Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang opens the book with a story that helped popularize the topic. In 2018, Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand company specializing in wealth management and wills, tested a four-day week for its employees while paying the same salary as for five days. Its owner, Andrew Barnes, wanted to know whether people could deliver the same results in less time.

According to reports at the time, the results were encouraging: the company said productivity held steady, stress fell, and morale improved. The story made headlines around the world and opened a debate about whether the standard workweek is a law of nature or simply an inherited custom.

Pang uses this episode to pose the question that organizes the book: what if working less for the same pay isn't a dream, but a decision about work design that you can actually test?

Imagine this scenario in Brazil: an accounting firm in a midsize city proposes that its team work Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off, for two months. The condition is that client deadlines must still be met. Instead of immediately saying yes or no, management agrees on performance metrics, listens to the team, and sets an evaluation date.

Before discussing the future, the book looks back at the past. Pang points out that the long, rigid workday is an invention of the Industrial Revolution. In nineteenth-century factories, workdays exceeded twelve hours, and the labor movement fought for decades to shorten them. The idea of dividing the day into eight hours of work, eight of rest, and eight of leisure came from that period.

In 1926, Henry Ford adopted a five-day, forty-hour workweek in his factories. He observed that workers with more time off bought more and performed better. In the 1930s, Kellogg's introduced six-hour workdays, which lasted for decades and brought improvements in morale and safety.

In Brazil, the 1988 Constitution set a limit of forty-four working hours per week. The debate over ending the six-day schedule, with one day off, shows that the issue remains very much alive.

One central point is challenging the belief that people who stay longer produce more. Pang argues that, beyond a certain point, each additional hour yields less, and that part of the workday goes toward low-value activities: long meetings, emails, hallway conversations, and the familiar routine of sticking around so the boss sees you.

He cites Parkinson's law, which holds that work expands to fill the time available. If you have all day to write a report, it takes all day. If you have half that time, you learn to cut what doesn't matter. The constraint forces you to think.

This doesn't apply to every profession. A construction worker, a nurse, or a bus driver can't compress a building project, a shift, or a route, and the book acknowledges this difference, which comes up again in the discussion of limitations.

Even for people working on a production line, it's worth remembering that hidden downtime exists: waiting for materials, redoing work, and shutdowns caused by neglected maintenance. Addressing these losses is usually more promising than simply speeding up people who are already stretched to their limits.