In the 1980s, everybody was working for the weekend,

or so a hit song from the period proclaimed. Now, working on the weekend is becoming more commonplace in some sectors as layoffs increase and workers seek time to focus, free from the deluge of meetings and other distractions. The average hours worked on Saturday and Sunday last year increased 5 percent to 6.6, according to Activtrak, which analyzed almost 175 million hours of work across 134,260 anonymized users of its productivity-management software worldwide. While just 5 percent of all workers tracked toiled on the weekend, certain industries, like technology and media, saw a spike of 25 percent or more hours worked in 2022 compared with a year earlier. The reasons are twofold: Job cuts that have heaped more work on fewer staffers, along with a need to escape the constant interruptions from the likes of Zoom calls and Slack chats.