“You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood - how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.”

Guilty as charged.

What this is

This essay/booklet of ~35 pages was first published in the UK in 1908 (two years later in the US). It was aimed at Edwardian men who commuted by train to work in an office, weren’t burdened by many domestic chores when they got home, and wanted to improve themselves and thus be happier. It’s an early example of the self-help genre that mixes the highbrow (Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Tchaikovsky) with dry humour and lots of metaphors (a skeleton at a feast, a pilgrimage to Mecca, playing scales on a piano).

Time, not money, is what matters

The core idea is that, as individuals, we focus on budgeting money, but not time, although the latter is more precious.
“If you have time you can obtain money - usually. But… you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have.”
Yes… and no. It’s true that people can steal our money but not our daily quota of time. But they can certainly waste our time (though I often manage, unaided), and although we can’t acquire more than 24 hours per day, we can try to increase our lifetime total by healthy living.

Perhaps a better point is that we tend to think of our work hours as “the day”, and so don’t fully value or plan the remainder. Bennett advocates consciously making space in our days to cultivate the mind. Allocating regular time slots isn’t for me, but just being more deliberate and appreciative is a good aim.

Image: Cartoon “time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time” Hmmm… (Source)

Read, but not novels!

“You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to live fully.”
I love literary fiction, and I like to think it improves my mind, understanding, and empathy (though enjoyment is my primary motive). However, Bennett is right to say that “literature is not the only well” to slake one's thirst for self-improvement. Learning about other subjects, especially the arts, increases our enjoyment of them.

But I part ways here:
“Good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader.”
I suppose the fiction of the time tended to be more straightforward, but even so…

More positively, he stresses the importance of thinking about what one reads, and after more than a dozen years writing reviews on GR, I know the benefits of doing so.

Sleep less?!

Bennett thinks most people sleep too much, out of a mixture of habit and lack of anything else to do.
“The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.”
He quotes a GP (family doctor) who said “Most people sleep themselves stupid” and suggests going to bed later or rising earlier, to gain an extra hour or two of useful time a day. He assumes seven hours a night (in another chapter), but everything I’ve read lately is about the dangers of too little sleep.

Congruence

Bennett asserts that one’s principles need to align with how one lives, which is why there can be joy in martyrdom. He then extrapolates from the odd premise of sorrowful burglars:
“What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them.”

Is it still relevant?

I’m not an Edwardian or a man, and before the Covid pandemic forced me to work from home 13 months ago (and counting), I drove myself to and from the office. Nevertheless, I’m a fan of Bennett’s fiction, he writes this in an engaging way, and the general ideas are still valid.

“When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject.” Just one.
“Mind control is the first element of a full existence.” (One’s own mind.)
It’s non-spiritual, and the urge to live in the moment in order to have a meaningful life, rather than merely exist, echoes contemporary mindfulness.


Image: Cartoon: Charlie Brown says, “We only live once, Snoopy”. Snoopy replies, “Wrong! We only die once. We live every day!” (Source)

It’s also pragmatic: setting small targets and allowing for slippage, especially at first. He explicitly warns against believing it can all be fixed by writing an ambitios and detailed timetable.
“I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty."

Quotes

•t“Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle… You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!”

•tAfter the evening meal, “you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed.”

•t“The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect… while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness.”

Further reading

•tThis essay is long out of copyright and is available free, on Gutenberg in various digital formats, HERE.

•tI also recommend Bennett’s fiction, which is always a delight, and is also available free on Gutenberg, HERE. Some novels are humorous while others are more serious, but all those I’ve read have been very enjoyable. I’ve reviewed seven on GR, HERE.

•tFor an old-fashioned approach to using time efficiently, but aimed at women, see Kay Smallshaw's How To Run Your Home Without Help, which I reviewed HERE.

•tFor a rather different and contemporary take on knowing yourself and organising your life and mind, see Mark Hebwood’s Happiness Rules, which I reviewed HERE.

Bonus humour

If work isn’t the purpose of life, what is one’s life’s work? Mitchell and Webb tackled this in a short sketch, “Our Life’s Work”, which you can listen to, HERE. It’s funny, but uncomfortably relatable. Bennett’s essay steers us along a better bath, allocating time to what we care about.

This book is hard to put down once you've started it, I started it one evening while laying in bed and kept reading it until 4am!! For all you go getters this book was published just for you.

