The sky in Shanghai is a bit overcast today. At 17°C, it’s not exactly cold, but it’s the perfect weather to wrap yourself in a blanket and sleep in. But I’m guessing many of you didn’t get much rest this past weekend. Today happens to be Monday, March 30, 2026, so let’s talk about a workplace “ghost story”—about the massive illusion that has been deceiving us for years.
The Big Lie About “No Work on Fridays”
I remember a couple of years ago, tech titans were all confidently predicting the same thing. Bill Gates painted a beautiful picture, saying that once AI becomes widespread, humanity would soon enjoy a glorious three-and-a-half-day workweek. Just a few days ago, Mark Cuban posted a series of updates on social media, claiming that as new technologies take over daily tasks, smart companies will proactively shorten employees’ working hours while keeping their salaries unchanged.
Everyone was thrilled to hear that. Think about it: if machines handle all those annoying weekly reports, summary spreadsheets, and meeting minutes, wouldn’t we just spend the rest of our time fishing and sipping tea?
Reality, however, gave us a hard slap in the face.
According to the latest workplace status report released by the ActivTrak Productivity Lab, new technologies haven’t given workers their weekends back; instead, they’ve caused major trouble. The data is right there: employees’ weekend workload hasn’t decreased—it has actually surged by more than 40%. An even more chilling detail is that for many, the average Saturday start time has quietly crept up to 7:11 AM.
Sigh, you thought this thing was here to work for you, but it turns out it’s the one dictating your schedule.
Welcome to the Era of the “24/7 Approver”
The reason behind this is actually quite darkly humorous.
A few days ago, a friend of mine who works at an internet company complained to me endlessly. He said that ever since his company deployed various generative AI tools on a large scale, he’s been more mentally exhausted than ever. In the past, writing an event planning proposal—researching, structuring, and formatting—would easily take half a day. Tasks that require slow, meticulous work at least let you catch your breath while looking for materials.
Now, machines can spit out a ten-page draft in seconds. Sounds great, right? But it’s actually a trap.
The machine’s brain works fast, but sometimes it confidently spouts utter nonsense. For instance, in a highly rigorous financial analysis, it might seamlessly invent a non-existent competitor or cite a local regulation that was repealed ten years ago. To prevent your boss from seeing these outrageous errors, the nature of your job is forced to change. You transition from being a slow-paced “writer” into a “compliance supervisor” who stares at the screen all day looking for mistakes.
The problem is, machines never sleep. They generate new content 24/7, which means the human brain must constantly remain in a standby mode of review.
This is exactly why everyone is starting work at 7:11 AM on Saturdays. Because right after you shut your laptop on Friday night, the machine runs hundreds of megabytes of data analysis in the middle of the night, conveniently dumping all of next week’s drafts into your cloud drive. When you wake up on Saturday morning and habitually check your phone, you are instantly drowned by a tidal wave of backlogged verification tasks.
Some Silicon Valley startups have even pushed this playbook to the extreme. For example, the boss of a code-review team called Greptile posted online, explicitly warning all applicants: we have zero work-life balance here; we practice an extremely hardcore six-day workweek culture. Interestingly enough, this boss later revealed that after the post went live, his inbox received 20% death threats and 80% job applications. People are so desperate to grab a seat in this technological carnival that it’s astonishingly hyper-competitive, yet profoundly helpless.
The “Automatic Washing Machine” for Knowledge Workers
Actually, this story of technology backfiring has played out exactly the same way in history.
I previously read a fascinating book by historian of technology Ruth Schwartz Cowan called More Work for Mother. The book mentions a piece of trivia about washing machines. Back in the late 19th century, the ecstatic expressions on people’s faces when looking at the newly invented household washing machine were identical to how we look at our computer screens today. Newspapers and advertisements back then heavily promoted that housewives would finally be completely liberated, free to leisurely read books and enjoy afternoon tea every day.
But guess what?
Before the washing machine was invented, doing laundry was backbreaking physical labor. It required boiling water, vigorous scrubbing, and wringing out—the entire process was incredibly tedious. So back then, even for the middle class, it was perfectly normal to wash large items of clothing only once every week or two, or even a month. However, after the washing machine came along, the physical exertion required for laundry dropped off a cliff, but society’s standard for “cleanliness” instantly skyrocketed to an unbelievable level.
Now, you have to change and wash your clothes every day, bedsheets must be tossed into the machine every week or two, and a slightly wrinkled shirt is considered unpresentable. The total time housewives spent on laundry and chores didn’t decrease; instead, it increased because of the existence of these machines.
This phenomenon was later termed the “Cowan Paradox”. To put it bluntly, today’s new technologies are just the “automatic washing machines” for us knowledge workers.
This is the ultimate paradox of productivity tools: technological advancement rarely buys us true leisure time. When you master a tool that lets you create a beautiful chart in five minutes, your boss’s first reaction is definitely not to let you clock out early in the afternoon. Instead, they think since it’s so fast, you can absolutely deliver a hundred charts before getting off work today. It merely ruthlessly raises the baseline expectations for our output efficiency.
We Are All Just Wage Earners in the End
I’ve talked a bit too much today, and saying all this has actually made me a little hungry.
My computer screen just lit up again. That tireless digital assistant considerately popped up a notification, telling me it has already generated all the potential topic outlines for next week. Oh, and it reminded me that one citation might have a logical loophole, requiring me to immediately go and manually verify it.
Alright then, I have to go be my 24/7 approver (:з」∠).
As for your recent weekends, were you woken up by your biological clock, or by a machine in the cloud?
References:
- ‘Weekend work increased more than 40%’: How AI is quietly expanding the work week as Saturday starts shift to 7:11 am
- For AI Startups, A 7-Day Work Week Isn’t Enough
- Billionaire Mark Cuban Predicts End of 40-Hour Work Week
- More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ.
