Dive Brief:
- The average worker gets between two and three hours of focus time per day, meaning uninterrupted work periods without meetings, messages or tool switching, according to the Hubstaff 2026 Global Benchmarks Report.
- Teams that were either fully in office or fully remote reported the most amount of uninterrupted work, with in-office teams reporting 45% of hours spent in deep focus, and remote teams reporting 41%, per the report. Meanwhile, hybrid work teams reported the least amount of focus time, at just 31% of hours in deep focus. Across all teams, managers and team leaders average only 27% of hours in focus.
- Increased meeting volume and poor scheduling are some of the biggest barriers to focus time, Hubstaff said in a release. Report data found that the average person is in twice as many meetings per year compared to two years ago, and typical organizations are now running nearly six times as many meetings.
Dive Insight:
The Hubstaff report tracked work time from more than 140,000 global workers across 17,000 organizations, and found that about 25% of all tracked meeting time was during “peak deep work hours,” with nearly a third of those meetings held outside of standard business hours.
“Our data proves that teams aren’t failing at productivity, they’re working in systems that constantly disrupt focus,” Jared Brown, CEO of Hubstaff, said in a release. “If leaders want better performance and real returns on their AI investments, they need to treat focus time as a core operating principle, not simply a personal responsibility.”
Employees are “struggling to navigate numerous tools” in the workplace, per the report. Hubstaff found that workers were using an average of 18 apps per day, with workers in sales/marketing, customer success and admin/HR roles averaged more than 20 apps per day.
In addition, although artificial intelligence adoption is on the rise, workers are not tracking more hours using those tools, per the report. The share of total tracked time spent in AI apps dropped from around 4% to 3% year over year. However, AI use varied significantly depending on teams, with hybrid teams using AI for about 11% of their day in 2025, up from about 5% the year before. Remote and in-office teams spent about 1% to 2% of their day using AI.
Last year, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Vanderbilt University and Harvard Kennedy School reported that on average generative AI was an integral part of work routines for U.S. workers aged 18 to 64. The collected data implied that workers are an average of 33% more productive in each hour they use generative AI, according to the report.
However, much of that productivity may be lost to rework, with a recent report from Workday finding that some employees lost as many as 1.5 weeks per year fixing AI outputs.