This is a discussion worth having but the Inc. article is spurious as hell. The "new research" they cite is a single 240-head business that ran a trial for two months and had a researcher hand out surveys. They get this from a New York Times article that also touches briefly on France's experience with shorter work weeks which, after all, have been law for 18 years. Results from that rather larger sample size are mixed. Meanwhile they also loop back to a 2016 self-reporting "study" conducted by a British Groupon knock-off as if it had any scientific rigor, then throw back to infamous clickbait publisher Business Insider (which also trumpets the Groupon knockoffs) for the spurious factoid "One study found people struggled to stay on task for more than 10 seconds" which links to a tutorial service for online learning hosted at the University of Utah. It doesn't say anything about struggling to "stay on task for more than 10 seconds" but it does say Yep. Tripod still exists. I checked. The entire linked page is about multitasking. The study Business Insider is probably referencing is this one, in which 60 undergrads were given 10 seconds to read a sentence, then distracted, then asked to answer questions about that sentence. Which is about as applicable to "how much work do we actually do at the office" as Ernie and the Duckie.Or, take the advice that Mr. Hoots gave Ernie: "Put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone!" (http://members.tripod.com/tiny_dancer/duckie.html)
My personal opinion is that many people fail to see how much time they are wasting, and that that should be the primary reason to work less, not to work more. I've been tracking my work time pretty diligently for the better part of the last eighteen months. Here's my work stats: I don't get paid for the hours I make, nor for overtime, as an intentional policy to prevent a work-skewed balance like what's so common in the US. I also have the freedom to work less as long as I get the work done. So I've noticed that weeks where I go over 40 hrs/wk of actual work (excluding commute and days off, including working at home) are draining, and weeks where i work less than 32 I start to feel bad about not working enough, even though it is often for a reason. The above are also real hours, not rounded-up-consultancy hours, which is 9% more as per my tracking. Of the above time, 31% is directly billable, 24% is R&D, 11% is value-adding-but-not-billable and the remaining 34% is informal (eg lunch) or wasted time. Cal Newport posits in Deep Work that people can't (and shouldn't) do more than about 3-4 hours of focused, value-creating work, and it's been my goal to hit that on as many days as I can while minimizing wasted time. So far I'd say it's going great. Maybe this isn't the discussion you think is worth having here, but I felt like my n=1 is about as representative as the Inc. researches.
This is a discussion worth having but the Inc. article is spurious as hell.