It’s an all-too-familiar story: your ‘to do’ list has more pages than the novel you’re reading and your last 20 phone calls have been from your PA. Morning meeting, working lunch, afternoon conference call and rush home for dinner with the kids. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to add a lengthy session in the spa. But what if it didn’t have to be so lengthy? What if you could slip a blow-dry in before work or a massage after a meeting?

More and more spas are introducing express treatments specifically with the time-poor exec in mind. From a half-hour ’Beat the Muffin Top’ Power Plate class at Selfridges, London, to a 15-minute microdermabrasion at the Elemis Day Spa, Hong Kong, the express spa offering has been growing across the globe. According to Lopo Champalimaud, co-founder of spa-booking website wahanda.com, we are seeing “an unquestionable move towards express, lunchtime treatments. There has been a proliferation of new spas that offer walk-in/express treatments and also that are opening in the business districts of cities. Equally, from the booking patterns of our consumers, we can see that the lunchtime specials are extremely popular.”

Even the top spas are expanding into this area. Ida Hatton, spa director for the Six Senses Pan Peninsula in London reveals that “about 35%-45% of our guests take the 25-minute treatment option. These were introduced as a response to demand, as people really don’t have a lot of spare time and want to get the benefit of a treatment that fits in with their schedule.” So at Six Senses spas in cities such as London and Paris, you can nip in for a 25-minute deep-tissue massage or pressure-point arm recovery and still have time to dither over what to have for lunch.

Hotel spas, traditionally the realm of those who can lounge between the hours of nine and five, have also upped the ante to provide speedy spa services tailored to the business traveller. Specifically designed for corporate guests, Andaz Wall Street, New York, has tapped into the busy lives of stockbroker central with a menu of Stocks (longer treatments) and Shares (short treatments that last from 15-45 minutes). They are by no means alone.

For 2011, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is launching a new, shorter Taste of Spa selection specifically designed for busy guests, and spas at Four Seasons Hotels worldwide provide treatments such as the new one-hour Express Jet Lag treatment in Riyadh or sub-60-minute body wraps and polishes in Chicago. The Four Seasons in Austin even has an entire spa package, including a healthy lunch, which you can slot into an hour between meetings.

But is there a flip side? When we cut down time, do we sacrifice on service? One way for spas to ensure that quality remains high is to focus on one thing – and do it exceptionally well. Drybar, a Los Angeles salon dedicated to the art of the blow-dry, sees everyone from studio execs to auditioning actresses walk through its doors. Founder Alli Webb says: “Once clients realise how much better someone else can do their hair than they can themselves, they get totally hooked. I’m a trained stylist who’s been doing hair for almost 15 years and I can’t do my hair as well as someone else can.” When the treatment just takes 30-40 minutes, it is easy to slot in before or during work. Drybar, and salons like it such as Blow in New York or Jo Hansford in London, with its breakfast blow-dry, have even started offering early appointments to accommodate business clients.

“Everyone feels better and more confident when their hair is beautifully blown out,” says Webb. “One head of a major movie studio, who comes in weekly, tells us that the confidence she gets from having her hair professionally styled makes her more productive at work.”