The Most
Productive Day of the Week

 

It's possible that while you are at work, you may dream
about a month of Sundays, but your boss wishes for a week of Tuesdays. That's
because she or he probably knows that productivity is one of the main factors
supporting a company's growth. A recent poll shows that workers are most
productive on Tuesdays! An employment agency carried out a survey of office
managers which shows that by the middle of the week a dramatic productivity
decrease occurs.

 While Monday is
considered second in "productivity value," only nine percent of office
managers think Wednesday is the peak productivity day. And only five percent
believe that the most productive day of the week is Thursday. However,
forty-eight percent of the managers say that Tuesday is, by far, the most productive
day of the week. A close analysis of workweek rhythms offers some obvious
reasons for those survey results.

First of all, Monday is full of meetings, designed to
"get things moving," and everybody knows meetings aren't very
productive. Wednesday is "hump day" - to get over it as painlessly as
possible, a worker thinks, and the week is more than halfway over. On Thursday,
people are running out of energy; and on Friday, everybody's thinking about the
weekend. There are reasons why the other days aren't productive, but what makes
Tuesday special? On Tuesday employees hit peak performance because they are
very focused on day-to-day activities. Also, it's usually the first day of the
week when they're focused on their own task. They're not in meetings that take
them away from their main responsibilities. And so, in 10 hours, they're doing
20-hour work. That's productive, but it's also tough.

This does not mean that nothing happens on the last
three days of the workweek. Things do not get so casual that people are sitting
with their feet on desks, drinking coffee and talking on the phone all day, but
there's a definite lack of focus. The pace softens and the rhythm slows down.
And this is not healthy: it produces tiredness and decreases productivity. To
prevent this midweek slowdown, some management consultants suggest that
employers avoid squeezing so many meetings into Mondays and answer the
question: “What motivates people to work?” Variations in productivity are only
natural, but both workers and bosses win when the peaks and valleys are less
dramatic than they are now.

 

 


1. Answer the question.                                                                     
         
 Why
do bosses wish for a week of Tuesdays?

 


  2. Find in the text the
synonyms for the word and word combination given below.        

a) to conduct a poll -________________________________

b) evident -
 3. Find in the text the
antonyms for the words given below.           
                      
a) to raise -__________________

b) easy -_____________________

 


4. Identify and circle the
correct variant (True/False).  Justify
your choice.                  .

a)
Monday is considered to be the most productive working day.                          True False

because________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

                                                                                                                               
  True False

b) On
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays employees relax, drink coffee and talk on the
phone.

Because________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

5. Give another title to the
text. Write your title in the form of a sentence.                      

6. Answer the question below
in 4 lines.                                                                        
   

  “What motivates people to work?”.


 

7. Identify the message of the
text and comment on it in 5 lines.