I think this is a short yer powerful book. It makes you think about how the hours of your day just pass you by without you realizing it. It gives a nice plan for the better use of your time which is really easy to implement.

he started out with good thoughts on money versus time: we all have the same amount (unlike rich vs. poor), we can't go into debt by spending it ahead of time, and we have all there is, there will never be more. no use waiting until you "have more time." that will never happen.

then he goes into changing your perspective that your "day" is your work day. instead, focus on your day being the time between work hours.

then he talks about finding that wasted time during your commute to work, and those hours after work you're so tired and just waiting for the day to end.

then he says to take 7 of those hours...and think. concentrate on something. then he goes off on ... well, that. hmm. and how reading novels is a waste of that time, because if it's bad it's a waste of time but if it's good you aren't thinking. he lost me somewhere.

This guy is quite a baller. "What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know)..." "'I hate all the arts!' you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more." and a lot more badass quotes that I forgot to write down.

But also, he's an example that proves that this "lifestyle design" or even "time management" stuff wasn't born yesterday. He's writing this for the common middle-class you or me, who wishes to "accomplish something outside [his] formal programme." He points out how, in 1910, a bunch of people went to work, came home, and twiddled away their time, while growing upset that they're wasting their lives.

His solution, part 1, is to set aside 90 minutes 3x/week and dedicate them to learning in depth about something. Literature if you like (poetry, not novels); other arts if you don't; or just a sense of in-depth knowledge and wonder in all things. The whole thing smacks of being very English: "Just Try Harder!" But at the same time, there are a lot of Buddhist undertones:
"You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose."
"When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue."
"The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect- in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe"
"Let the pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as regular as possible."

It's a spot of enlightened jelly wrapped in a doughnut of stiff-upper-lip. Well, better than most Englishness, which doesn't even have the jelly.

Arnold Bennett, novelist and father of omelettes here addresses the fundamental issue of life that one can live with intension rather than drifting and feeling that life is passing you by.

While first published in 1920 and aimed at an audience of clerks commuting from the London suburbs into the city everyday - bringing to mind T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land "Unreal City/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,/ And each man fixed his eyes before his feet." Well, you may ask, what possible relevance could the words of one who was so dismissed by Virginia Woolf have to me? For me his trick is that he is presenting the same answers as the Stoics, maybe even as the Buddhists - and ideas which are already several thousand years old are hardly going to get more out of date. He suggests to the idle, commuting worker who feels that his  this is such a monstrous run on of words that I had best hide it from decent eyes in spoiler text(and yes this is a book all about the men, which is mildly interesting since in his novels Bennett certainly recognises that there are also women, we can perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he recognised they were so downtrodden with drudgery that they were unlikely to have the leisure time to regret that there weren't enough hours in the day and that life was passing them by, or more prosaically that maybe they were less likely to buy a pamphlet advising how to live even though we only each get a mere twenty-fours hours each day, or then again perhaps this was one of the reasons why Madame Woolf objected to him - in addition to his being some jumped up clerk from the North of England) day is too short, that it won't get any longer, ever and the only thing to do is to live with intention. Namely if you don't love your job, don't make it the centre of your day, instead see the sixteen (or however few) hours that you don't work and the expanse of the weekend, next be deliberate in your use of time - doing nothing is fine, just be aware that you are doing nothing, ideally embark upon a programme of study. He recommends a few books to the curious reader- like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus suggesting reading a chapter of an evening and the following morning on the way to work reflecting on what you have read. Touchingly this reminded me of a scene from Clayhanger. But it doesn't have to be stoic philosophy, it could be architecture - once you've read an introductory text then every building you see becomes something you can appreciate in a more complex way. The commuting clerk here then is bringing themselves to be more conscious and alert of living in the moment and in the world. Or the object of study could be music, or nature and his advice of going forth with the butterfly net to catch the beasties that gather around the street lights reminded me of my fascination for the superhighways that the cats and foxes use here, cutting across gardens and over roofs to get quickly from one street to the next. But he cautions, start small, don't be a slave to a program of study, but also take it seriously. Above all be aware of yourself and go at the pace that is right for you. It is in tone rather more kindly than his novels but perhaps once you've had an omelette named after you the sour edge of life is reduced. And that is more or less it, and my review is already at risk of being longer than Arnold Bennett's leaflet, so I'll.

Brilliantly written, never lacking in its sense of humour, concise and practical. The author’s style is engaging and empathetic, and his suggested program is not hard to follow. I liked how he describes time and the haunting feeling of wasting one’s life without doing what he had always aspired to. Dying in a trip to Mecca without ever reaching there is better than not to have taken any steps at all. It is okay to fail as long as it doesn’t affect your self-esteem. Start by taking baby steps and acknowledge the frailty of human nature. I would have liked it to be more specific in parts and cover the rest of the 24 hours as the title promises.

P.S: It is funny how YouTube suggestion section can get you to wonderful places, it’s how I found this masterpiece!

