When was the last time you truly switched off from your job? We’re living through a time where our never-ending to-do lists follow us home from the office like unwanted colleagues, pestering us with emails that we check in bed before we go to sleep and as soon as we wake up. This rise-and-grind mentality means our working week bleeds into our weekend and hobbies become lucrative side hustles, which is incredibly stressful. It’s no coincidence that burnout was officially recognised as a medical diagnosis last year.

But what would happen if you just stopped working so much? And, by doing so, could you really get the same amount done? These are the big questions in Shorter, a book by the Silicon Valley-based futurist and consultant Mr Alex Soojun-Kim Pang. It introduces the idea of the four-day week and is a manifesto for spending less time at work without compromising productivity.

“Overworked or burned-out employees are actually less productive than well-rested workers,” writes Mr Pang. “They’re also less engaged at work, more likely to leave and even more likely to cut ethical corners or steal from the company. Employee burnout costs the global economy an estimated $300 billion a year in sick days and lost productivity.”

It turns out that by working less, you can get more done. Last year, Microsoft Japan trialled a four-day week and reported a 40 per cent increase in productivity – food for thought if you were planning on staying late today. And if you’re just dipping your toe into working from home, whether enforced or otherwise, now is the time to get your work-life balance in check.

Here are a few things we gleaned from the book.

Introducing the concept of working fewer hours can at first seem insane and Shorter gives examples of many businesses where employees’ response to the announcement was simply, “Is this a joke?” To counter the scepticism, not to mention the worries around changes in salaries and company performance, it’s important to make sure it’s taken seriously. “We literally had to police it,” says chef Mr Ben Shewry, who brought in a policy to reduce the hours staff were working at his restaurant, Attica, in Melbourne. “It was a really big cultural shift for them as well because they’d never ever worked like this.”

If you’re thinking about shortening the working week, it’s important to identify the least productive day. “If there’s one day that’s your slowest, that generates the least profit, has lower productivity or would be least disruptive to clients, then that’s the obvious day to eliminate,” writes Mr Pang. Most people eliminate Fridays, but the approach is different for every company. Mr Mark Merrywest, MD of marketing agency Flocc, which, instead of a four-day week implemented a six-hour day across five days, writes: “I want my team to be working absolutely as hard as they can, for six hours, and when they’re done, they go home.” Focused hours beat longer hours.

With more time spent out of the office, interactions between colleagues can diminish. To keep morale high, set time aside for colleagues to chat and socialise. For some companies, that’s something that happens over lunch. “Lunchtime is an hour with my whole team, pretty much all together, bonding,” writes Mr Merrywest. “The teamwork and the understanding between them that that time together builds – you can’t buy that.”

When companies transition to working less, Mr Pang says they may need to give it a few goes before they get it right. “Even after discussing it with employees, writing up contingency plans and establishing performance metrics, very few companies make a permanent switch to a shorter work week immediately,” he writes. They first trial the new approach for three months or so and then figure out what’s working well and what perhaps isn’t. “An experimental phase makes the risks feel more manageable and minimises the downside,” says Mr Pang.

Korean mobile app developer Woowa Brothers has a policy where employees don’t say goodbye before they leave the office; they just leave. This means nobody feels guilty about leaving early and it shows respect for other people’s time and boundaries. “Days at work and days off are both improved if you’re not always on and don’t have to take work home,” writes Mr Pang. “Finally, boundaries help temper passion, slow burnout and encourage people to take a more sustainable approach to their careers.”

Shorter: How Working Less Will Revolutionise The Way Your Company Gets Things Done (Penguin) by Mr Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is out now