Work and rest are both the necessities of our life, while how we can balance them to get a more efficient and enjoyable life is also a big question for us to answer. As I see it, the merits of working five days for shorter hours far outweigh those of work only three days but for longer hours.
To start, working for short hours enables us a higher productivity. It is because that, as we know, our brain can not keep active and alarm for a continuous long time, and its efficiency decreases rapidly in the working time. Such work arrangement offers us an excellent opportunity to take a break for our brains, and refresh it in preparation of succeeding hard tasks. Take my personal experience as an example, at the beginning of last semester, I was suffering from reciting word day and night for preparing the GRE test, my teacher recommended me not to work for a long time but to break the task into small pieces and spread them among several days, and turns out to accelerate my process of preparation.
Another advantage for working for short hours is that it can make us more creative in work. The reason is that whole-day work may stuck our mind into a specific problem for such a long time that we can not jump out of it to take another place and think it in a another way. However, timely suspension may help us figure out a more creative way to finish the work. For instance, last semester, two of my classmates and I participate in an mathematic modeling competition, and after two days’ continuous work, we are finally stuck into a problem and do not know how to figure it out. So we just stopped our work totally and watched a comedy for relax. What is surprising, when we considered our problems again, we found a new solution quickly.
Admittedly, working three days can offer us more continuous leisure time to do something which we cannot do if we choose to work five days, such as going for a trip. However, a longer rest time also means a more lazy life style, during the...