Arnold Bennett’s „How to live on twenty-four hours a day” is the hint, the tip, yes, the epiphany we’ve all been seeking. It deals with one of our most serious problems: Not having enough hours in the day to do those things our souls tell us we should be doing. It deals also with the reverse side of this problem, which is having too much time to do the things that mean nothing to us at the close of day. We all get our fair share of time—24 hours and if there ever has been a better example of Equalism (if that’s a term) I have not come across it. I recommend this book to those who need help in the area of time management. It’s a “how to book” that tells you a lot more than just how to. Have fun….

I am not normally drawn to philosophy, which seems to me, like religion, to get caught up in eddies of meaningless dispute. Nor am I drawn to self-help, which seems to be one or two good sentences surrounded by a tremendous amount of padding. Sometimes, not even one good sentence. Anyway, I had gotten the idea that this was funny (I don't know where I came by that idea), so that's why I started it. "It'll make a nice little palate cleanser," I thought.

Ha! This is brilliant stuff. Okay, Bennett was clearly a product of his time, and he's writing rather pointedly to a white, middle-class adult male, working in the City. The premise is straightforward: sure, you probably hate your job, but that's only 40 hours out of your week. If you really wanted to, you could devote some serious time to thinking. About anything really. Books are good (Bennett likes poetry and essays, but considers novels to be to easy if they're written well). But there's also music, and history, and the natural sciences. They're all good, too.

In 1912 college education was still pretty restricted. Public schools, lecture series, libraries, the mass publishing of books were among some of the many ways intended to improve the common people. Bennett isn't particular, he doesn't care what people devote themselves to as long as it is an intellectual hobby. He doesn't care much for your body, although you're welcome to give it some exercise now and then. Crafts won't do, you understand. He doesn't want you to take up playing an instrument, we wants you to take up music appreciation.

Really, Bennett wants you to blog. He wants you to develop a narrow fascination with something specific, learn everything about it that you can, and devote time to really thinking about it; there's no better thinking that, as he mentions, preparing to write on a topic. From this effort, Bennett assures you, will derive numerous benefits in life enjoyment and a decrease in boredom. So, get to work blogging or reviewing: it'll make you a better man.*

Seriously, I do think it would be a good idea to make this required reading in high school, followed by in depth discussion. For most people, whatever satisfaction they derive from work, it isn't the main focus of happiness. For most of us it is the time spent gardening, or reading, or solving sudoku, or building trains, or directing community theater, or blogging about hideous cakes; that is what *really* satisfies us. Growing up, we are constantly asked what kind of job do we want to have, but "bureaucrat", though necessary, isn't defining. Maybe we should be clearer on that.


* Woman doesn't enter into it. Women are presumably too busy taking care of all the other stuff that needs to happen in order for the men to be free to pursue intellectualism.

Here’s something people may not expect - a self-help book about productivity written over a hundred years ago. We like to think we’re in an age where there’s never enough time and the golden era of leisure was yesterday.

Arnold Bennett comes out and, in a fun and entertaining British way, writes his advice for a middle/upper class society who feel miserable about their existence.

In this book (which is public domain and therefore free), he tackles the issue of people going to work, coming home and then wasting their evening away until they wake up the next day to do it again. All the while, they complain about not having enough time to pursue anything meaningful in their lives (hmmm… sounds familiar…)

While today’s self-help genre focuses toward the idea of being your true self, finding your passion or making money (usually the latter… which only profits the author, but that’s another rant), Bennett focuses on taking advantage of time.

Specifically, how one is able to maximize every minute of every day given to them. Money can be replenished, but time is something that can never be banked. Instead, one should learn how to find all the spare minutes of their day and use it to start living, not merely existing.

It’s a short book and if you’re willing to delve into it, you’ll find plenty of wisdom that is highly useful today.

In this book, Bennett urges hourly workers to use "spare" time to improve their lives, making the best of their time outside of work. He understands that most people are spending as much time as possible working to make more money, thus disliking their lives. "Time is money" seriously understates this matter, more time can generate more money, but money cannot buy you more time

A MUST READ! This book was short but full of good perspectives. And even though Bennett is not the most modern writer (he lived in England from 1867 to 1931), everything he says still applies to today with a wonderful dose of humor. I can't say enough about the book. I happened to read this book at exactly the right time in my life, but I know that it would be a meaningful read for anyone.

Se você pronuncia com frequência a frase 'estou sem tempo', este livro é para você. Você vai se chocar com as constatações cruas sobre a sua vida e as dicas totalmente plausíveis que você tenderá a dizer 'que são impossíveis de executar'. Leia se você é daqueles que deseja fazer mais do que tem feito.