Band 6.0
People have different opinions about working hours. Some people want to work fewer hours and have more free time. Other people think long hours can make a successful career. I will talk about both sides.
Working fewer hours is good for life. People have time for family and friends, and they can do sports and hobbies. If people work too much, they are tired and stressed, and their health becomes bad. In some countries, people work only four days a week and they are still very happy.
On the other side, working long hours can help your career. You can finish more work and your boss will see you are hard-working. Then you can get a better job and more money. Many rich and successful people worked very long hours when they were young.
In my opinion, I think balance is important. Young people can work more to build their career, but older people should work less and enjoy life. People should choose what is good for them.
Band 7.0
How many hours a person should work is often presented as a choice between a good life and a good career. Shorter hours promise time and health; longer hours promise advancement. Having tried, at different stages, to live by each, I believe the second promise is largely an illusion beyond a certain point.
There is little doubt that fewer working hours improve quality of life. Time is the raw material of everything else people value: raising children, staying fit, maintaining friendships. Rested workers also make fewer mistakes. Experiments with four-day weeks have repeatedly found output maintained or even increased, because tired people do not produce more — they simply produce more slowly.
The case for long hours rests on visibility as much as productivity. In many workplaces, the employee who stays latest is read as the most committed, and early in a career that signal can genuinely accelerate promotion. There are also professions where hours are the price of entry. Yet the signal has diminishing returns: the tenth extra hour rarely produces anything memorable, while the costs — to health, relationships and eventually the work itself — compound quietly.
My own view is that hours should be treated as a phase, not an identity. A short, deliberate period of longer hours can open doors when a person is young and unencumbered; as a permanent pattern it trades the life the career was meant to fund for the career itself.
Overall, beyond a moderate threshold, additional hours buy less success than they cost in life — and a system that rewards presence over results is measuring the wrong thing.
