168
How many hours are in a day?
24.
Everyone knows that.
How many hours are in a week?
This, most people don’t know this number off the top of their head.
It’s critically important – life-changing, maybe, even – to know. I do not exaggerate when I say this.
168.
24 hours per day x 7 days per week = 168 hours per week.
There are a whole lot of immensely practical implications of this number, knowing it firmly, respecting it – and navigating it to the best of your ability. We dive into a few of them in this chapter.
***
CHAPTER 5: “TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL”
“You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use.
Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o’clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then.
I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter. You don’t eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; 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; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day’s work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office—gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!
That is a fair sample case. But you say: “It’s all very well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can’t always be on the stretch.” Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don’t spend three-quarters of an hour in “thinking about” going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?
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), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., “Time to be thinking about going to bed.” 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.
But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “…but I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.”
-- Arnold Bennett,
How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day
, 1910
***
168 AS A MAGIC NUMBER
The dividing of the day into 24 “hours” is somewhat arbitrary, as is the dividing of 7 days into a “week” – you could divide them differently. If I have enough spare time in a decade or two, I’ll probably try to advocate for and popularize the world getting on some form of metric time, like beat time.
But nearly everyone uses 24 hours and 7 days; our schedules and clocks and computers and organizations are built around this, so we’ll stick with it. Changing the measurement and units wouldn’t change the underlying fact of the world spinning, anyways – the measurements are less important than the movement.
So, as long as this is the convention, we’ll use it. It’s good enough.
There are 24 hours in a day.
There are 7 days in a week.
That means there are 168 hours in a week.
There is really no getting around this – everything you want to do in your life will have to fit into these hours and days.
So, what do we do about it?
***
TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT TIME: MEASUREMENT AND PUZZLE
Bennett’s whole idea, his marvelous idea, is that we should learn to budget and spend our hours like we’d budget and spend money. Everything you need and want to do in a given day must fit into the 24 hours of the day, and everything you want to do in a given week must fit in the 168 hours of that week.
There’s a major difference between money and time, though: money will sit in your wallet or bank account until you are ready to spend it, whereas time passes on its own moment-by-moment. You cannot bank time; you are always spending it; it is always being spent.
I’d like to suggest two ways to look at time, then – the first way is as a measurement
. When we talk about having 168 hours per week, we’re talking about a particular measurement of time.
You can – literally – measure where your time is going, and make adjustments for the current week and upcoming weeks.
Behaviorally, though, time acts more like a puzzle
– I don’t mean that as “mysterious.” I mean, almost literally like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to fit the pieces together well.
***
THE PUZZLE OF THE WEEK
You can see the language is dated, but nonetheless I love this passage –
“There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use.”
There are a lot of ways to visualize time – the calendar app on your computer is a fine one. You can literally block out where you are going and where you have to be on the calendar, and observe where the empty blocks are, and fill them in.
Many people do exactly this, attempting to allocate onto their calendar exactly what they’d like to do, and leaving very little blank time. “Calendar painting,” I think that’s what it’s called.
But step back from that for a moment – Bennett is pointing out that if you’re commuting by train, you can choose what you’ll do in that time. He says that reading newspapers during a 45-minute commute on public transit is a bad use of 40 minutes. It’s lavish and wasteful.
If you instead prepared to do something more taxing than reading the newspaper – such as studying a particular topic you wanted to become more knowledgeable in – you could use the time in commuting more profitably than if you hadn’t set that aside.
This is part of the puzzle-fitting of time
– figuring out when, throughout your week, you can do more valuable things.
***
ALLOCATION AND TIME AS A MEASUREMENT
Now, here is why I think the number “168” is critically valuable, and here’s an exercise I strongly recommend you do. I do this a few times a year, and every time I do, it’s very insightful.
Actually sit down and calculate where your hours go each week, roughly.
Rough is fine – estimates are fine.
I average nine hours of sleep per night; after much trial and error, that’s where I function best (unfortunately – I envy the people who can be at full cognitive ability on less sleep).
So,
7 days x 9 hours of sleep per night = 63 hours per week sleeping
Again, there are 168 hours every week.
168 hours - 63 hours sleeping = 105 hours remaining in the week.
(If you slept 8 hours per night, it would be 56 hours per week, and you would have 112 waking hours remaining.)
If you have to be at a set place for a job, you can calculate that. Five days per week from 9AM to 5PM is 40 hours. Thus, if I was at a 40-hour-per-week job and slept nine hours per night, I’d have:
168 hours - 63 hours sleeping - 40 hours at the office = 65 other hours
How long do you spend eating? If it’s three hours per day, that’s 21 hours per week. There would be 44 hours left.
How long do your chores take? Showering, dressing, laundry, shopping, etc? 10 hours per week? Then there’s 34 hours left.
