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    For many telecommuters, 9 to 5 has turned into something more fragmented. A typical schedule might be more like 9 to 2, then 7 to 10. Then sometimes another five minutes wherever you can squeeze them.

    When the coronavirus turned the workplace upside down in 2020, leaving around 50 million people working from home in May, the workday as we know it also underwent radical changes. The mornings became less rushed. Afternoons became childcare time. Some added a third shift to their evenings, what Microsoft researchers call the “third peak” of productivity, after the mid-morning and after-lunch crunches. With 10 percent of Americans still working from home and some companies embracing permanent remote work, companies are struggling to adapt to a new understanding of working hours.

    “What we used to think of as traditional work — very specific location, very specific ways of working together, very well-defined work metrics — are changing,” said Javier Hernandez, a researcher in Microsoft’s Human Understanding and Empathy group. “There is room for flexibility. There is also the possibility of making us unhappy.”

    The more diffused approach to work scheduling has created huge benefits for parents, along with some new sources of stress. What’s clear is the shift: The workday, when mapped, starts to look less like a single mountain to scale, and more like a mountain range.

    Mornings used to mean hazy-eyed showers. Makeup to hide bags under the eyes. Quick to the door, disgruntled children in tow. For telecommuters, that agitation went the way of their commute.

    6.30 in the morning When Jennifer DeVito, 33, hears her alarm go off, she feels a temporary panic — a holdover from prepandemic times, when she’s said to have been up at 4:10 a.m. to catch a shuttle from Sacramento to Santa Clara, California, where she works. at a tech company. Freed from her commute, like so many Americans who used to spend about 54 minutes on the daily commute, she can now steal more sleep.

    “The pressure to make the most of every second is gone,” said Ms. DeVito. “I feel more like myself than I have in a long time.”

    7:05 am Kristen Hermanson doesn’t want her kids to feel like they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, so she tries to bring some cheer to their mornings by rubbing their backs and tickling their feet. Her son, who has autism, is picky about breakfast, but he devours her bacon. She puts her kids at school at 8:02 am and then goes for a jog before her calls start at 9 am

    “I get almost eight hours of sleep a night!” Ms. Hermanson, who works in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, said. “That is unheard of. My doctor always said to me, ‘You need to get more sleep.’”

    07:30 Michelle Flamer, 65, who works for the Philadelphia city council, sometimes wanders into her kitchen after waking up and starts working right away. Why not? She doesn’t leave the house, so she doesn’t need a shower yet. Sometimes, bewildered, she thinks of all the tasks that used to fit into her morning, such as reading Bible meditations, feeding her pets, and hopping on the train. “It’s amazing how much you can accomplish to get up around 5:30 and run out the door just before 9:00,” she said with a chuckle.

    10 hours For many work-at-home parents, especially mothers, the morning hours are a time of intense productivity.

    “In the morning, I can just talk things out,” says Laura Bisberg, 37, who works at a college press in New York. “My energy starts to slacken after lunch.”

    Many telecommuters, like Ms. Bisberg, have found that their productivity rhythms are more idiosyncratic than they ever thought possible. Some people are the sharpest early in the day, fueled by caffeine and ready to bend over spreadsheets; others are virtually useless until the sun begins to set.

    Working from home meant more freedom to pay attention to those patterns, and 80 percent of remote and hybrid workers say they are equally or more productive outside the office than they are in the office, according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index.

    11:30 The hustle and bustle of meetings is in full swing. At all companies, the pandemic was accompanied by an encounter flu. For example, Microsoft Teams users saw the time they spend in meetings each week increase by more than 250 percent since March 2020. The increase could be driven by a genuine desire on the part of employers to keep colleagues connected, and perhaps, some employees speculate, by managers eager to know how people spend their time.

    “People were going a little crazy,” Ms. Flamer said. “There may be a day when I have four consecutive hours of meetings.”

