Bookshops seem to be heaving with titles extolling the virtues of laziness, which is unsettling, because I've never fully understood the appeal. When I take time off work, it doesn't occur to me to spend it lying on a patch of sand, doing nothing. "Sand and nothing! Sounds like a winning combination!" is not a thought that's ever passed through my mind. I realise this might make me sound like irritating company. Fair enough: if we ever go on holiday together, you can stay on the beach while I go and check out the museum of grain-processing machinery.

The message of most of these books, though, isn't really that doing nothing is good. It's that doing less work - and certainly spending less time in offices - could actually help us get more done: more effective work, and more other stuff, too. The Four-Hour Workweek, a bestselling new book by Tim Ferris, has a cover showing a person in a hammock. But the author himself seems to live a frenetic lifestyle of international travel, scuba-diving, competitive tango dancing and wrestling. He's not lazy: he's just spending more of his time on things he wants to do.

The advice dispensed by these less-is-more gurus is an odd mixture of the practical and the suspect: if you really want to reduce your workweek to four hours, I'll leave you to buy Ferris's book and learn how he did it by marketing a dubious-looking dietary supplement called BrainQuicken and outsourcing aspects of his life to a "virtual assistant" based in India.

What's scarier is how much internal resistance we encounter even towards the simpler ideas. Clear your mental fog and go home earlier, Ferris recommends, by checking your email only twice a day, at 10am and 4pm; set up an autoresponder to let people know your new policy. To which your instant response, just now, was almost certainly: "Maybe that could work for others - but in my job..."

Or take the "Pareto principle", from which it follows that 20% of what you do brings 80% of the benefits. In the long run, it may be worth junking whole projects or, if you're self-employed, "firing" unlucrative customers even at the risk of infuriating people. And if you get 80% of your work done in 20% of the day, well, what are you doing hanging around in the office the rest of the time?

What you're doing, of course, is living in a culture obsessed with the idea that presence in the office matters in itself: that work is a place you go, not a thing you do. Only a few employers think beyond this. One is the US electronics chain BestBuy, which has told 4,000 staff at its headquarters that they can work wherever and whenever they want, provided they get their jobs done. (Like many such innovations, you'd think this would work only for privileged office workers. Mindbendingly, though, BestBuy plans to extend the scheme to retail outlets, telling staff the hours stores must be open, then letting them figure out the rest.)

I wanted to hear more from Ferris, so I emailed him. But all I got was an autoresponse message, saying he was in Hawaii and would be out of touch until after my deadline. Annoying, but I guess he must be doing something right.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com