Sometimes the best ideas are so simple. A recent example is the headmistress from Stirling who made her unfit pupils run a mile a day. Within five weeks all were fit. Her pupils are obesity free, energised, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and more attentive in class. And the initiative is going international. I wonder why it didn’t happen ages ago.

Now, let’s consider what should happen to another one of life’s seemingly intractable problems: the endless number of hours we all seem to work.

First, a question: How long did you work yesterday? If the answer is eight hours, please subtract time spent scanning your phone for news updates, texts or emails. Also deduct the minutes you used up on Facebook or twitter. Then take off that extended coffee break and the moments you spent gazing blankly into space.

If you frittered three of the eight hours you worked you would be an average employee, according to research from Microsoft Office 2016. It amounts to 200 hours (or 28 days) a year of lost productivity. What a waste of time.

Why are we so distracted at work? The answer seems to be that our attention span is dipping. Since the mobile revolution, it has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to a mere eight seconds today. (That’s a second shorter than a goldfish.) Or, as one journalist wittily wrote: "The average human’s attention span is … oh look, a bird!"

The compensation is a greater ability to sustain short bursts of high attention. Given this understanding of how we function as a workforce, the question is this: should workers be forced to up their productivity during the existing working week or should work be tailored to suit human nature?

Is a six-hour day the next simple but brilliant idea? It’s not as if the working day was designed with the workforce in mind. According to the New Economics Foundation think tank, society can only gain from a shorter working week. In its book Time on our Side, the foundation lists positive effects, from a smaller carbon footprint to lower unemployment, a more equal society, stronger communities and a stronger democracy.

Since the influx of women into the workforce in the 1970s, we have grown accustomed to the idea of flexi-time. Employers learned to accept the reality that children and elderly parents existed; that their employees had lives and responsibilities that needed to be accommodated alongside their job; in other words, they were more than economic cogs.

Women have paid the price in reduced career opportunities and lower wages. These contributed to a gender imbalance. That’s one area that would be improved by a shorter working week.

We have evidence from Sweden that it can work well for everyone. It’s 13 years since Toyota in Gothenburg switched to a six-hour working day. Its first shift starts at 6am and ends at noon. The next starts at noon and ends at 6pm. So a couple with children can earn two full salaries, work separate shifts and still be available to do the school run and be at home in time to eat as a family.

No wonder its workers say they are the envy of their friends. In this country, more than three quarters of children regularly eat alone. And the wealthiest families are the least likely to eat together regularly. The link to long working hours is obvious and regrettable.

It’s easy to see why shorter hours are also associated with improved wellbeing. With more time, the need for child care drops. There is time to cook and to listen to what children have to say. The community improves because, when people are not stressed and rushing, they become involved. Neighbourliness increases. Shorter hours mean more employment and ultimately a stronger democracy. Toyota has even registered a 25 per cent increase in profits.

It sounds too good to be true and some Swedish politicians think it is. A nursing home, also in Gothenburg, has been conducting a short-hours experiment for a year. Nurses are working six hours on the same pay they received for an eight-hour shift. Predictably, they are happier and healthier. They are better able to fully focus on giving the residents high quality care. They say they are less fatigued and more efficient. Staff turnover is down. Time lost to illness has reduced. The residents are more settled and therefore more contented.

However it is costing upwards of £600,000 a year. One Conservative politician said despairingly: "It’s like living in a world where it’s raining money from the sky."

Like the rest of the public sector, nursing can’t be measured in profit margins. But at the risk of sounding like Jeremy Corbyn, is money the only – or even the most important – factor for political consideration? With only 31 per cent of the European workforce saying they are engaged in what they do, according to the Blessing White survey, isn’t time also a valuable commodity?

John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that we would by now be working a 15-hour week. He thought our challenge would be: "How to use freedom from pressing economic cares."

I see the up and coming generation beginning to manage such freedom. My children’s generation seem to be shifting towards working as freelance contractors or starting their own small businesses. From observation, more of them seem to work with a high focus in short bursts.

I compare them to the generation that preceded them; to men and women who proved their executive worth by getting into the office first and leaving last. Too many of us still live that way. The spin-offs are poor health, strained relationships, farmed-out babies and guilt about grandparents who are visited infrequently. It fuelled a boom in ready meals and presumably assisted the advance of obesity.

It was a complex and truly bad idea. Even the New Economics Foundation says that, for a six-hour day to work effectively, it will require gradual introduction and a strengthening of wage levels. The first is more easily achieved than the second. But just as women have shown willing to compromise on income to do justice to family as well as career, I wonder if some men too would accept a dip in income in exchange for more time? I bet many would.

I’m not being Pollyanna. I know that many are already struggling on low wages; that they don’t have that option. But I’m talking about a direction of travel; about goal setting that will shape the kind of society we live in.

It seems to me that, until now, the way we work has been dictated by the needs of the market place. If we – and employers – have a new understanding that we are more productive economic units on a shorter day, that will drive change, at least in profit-making organisations.

It’s more of a challenge to the public sector. However there must be cost savings in lower staff turnover and reduced sickness. And there would be economic benefits in less stress, better health in families and less of a burden on the NHS.

It just needs courage and the political foresight to see that, just like the one-mile-a-day run, the six-hour day can be transformational. Simple?