THE SIGNAL
Microsoft’s June 2025 follow-up to its Work Trend Index found that “meetings after 8 pm are up 16% year over year” (Microsoft 365 telemetry through February 2025, excluding education and EU tenants), and that by 10 pm “nearly a third (29%) of active workers dive back into their inboxes.”
Sleep is where that evening work comes due. A systematic review in Sleep Medicine Reviews (Linton and colleagues, 2015) of 24 prospective or randomized studies, with meta-analyses, found that “high work demands, job strain, bullying, and effort-reward imbalance were related to more future sleep disturbances.” CDC survey data show the share of US adults sleeping less than the recommended 7 hours ranged from 30% in Vermont to 46% in Hawaii in 2022.
None of these sources measures late meetings and sleep together. Together they describe a workday that keeps getting longer, in a population that is already short on sleep.
BEFORE
Hypothetical: a contract manufacturer flags a deviation on a batch. Quality has the investigation summary ready. The head of quality must decide on release, and the only time the site leads and the global team overlap is an 8:30 p.m. call.
The file is ready. The person who can release it is not.
WHAT THE WAIT COSTS
The call runs late, the decision is deferred to a follow-up, and the head of quality goes to bed with an open release question. The batch waits either way. The late meeting adds hours to the day without moving the decision.
AFTER
The head of quality gets one packet in the morning: the deviation, the investigation, the site’s recommendation and her prior decisions on similar deviations, each cited.
She decides before lunch, writes her reasoning into the record, and nobody needs the 8:30 p.m. call.
HOW WISDOMTWIN FITS
WisdomTwin.ai is building a sovereign judgment layer for regulated enterprises. It is designed to give each named approver a role-specific judgment twin that prepares the decision packet the way that person reviews, with the evidence attached, so the decision moves faster and leaves an auditable record. It is designed to run on-premises, on-device or in your private cloud, and the named person still makes the call.
We don’t replace judgment. We remove the wait.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Count the meetings on your calendar that start after 6 p.m. this month.
Note which of them exist to get one person’s decision across time zones.
Replace one with a written packet that person can decide on during their own working hours.
SOURCES
Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking down the infinite workday”, June 17, 2025: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday
Linton SJ, Kecklund G, Franklin KA and colleagues, “The effect of the work environment on future sleep disturbances: a systematic review”, Sleep Medicine Reviews, 23:10 to 19, 2015: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2014.10.010
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “FastStats: Sleep in Adults”, May 15, 2024: https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data-research/facts-stats/adults-sleep-facts-and-stats.html
Examples in this issue are hypothetical, and nothing here describes a customer result.
JOIN US AT WISDOMTWIN LIVE
We’re hosting our first-ever WisdomTwin Live, a session on the true cost of meetings: the money, the slow decisions and the toll on the people sitting in them. Prefer a one-on-one conversation first? Book a call: https://calendly.com/romanbodnarchuk
Want in? Comment two words: No Meetings. We’ll invite you to the next WisdomTwin Live, or send you the replay if you miss it.
Roman Bodnarchuk
Co-Founder and CEO, WisdomTwin.ai