Microshifting describes a workday broken into multiple short, flexible “bursts” of focused effort, often around 45 to 90 minutes, separated by stretches of personal time, family duties, or rest. Rather than clocking a continuous 9‑to‑5, a worker might log on at dawn, disappear for school drop‑off or a gym class, and return for another block in the late morning before finishing tasks in the evening.​

The term was popularized by video‑conferencing firm Owl Labs, which defines microshifting as working “in short, non‑linear blocks based on personal energy, responsibilities, or productivity patterns.” Originating during the pandemic, when school closures and lockdowns shattered the traditional schedule, the model has since been embraced by parents, global teams, and gig‑economy workers trying to fit paid work into complex lives.​

Gustas Germanavicius, a Lithuanian ironman competitor and the CEO of InRento, described his approach to microshifting to Fortune in November 2025, likening it both to his physical fitness training and the time he spent studying with the Shaolin monks in China.

“Basically I work in marathons and sprints,” he said. “Two months I work, 24-7, seven days a week, then two weeks off. This two weeks off doesn’t mean that I’m fully offline, but I try to relax and put a lower gear.”

Day One Ventures founder Masha Bucher, an early backer of 12 unicorns and more than 30 exits, told Fortune people close to her absolutely “work seven days a week, from 6:00 or 7:00 am, with a break for sports until like midnight or 1:00 or 2:00 am.” Work to her Silicon Valley circuit is “flexible … I don’t remember when I was on vacation and what vacation is. I think when you do something you love, you don’t feel like you need vacation.”

From hybrid to ‘extreme’ flexibility

The rise of microshifting marks an escalation from earlier forms of hybrid work, which largely focused on where people worked rather than when. In many companies, employees are still required to appear in the office several days a week, but now increasingly negotiate the right to distribute those hours across an elongated day or even late evenings.​ Jones Lang LaSalle conducted a worldwide survey of its commercial real estate business and found a certain “non-complier” with traditional work is “empowered,” because of their special value to the business.

Employer data suggests appetite for this extreme flexibility is strong: Owl Labs’ survey found around 65% of workers are interested in microshifting, with interest especially high among managers, caregivers, and staff with side jobs. Younger workers, particularly Gen Z, are leaning into such non‑linear schedules to accommodate additional gig work, with more than a quarter reporting a second job or side hustle.​

Why workers are embracing it

Supporters argue the model aligns work with natural peaks of concentration and energy, rather than forcing productivity through afternoon slumps. Short, intense blocks are seen as a way to harness “deep work” while leaving time for exercise, school runs, or caring responsibilities that rarely fit neatly into a rigid office day—maybe even ironman training.

Mental health is another selling point: HR consultants say that when done intentionally, microshifting can reduce burnout and decision fatigue, giving workers permission to unplug between bursts. In output‑driven organizations, managers report performance has not dipped when staff are allowed to plan their own microshifts, provided they remain available for key meetings and high‑stakes in‑person commitments.​

Germanavicius, the ironman, stressed to Fortune he encourages people to take vacation and “don’t experience the burnout, because it’s very hard to recover,” including for himself. Referencing the valuable lesson he learned from the Shaolin monks that “practice makes tired,” he said he really works himself hard, and expects everyone else on his team to do so, but there’s a limit.

“The company must not be dependent on me,” he said. “If it’s dependent on me, then it means I’m doing a craftsmanship, not a business. The business needs to work for you, you shouldn’t work for the business.”

Labor experts warn schedule autonomy can morph into expectation, with employees quietly stretching their work across 14 or 16 waking hours to stay responsive in different time zones. Some large employers, especially in finance and government, remain wary, pushing a return to presence‑heavy office cultures and expressing concerns about coordination, accountability and surveillance in such dispersed patterns.​

Jones Lang LaSalle was clear in its survey around workforce trends: The next battlefield between workers and employers has already shifted from where to when. Work-life balance has overtaken salary as the leading priority for office workers globally (65%, up from 59% in 2022.), with employees especially looking for “management of time over place.”

In 1983, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief asked whether technological change could become so profound that “humans could go the way of horses” when tractors replaced them in agriculture and transport in the early part of the 20th Century.* Might not computers replace the need for humans who can think the same way the combustion engine replaced the need for literal horsepower?

This week, two analysts at Goldman Sachs tried to answer that question in a research paper cheerfully titled, “How Concerned Should We Be About a Job Apocalypse?”

Quite, but not too much, is their conclusion.

Joseph Briggs and Sarah Dong estimate, based on Department of Labor job numbers, that 25% of all work hours could be automated by AI. Thus, “We expect that the AI transition will lead to a meaningful amount of labor displacement.”

AI won’t replace jobs in a uniform way, however. “Our baseline forecast for a 15% AI-driven labor productivity uplift and the historical relationship between technologically driven productivity gains and job loss implies that 6-7% of jobs will be displaced over the adoption period,” they said.

“We estimate a peak gross unemployment rate increase of around 0.6pp (corresponding to a 1 million increase in unemployed workers.”

That sounds bad, but there is good news.

Previous eras of technological change have resulted in the creation of a mass of new jobs that no one previously was able to imagine, the Goldman team said.

“Technological change is a main driver of long-run job growth via the creation of new occupations—only 40% of workers today are employed in occupations that existed 85 years ago—suggesting that AI will create new roles even as it renders others obsolete.”

“More than 6 million workers are currently employed in computer-related occupations that did not exist 30-40 years ago, while another 8-9 million are employed in roles enabled by the gig economy, e-commerce, content creation, or video games.” 

Fundstrat head of research Tom Lee recently made a similar comparison in an appearance on the Prof G Markets podcast with Scott Galloway and Ed Elson, comparing the current AI boom to the introduction of flash-frozen foods in the 1920s. Citing his firm’s research, he claimed this reduced farm labor from 40% of the U.S. workforce to 2%, but enough new jobs were created that the shift was overall positive.

“Let’s say there was a CNBC in 1920 and these economists were saying, ‘frozen food, if it comes along and it’s going to wipe out 95% of all farmers, this is going to wipe out the U.S. economy. The U.S. economy can’t survive frozen food … Instead it freed up time, right? And it created, it allowed people to be repurposed, and it created a completely new labor force.”

*Leontief originally wrote, “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” This has been truncated over time and is now widely attributed to him as, “Humans could go the way of horses.”