the balance right for each role, function or project to ensure optimal performance on both sides of the equation,” the report said.
At what Microsoft calls “Frontier Firms,” AI is being used for marketing, customer success, internal communication and data science.
Also, the report said, it can be more efficient to have humans and AI working in tandem, including for human preference and moral judgment. Microsoft laid out first steps into the world of AI and also offers a resource guide and plenty of examples of businesses who have incorporated AI and used it for success.
The 2026 annual Work Trend Index builds on the 2025 report.
For the sceptics or anxious it offers reassurance and more statistics on usage.
This year, Microsoft says “86% of AI users treat AI output as a starting point – not an answer – remaining responsible for the thinking.”
“The anxiety around AI at work is real. But our research shows something else, that a growing share of works are using AI in advanced, resourceful ways. The problem? Most organizations aren’t keeping up.” mbj
Guam is currently experiencing a construction boom. Military construction alone is expected to reach $10.5 billion through fiscal 2027. Roughly $8.6 billion of that work is already underway or anticipated by the end of this year, with another $1.9 billion in requested funds for fiscal 2027 awaiting approval from Congress. This is in addition to the housing, infrastructure, disaster mitigation and recovery work Guam needs to have done or requires after every typhoon season. The question is not whether the work will happen. It’s already happening. The question is whether the working people of Guam will experience the full benefits of their labor and development, as it does.
In September 2025, the Navy issued a Request for Proposals to acquire up to 2,400 housing units on Guam over the next seven years — roughly 1,300 units by June 2028 and another 1,100 by June 2032, structured as leases, lease-to-purchase arrangements, outright purchases, or “other transaction structures.” The headline numbers are large enough that the procurement has been read across the island as a generalized opportunity: a rising tide that will lift hotels, condominiums, dormant subdivisions, and raw land alike.
Guam is not short on opportunity. Defense investment under the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act directs approximately $1.3 billion toward projects on Guam.
