Here’s a number worth sitting with: 61% of workers now say they do the job of more than one role. It comes from Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 report, a survey of more than 16,000 professionals across 11 markets released last month, and Korn Ferry has a name for it that has stuck: the “two-job job”. Not two employers, necessarily. Two jobs’ worth of responsibilities, carried by one person, inside one job title.

The same survey has the context around it: 62% of people say their workload has gone up significantly in the past two years, and 45% say they’re too busy to deliver the work that actually moves things forward. Motivation has dropped from 71% in 2024 to 61% this year. None of that is surprising if you’re one of the 61%.

How this happened

The report and the coverage around it point at three things happening at once.

• Flatter organisations. 42% of organisations cut management roles over the past year. Uber’s recent cut of about 10% of its workforce came with a 20% reduction in managers. The work those managers did doesn’t vanish; it gets spread across whoever is left, and 55% of the remaining managers say they’re exhausted.
• AI as extra work, not just less work. 79% of CEOs say AI has improved efficiency, but only 51% of individual contributors agree. Among the people Korn Ferry calls “AI-weary”, 52% say AI has increased their workload. A working paper from researchers at Stanford, MIT Sloan and NYU Stern describes why: building and running generative AI tools inside an organisation creates a lot of unseen work in experimenting, reviewing output and constantly adapting.
• Lean as the default. Cutting roles is a decision a company makes once. Adding them back requires someone to argue for headcount, every time.

Why I don’t think this reverses

There are signs of second thoughts. Meta, after removing layers of management, has reportedly asked some individual contributors whether they’d like to go back to managing. Wharton’s Peter Cappelli puts it bluntly: “It is not more efficient in terms of productivity to cut managers.”

Still, I’d bet on the trend continuing. The incentives all point one way: cost pressure doesn’t go away, the gap between how much leaders think AI saves and how much it saves in practice will take years to close, and a role that has been absorbed by someone else rarely gets re-opened. Add the people for whom the second job really is a second organisation (a fractional role, a consulting client, a side business), and holding more than one job looks less like a phase and more like how a large part of the workforce will work for the foreseeable future.

The part nobody planned for: your calendar

Here’s what struck me reading the report. Almost every tool people use to organise work still assumes one person has one job. Your calendar is the clearest example.

If your two jobs live inside one company, they share one calendar, and that calendar has no idea which meetings belong to which role. The focus time you need for the second job gets eaten, one “quick sync” at a time, by the first. Nobody, including you, can see the whole load in one place.

If your two jobs span two organisations, it’s worse: you have two calendars, and each one is blind to the other. Your Microsoft calendar shows you as free at 2pm because the meeting is on your Google one. Colleagues book the gap in good faith, and you find out when the second invite lands. The usual fix is copying events between calendars by hand, which works right up until the week you’re too busy to do it, which is exactly the week it matters.

And it’s not just people booking you anymore. Scheduling assistants and AI agents increasingly look at your availability and book time on their own. They trust whatever the calendar says. If the calendar only knows about one of your jobs, so do they.

What a calendar for a two-job job needs

1. One true picture of your availability, across every account you use, so “free” means free everywhere.
2. Automatic, not manual. Anything that depends on you remembering to copy events will fail in your busiest weeks.
3. Something you can share. When someone asks “when are you free?”, the answer should come from your real availability, not from whichever calendar you happened to open.

This is the problem I’ve been working on with Calendrz. It connects your Google and Microsoft calendar accounts and keeps them in sync: when you’re busy in one, the time is blocked in the others, so you can’t be double-booked across them. You can then share your real availability with anyone who needs to book you, or let an assistant do the booking against data that’s actually right.

Lean shouldn’t mean overbooked

Korn Ferry’s report ends on a fair question: are companies cutting jobs faster than they’re cutting the work? Until the answer changes, a lot of people will keep doing two jobs. Their calendars should at least know it.

If you’re juggling more than one calendar, or more than one job, give Calendrz a try.