How busy are you going to be over the next few weeks?
I ask because, for a lot of people in Europe and beyond, June has become a month of outsized busyness.
It is not just the general deck-clearing at work in advance of the summer holidays. Nor is it only the added strains that parents face in a peak school exam period, which runs until late June in a country like the United Kingdom. The problem is there is so much else going on at the same time, not least when it comes to international meetings.
This year, even if you are not heading off to anything as grand as the G7 summit in France on June 15th-17th, you could be caught up with associated G7 summitry for business leaders and city mayors.
For tech types, June means the South by Southwest London festival, which ends two days before London Tech Week, which is a week before the VivaTech conference in Paris. VivaTech ends just before the five-day Cannes Lions industry gathering, known as the Oscars of advertising, which clashes with London Climate Action Week, and so on.
So many business gatherings bloom in June that I have colleagues in the Financial Times’s conference division who are working on five events in one 24-hour period on three continents this month.
Beyond the international conference circuit, other countries have their own version of this frenetic activity.
Americans have taken to calling the month of May Maycember because the end-of-school rush of concerts and graduation days makes it feel like the hectic scramble of December, minus the gifts. Australians look upon November, the month before schools break up for summer, with similar anxiety.
Wherever one lives, though, I suspect these hyperactive months take a toll on our always-on, more-is-better working lives.
The first time this thought occurred was on the morning of June 18th last year, right in the middle of the sixth-month mayhem, when I got an email from a bank apologising for sending a mucked-up statement on inflation figures.
It was followed less than two hours later by another apology from a woman who said her earlier email mentioning my (non-existent) maternity leave was one of “a million mistakes” she had made that morning.
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An hour later, an academic journal apologised for botching the topic of a press briefing. Three hours after that, a public agency said it had sent the wrong date for its press briefing. As I was marvelling at this weird series of blunders a couple of hours later, in came yet another email with “CORRECTION” in the subject line. This time, from a news organisation saying the hedge fund titan it had called a chief executive was in fact the founder of his firm.
I felt its pain. No one likes making a mistake, and owning up to bungles immediately is admirable. But it did make me wonder if something was afoot during that busy June.
Robust evidence for the most mistake-prone months is not easy to find, though if you are interested, research does show office workers tend to make more mistakes in the afternoon, especially on Fridays.
Still, as June has approached this year, my unscientific fieldwork on the matter has not been encouraging. A steady stream of apologies and corrections began to emerge in May, and as the end of the month loomed, these were averaging two a week. Publishers misnamed authors. Banks sent out false alerts about expired bank cards. Companies mangled graphs, and so on.
These things happen every month, I know, and I suspect an overly liberal use of artificial intelligence may not be helping. Still, if mistakes are becoming more prevalent in more frenzied months of the year, it would not be a surprise, considering the state of modern work routines.
Employees receive an average of 117 emails each day, and an interruption every two minutes, a Microsoft study showed last year. At least 40 per cent check their emails before 6am and the share of meetings after 8pm is growing.
When the added burdens of Maycember and its equivalents approach, this may require extra action. Switch off after dark if you can. Just say no when possible. But above all else, be aware this may be a treacherous time, so before you hit send, check, check, and check again. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