    For parents, afternoons at the office often meant high-pressure questions: Could you sneak out in time to pick up school? Working from home and doing childcare after lunch reinforced the feeling that the office was not suitable for the care needs. “It’s built around the expectation that people don’t have families,” said Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. “We’ve seen dogs and children roaming people’s screens. They will be banned again when you go back to work.”

    2:50 pm The best part of logging out to handle school pick-up, for Mrs. Hermanson, is when she hears her son yell, “Mommy, you’re here!” She asks about his lessons: “What have you learned? Who did you play with?” In prepandemic times, she had to wait until the evening to ask how he was doing, and the answers were monosyllabic: “Fine.”

    3:15 pm The first shift of Mrs. Bisberg’s workday is over. Her kids are home from school and she has reached her slump after lunch, so she turns her attention to games. Her kids love to play Silly Street, which involves doing a series of crazy tasks — acting like a monkey, giving everyone in the room a high-five — a sharp shift from the kind of assignments that filled her office afternoons.

    “I’ve worked really hard to compartmentalize,” Ms Bisberg said. “When I was working, I didn’t think about the children. The second time I left, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going home to my kids.’ I didn’t bring work into my private life and I didn’t bring home into my work life. Now everything is more mixed together.”

    4:30 in the afternoon Kathryn Beaumont Murphy, 47, a Philadelphia attorney, now accepts occasional afternoon carpool duties. Sure, she’s scrolling through emails at the same time in a parking lot. Her children complain that she spends all her time on her job, but Mrs. Beaumont Murphy is relieved that at least they are physically spending time together.

    “The biggest tension is my kids saying, ‘You’re always working,'” she said. “While I feel like I’m much more focused on my work when I’m in the office.”

    For some employees, the commute at the end of the day meant setting up a firewall for life: devices were turned off, Netflix was on. Now that home is the office, work can easily seep through the cracks.

    7:30 pm The afternoons and evenings fade for Mrs. Flamer. Her working day is sometimes 13 or 14 hours long. She used to get up from her desk before 5:30 to catch the train home. Since she is now in her kitchen, there is no clear point at which she should shut down her computer.

    8:45 pm Mrs. Bisberg puts her children to bed and sits down for the last shift of her working day. Some of her teammates are also online.

    “At one point I sent an email late at night and got a reply,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘You know I’m doing this weird schedule, but you don’t have to write back.'”

    Her co-worker explained that she, too, worked the odd hours of a stay at home mom: “I was like, ‘OK,'” Ms. Bisberg said. “‘Then I’ll accept your 10pm e-mail.'”

    This late-night activity is that so-called third peak: the extra shift deployed by people who have taken a daycare break earlier in the day or simply feel compelled to keep sending emails because their inboxes keep pinging. According to data from Microsoft Teams users, time spent working outside of traditional working hours has increased by 28 percent since March 2020, and weekend work has increased by 14 percent.

    Several employers have placed crash barriers. Teams at Microsoft, for example, encourage managers to agree on everyone’s working hours. Cali Williams Yost, founder of a workplace strategy group, advises bosses to sit down with their employees to determine when people should be available for meetings, emails, and solo work.

    “Unless we deliberately coordinate our rhythms, it can happen that everyone is working all the time,” Ms Yost said.

    In some cases, employees had to start those sticky conversations themselves. “It was very difficult to draw a line in the sand,” said Stephen Luke Todd, 27, an engineer, who recalls his previous outside job expecting him to answer messages around the clock. “I felt like I had to set boundaries with my boss.”

    For some people, the new working day runs from 9 a.m. to almost 5 a.m.

    2:45 am Ms. Beaumont Murphy recently woke up in the middle of the night on a Tuesday and wrote colleagues an email, which she would send at 8 a.m. She no longer feels the pressure to jump out of bed at 5:30 am to exercise. But she also feels unable to put her work aside at the end of the day. Come to think of it, when is the end of the day?

    07:30 Mrs. DeVito signs up. She is faced with a deluge of 30 emails sent overnight.