By Tara Weiss

After working traditional hours for more than 20 years, John D. Connolly realized that wasn't how he worked best.

"I'd be dialed in, looking at the computer for six hours but I wouldn't have any more gas in me," says Connolly, 46. "I'd have to sit there for another 2 1/2 hours."

Connolly, founder of financial-services advisory firm Bifrost Advisors, works at home before his toddler wakes up, takes a break to have breakfast with the family, and works for about four hours before lunch with his wife. He resumes work around 4 p.m. and continues until dinner, often returning to finish things up after his son is in bed. He puts in work on the weekends, when necessary.

He is among the workers who have embraced "microshifting," or carving their day into short chunks of work, with intentional breaks for family time or personal replenishment. While employees who work from home have long squeezed personal business into the workday -- with or without the boss's blessing -- more are now openly working at the times when they are most productive, often in segments of several hours, and some companies are encouraging it.

Indeed, Connolly began working in microshifts at his previous job at Woozle Research, where he was head of marketing. His former boss at the company, a research platform serving institutional investors, encouraged employees to work at the times that were best for them.

"Instead of forcing everyone into a rigid schedule, we focus on output and deliverables," says Woozle founder Mark Pacitti, who is based in Glasgow, Scotland, and works in two-hour microshifts himself. "If someone does their best, deep research work in a focused five-hour window, that's more valuable to us and our clients than eight hours of diminishing returns."

Where and when

Covid's work-from-home requirement demonstrated that employees can work successfully from anywhere, without a boss watching over them all of the time. Now, flexibility increasingly means giving employees more control over when they work, not just where, which has made microshifting a buzzy work style, particularly in outcome-oriented businesses where results are more important than time spent at a desk.

While there is little data on microshifting, it is more likely to be prevalent in industries where flexible work arrangements already are common, such as IT, financial services and professional and technical services, says Anita Williams Woolley, associate dean of research and professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University.

People who have caregiving responsibilities at home -- for children or other relatives -- are more likely to try microshifting than non-caregivers, according to a recent report on the state of hybrid work from Owl Labs, a company that sells videoconferencing technology. The report found that 72% of caregivers are interested in microshifting compared with 28% of non-caregivers.

Artificial-intelligence scheduling programs that enable even in-person service employees, such as those who work at restaurants or retailers, to schedule several shorter shifts in a day are likely helping drive the trend, says Williams Woolley.

For example, restaurant workers might schedule shifts in between when they have to drop off and pick up children from school, and then use the AI scheduler to find chunks of time afterward when they are available to work and the restaurant needs staff.

"Accommodating the changing needs and preferences of employees in a high-turnover industry is a complex optimization problem that has been challenging, even for sophisticated software to solve," said Williams Woolley.

AI also has helped accelerate the microshift movement by taking over lower-level tasks that keep people chained to their desks during specific hours, such as sorting and responding to emails. That frees up people for higher-level work, the kind that requires more concentration and can be done when employees know they can be most productive.

If done correctly, microshifting prevents burnout. "When you're trying to solve really difficult problems, you can only push for so long," said Williams Woolley.

Whitney Munro, founder of a boutique consulting firm, has long known that when she works in three- to four-hour chunks with intentional breaks designed to incorporate movement and household chores, she produces her best work.

Munro starts each workday with a priority check, noting the three most important things she must accomplish for work by 10 a.m. She works without interruption by marking her calendar as busy until about 10:30 a.m. Even email waits until that period is up. If anything urgent arises, an AI tool flags it and sends a notification to her phone. Then she breaks to take the dogs for a walk.

The next few hours are for emailing, connecting with clients and co-workers and making phone calls until about 2 p.m. when, "my brain stops."

She eats lunch, throws in a load of laundry and preps dinner. She returns to work for a few hours in the late afternoon or early evening.

"If I push too hard, I get overwhelmed and pressure sets in," says Munro. When that happens, she takes a break or pushes her most important to-do items to the next morning to ensure she is doing her best work.

Overcoming pitfalls

Of course, microshifting comes with pitfalls. Without structure and proper planning, employees could fall behind on deadlines and actually wind up working round-the-clock. Team members, meanwhile, need to be aware of their colleagues' preferred work hours and when they are available to respond to emails and questions.

"You can't just have a whole group of individuals doing their own thing, " says Cali Williams Yost, founder and CEO of Flex + Strategy Group, a firm that helps employers design flexible work options. "Without clarity, we have an infinite workday."

Practitioners also say it takes extreme discipline to focus intensely for short periods. Munro, for example, avoids looking at or responding to emails when she is doing deep, high-level work. Simple adjustments, like auto-scheduling when client emails are sent, can help.

When she started her consulting firm from her suburban Dallas-area home in 2022, Munro specifically looked for employees who wanted to microshift. New employees complete a questionnaire that asks how they work best, including their time zone, peak work hours and what times of day they're most distracted. Knowing each team member's optimal work time helps everyone plan deadlines and communication.

"Our clients don't ask, 'Are you working on my project from 8 to 5?' " says Munro, who manages a team of five full-time employees and about 22 freelancers scattered across the country. "They care about the product and if it comes in on deadline."

Similarly, Pacitti says that when he founded Woozle Research 10 years ago, his goal was to work "smarter, not harder."

Much of the work his researchers do is measurable since it involves making a certain number of cold calls by an established deadline. To improve efficiency, the firm invested in productivity-tracking tools to determine when employees were most productive -- and when that productivity dropped.

The management team learned that the last three to four hours of an eight-hour shift were much less productive than the earlier hours. So the management team implemented shorter shifts and found employees completed more surveys per hour.

As technology improved, particularly AI that handles time-consuming administrative tasks like building spreadsheets or sorting important from low priority emails, Pacitti evangelized working in microshifts to his staff and promoted it in recruiting.

Burnout in his industry is prevalent, so Pacitti markets flexibility as a recruitment tool in an industry not known for it.

Says Pacitti: "This is not only what people want but what works best."

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 10, 2026 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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