On a train, in a minibus taxi, in the passenger seat of a lift club or in the back of a bus, a familiar posture repeats itself. Head down, thumb moving, working through the messages that arrived overnight or since leaving the office. Deciding what is urgent, what can wait, who needs a quick reply before they start asking again.
It does not look like work. There is no desk and no laptop. But for some people, the journey to and from work has quietly become the first and last shift of the day: unpaid, unrecorded, and done in a moving vehicle.
This piece looks at why that happens, what it takes from the people doing it, and what a business can change so that the commute can belong to the person making it.
What the evidence shows
Microsoft's Work Trend Index analysis of the infinite workday gives one view of how early the working day now starts. In its Microsoft 365 data, Microsoft reports that 40% of people online at 6am were reviewing email to work out the day's priorities. The same analysis found that the average worker sent or received more than 50 messages outside core business hours.
Those are global figures from one vendor's tools, not a survey of South African commuters. They do not tell us where people were when they opened their mail. What they do establish is that sorting the day's messages before the formal day begins is a common pattern, and that out-of-hours message volume is substantial. For people with long journeys to work, it is reasonable to infer that some of that early sorting happens in transit, though no source cited here measures it.
South African law does not currently provide a specific right to disconnect. A 2024 article from CK Law reviewing the debate notes that some employers already address after-hours availability in their own policies even without a statutory obligation, and points to Australia's approach, which allows contact outside hours but asks whether expecting a response is reasonable. The legal question belongs to employment lawyers. The operational question, why the commute fills with triage in the first place, belongs to the business.
Why the commute becomes triage time
Triage on the commute is usually a response to the shape of the work, not a personal habit. Several arrangements push it there.
- Everything arrives in one stream. Requests, approvals, complaints and information all land in the same inbox or chat group, so the only way to find the urgent item is to read all of them.
- Nobody else sorts. If there is no shared queue with an owner, each person has to triage their own share before they can act on it.
- The working day starts in meetings. When the first hour at the office is already booked, the only time left to sort the overnight messages is before arriving.
- Silence looks like neglect. In some teams, a message unanswered by 8am is treated as a dropped ball, so people answer from wherever they are.
Mellorca has looked at the evening end of this in the inbox that follows you home, and at the operational cost of constant interruptions in employees interrupted by messages and notifications. The commute is a narrower moment, and a revealing one, because it sits on the boundary between home and work.
An illustrative journey
Consider an illustrative example, not a real case: a sales administrator at a Gauteng industrial supplies distributor with forty staff. She travels about an hour each way by train and taxi.
Customer orders and queries arrive by email and in a WhatsApp group that the sales reps use from the road. Overnight, the reps post updates, ask for quotes and forward customer messages. By the time she reaches her desk at 8am, she is expected to know what is urgent, because the 8:15 sales meeting will ask.
So the sorting happens on the train. She reads every message, flags some, answers a few, and forwards others. In this scenario, by the time she arrives at the office she has already worked for most of an hour. On the way home, she checks again, so that tomorrow's list is shorter.
Nothing in this example involves anyone asking her to work on the train. The arrangement asks it for them.
The human tax: time, attention and energy
The first tax is time. An hour of triage each way is a substantial share of a working week, and it is not counted as working time by anyone.
The second is attention and energy. A commute can be many things: rest, reading, music, a phone call with family, prayer, sleep, simply looking out of the window. It can also be a necessary transition between one role and another. When it is filled with triage, the person may arrive at work already tired and arrive home still carrying work. Some people genuinely prefer to use the journey this way, and that is their choice to make. The concern is when it is the only way the job can be kept on top of.
There is also a safety point that needs no research to support it: for anyone driving, reading and answering messages is not a use of commuting time that any business should rely on, even implicitly.
What could realistically change
The useful changes reduce the amount of sorting that only one person can do, and remove the expectation that it is done before the day begins.
- Separate the streams. Orders and customer requests into a shared queue or order system, information and chatter into the group chat. Urgent items become visible without reading everything.
- Give the queue an owner and a start time. Overnight items are triaged at a set time at the start of the working day, by a named person, as part of their paid hours.
- Move the first meeting. A short delay to the morning meeting can leave time to sort at a desk rather than on a train.
- Agree what urgent means. A genuine emergency route, such as a phone call to a named person, means nobody needs to watch the full stream just in case. Mellorca's piece on why shared inboxes become operational bottlenecks covers the queue design.
- Use the tools' quiet settings. Microsoft Teams, for example, lets people schedule quiet hours on mobile devices so that notifications are silenced at set times. A setting does not change expectations by itself, but combined with an agreed team norm it can.
The first consequence, and the business outcome
The immediate change is that triage happens once, in working hours, by the person whose job it is. The business outcome is more consistent handling of urgent items, less duplicated reading of the same messages by several people, and a morning meeting that starts from an organised list.
The human dividend
The dividend is time and presence. Time, because an hour of unpaid work each way is returned. Presence, because the journey can become whatever the person wants it to be, including a genuine break between home and work. That may matter more for people with long commutes, for whom the journey is a large part of the waking day.
The trade-offs
- Some people like the head start. Arriving with the inbox already sorted can feel calmer, and a redesign should keep that as an option rather than forbid it.
- Response times may lengthen slightly. Customers who were used to a 7am reply may now get one at 8:30.
- Someone has to own the queue. If triage simply moves to one person's working hours, their workload needs to make room for it.
- Norms are harder than settings. Quiet hours do little if managers continue to reward instant replies.
Why it matters
The commute is one of the few parts of the day that belongs to neither home nor the office. When it fills with unpaid triage, the working day has quietly grown at both ends, usually without anyone deciding that it should.
Mellorca's reading is that this is a design question about where messages go and who sorts them. Answer it well, and the journey can go back to the person making it. The broader argument about work overflowing its hours is made in Friday evening should start on Friday evening.
Sources and further reading
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Exploring the possibility of “Right to Disconnect” in South Africa (last verified 10 October 2026)
- Quiet time in Microsoft Teams for mobile devices - Microsoft Support (last verified 10 October 2026)
Related Mellorca reading
- The Evening Spent Chasing Signatures
- The Lunch Break Eaten by Approval Requests
- When Every Day Starts by Rebuilding Yesterday's Context