Sundays are the new Mondays

When freelance writer Sam Hindman sits down to work for a few hours on Sundays, she knows it will be quiet. There will be no pings and requests from her clients, no rush to meet an EOD deadline, and no scrambling. While logging hours on the weekend is typically more associated with overwork than freedom, Hindman says that locking in on a Sunday feels like liberation.

"I'm contributing to my future rest by allocating that time in a way that makes sense," she tells me. By working Sundays, she can justify a mid-morning workout Tuesday class or a long Thursday lunch break to meet up with her friend. The idea of work-life balance, Hindman says, has shifted for her from "working and then clocking out and being done, into work melding and meshing and molding around your life."

Slack, email, and smartphones had already made workers ever-reachable. Then the rise of remote work and Zoom during the pandemic further eroded the division between our work and all our other selves. Five years later, some are pushing to claw it back by skipping work on Fridays or drawing hard digital boundaries to silence afterhours messages and emails.

But another cohort of workers, a new type of white-collar weekend warrior, is embracing those blurred lines. Working a little here and there during the off days doesn't feel overworking, they tell me, but is a way to make the workweek work for them. They take those quiet hours to think creatively and deeply about their work without interruption, and they're all doing it voluntarily, embracing the idea that the strict boundaries of a 9 to 5 can be more restrictive than they are the sole practice of self preservation.

For many addled, anxious workers in today's addled, anxious white-collar economy, Sundays are the new Mondays.

As of last year, 5% of white-collar workers in the US logged on during the weekends, a 9% increase from 2023, according to an analysis of the habits of more than 200,000 employees and 777 companies conducted by ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company. They clocked an average of about 5 hours and 30 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays, and those at mid-size companies of about 1,000 to 5,000 employees were the most likely to work weekends. In 2024, people with bachelor's degrees worked an average of four hours on a weekend, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and about 29% of all employed people worked on weekends.

The rise in weekend work comes as China's 996 culture — working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — has taken hold in Silicon Valley. The lazy girl job era has given way to the locked-in era, and some AI companies demand long hours to compete. An analysis of corporate credit card use by Ramp, a business financial operations company, found an uptick in San Francisco on Saturdays of meals ordered from January to August of 2025 when compared to the same time in 2024.

For some, giving up some weekend hours is a way to carve out schedules that prioritize their families. Joey Sanford, a founding account executive at a startup, says he began working on weekends regularly after he had a baby two years ago. He knows he can be home for bedtime routines and to observe the Jewish Sabbath starting on Friday afternoons if he puts in more work at unconventional hours, like Saturday or Sunday nights, early mornings, and late nights. "I actually think that by making soft boundaries, you can have extremely hard boundaries," he tells me. His team knows he will fully log off from sundown Friday to Saturday, but that he's dependable to meet at other odd hours and to get his heavy workload done. "It's not that I ever feel forced to do it, it's that I want to do it."

Others say the weekends are their distraction-free days. A 2025 report from Microsoft found that workers experience some 275 distractions each day, or an interruption about every two minutes during the 9 to 5 workday. The average desk worker sits in meetings for nearly 15 hours a week in 2024, according to a survey from AI-powered calendar app Reclaim.ai. Cassaundra Kalba, who works in public relations, says she used to log on Saturday and Sunday mornings to do extra work and get ahead early in her career. That earned her praise from bosses, but it wasn't great for work-life balance. Now, she spends Sunday nights going through emails or getting some work done without distractions of meetings and notifications. "It turned from something that started like, I want to be the best in this career, so I'm going to work often, to more so, this is actually setting me more up for success during the week."

The melding of work and personal time also is influenced by how people live. People are marrying and having children later in life, if at all, and spending more time alone than ever before. That can leave more hours open for putting in some extra work, and make career a priority. Lindsay Mahaney, who works in PR, doesn't take calls on weekends and strictly logs off when she takes her paid time off. But she's also a self-described workaholic, and tells me she has trouble turning the creative part of her work brain off. "I'm passionate about what I do, and I want to do it well," Mahaney says. She might get ideas while on a run and take time on the weekend to jot it down, or spend Sunday evenings prepping for the week ahead. The "creative part of the brain, it doesn't turn off."

Fanni Gabor, chief of flow (a modern twist on chief of staff) at a digital ID security company, tells me that her work is also her main life priority right now. "I try to optimize for making sure that I spend my time that I care the most about learning and growing," she says. If that means spending weekends meeting with her CEO, who has become not just a boss but a mentor and friend, or doing deep work, that's fine. The tradeoff allows her to still exercise, eat healthy, and get enough sleep throughout the week, rather than burning out on a 996-like schedule and then crashing on empty on Sundays.

In a time when job security feels precarious, the idea of logging extra hours might feel forced. With grindset culture and a push to return to the office, the flexibility workers have carved out for themselves feels at risk. The people I spoke with for this story had a thread in common: They said they truly loved their work, and they weren't forced to live in this sort of always-on mindset, but felt that doing so gave them agency.

Time is "the limited resource," Gabor says. "We can always make more money, but we don't have the exact same amount of time and we don't know how much we have left." For some, turning Sundays into Mondays might be the best way to take control of that time.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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