***
I RECOMMEND YOU ACTUALLY DO THIS
Here are a few big categories to look at –
*Hours slept
*Chores
*Time in the office
*Commuting
*Time eating
To figure out how many hours per week any daily activity takes, multiply by 7 if you do it every day (sleeping), or multiply by five if you only do it on the weekdays.
So if you commute one hour each way to the office, that’s two hours per day. If you do it on weekdays (five days per week), that’s 10 hours.
Every time I do this exercise, I almost always notice two things –
1. There are quite a lot of hours, dozens of hours, unaccounted for. Where are they going? What am I doing with them?
2. “Little stupid activities” that don’t add much to life – shopping, commuting, etc – are actually eating away at a lot
of life and hours.
Both of these insights are very valuable for improving how you deploy your 168 hours each week.
***
BASIC SUGGESTION: FILLING DEAD TIME
We will walk through some basic, intermediate, and advanced suggestions.
You can come at the challenge of living better on your weekly hours from either the measurement perspective or the puzzle-fitting perspective; in the end, all your life resolves to actions and movements you’ll make, but you can start from either viewpoint.
First and foremost, you want to take time that’s “mostly bad and wasted” and make it slightly better.
Smartphones have done a lot in this regard – you can use Audible for audiobooks (or get a library card and Overdrive to get audiobooks for free), as well as using Amazon’s Kindle app on your phone to read books (there’s many free ones that are out of print, as well as almost all major new releases coming out on Kindle). Finally, you can use an app like Pocket to load up reading of longer essays and articles; I know a number of readers forward each issue of The Strategic Review
to Pocket, and then read them at their convenience.
Whenever I’m in an airport, I’m often dumbfounded to see people doing nothing
while waiting in line for security screening, and for customs and immigration when flying internationally. It’s very easy to set it up so you can listen to a book, or read books and essays while in line and waiting for things. This can easily turn 3-5 hours per week of “standing around waiting” into reading and learning.
Bennett notes that people wasted their time away on trains reading newspapers in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, because they hadn’t prepared and queued up something better to do with their time.
It’s even easier to remedy this fault these days. This is the lowest-hanging fruit – find ways to bring useful things with you, that would otherwise be unpleasant waiting-around time.
***
BASIC SUGGESTION: REDUCTION OF TIME ON INSIGNIFICANT THINGS
In Bennett’s Sixth Chapter, “Remember Human Nature,” he notes –
“To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been.
”
This insight must be noted.
To do more of something you want to do, you need to replace some activity you were already doing.
This maybe sounds very obvious, but I usually see people neglect it. If you want to write for an hour each day, that means doing one hour less each day of something else you were already doing.
“One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it” – indeed.
Now, here’s why I recommended you actually sit down and estimate how much time you spend on each major activity in your life: to re-allocate time to some new activity, you need to find where the time was actually going in the past.
The best candidates for doing this are, perhaps counterintuitively, not
procrastination and waste – but rather, unpleasant routine activities with no payoffs to them.
Commuting is the largest one.
I can’t say enough bad things about commuting.
Commuting is the worst thing in the world.
Unless you’re doing it by foot or by bicycle, one of the largest quality-of-life improvements is reducing the amount of time you spend commuting.
People think “oh, it’s only 30 minutes each way; it’s only an hour a day” – but when you actually sit and write out where your 168 hours each week are going, you realize it’s very significant.
If you’ve got some core job or duties in the world that are consuming 40+ hours per week, and you sleep 8 hours per night (56 hours per week), then that’s already 96 hours. Chores and eating are typically taking 10-20 hours per week or more; let’s call it 10 (but it’s probably more for you if you measure it).
So, just sleep+work+chores+eating is already 106 hours.
That means you only have 62 hours left each week.
If you’re commuting 10 hours per week, that’s 16% of the remainder of your life.
And what do you get for commuting? Lower rents? Often, people spend on commuting more than they save on lower rents, when they actually measure it.
I won’t go on too long on the topic – it risks crossing over into ranting – but commuting is a dreadfully bad use of time and just about every major study on the topic has shown commuting makes people less happy. Reducing your commuting to a distance you can do by foot or bicycle should be a goal for anyone who wants to do a lot in the world. If it takes 3-5 years to get in a position where you can, fine, but by all means reduce commuting. I’m able to write 200,000 words per year in the time most people spend commuting – what could you do with an extra 520 hours per year? A lot, a whole lot.
Cooking and eating is a great joy for many people – if that’s you, by all means keep doing it.
For many of the rest of us, it’s just something we do to stay alive. I’d encourage you to measure how much time you spend cooking and eating – it’s probably a lot more than you think – and work to reduce it.
My friend
Taylor Pearson
typically cooks once per week – making a mix of grilled chicken, stew, baked sweet potatoes, etc – and then he can heat them up and eat quickly when he feels like it.
Figuring out healthy food deliveries, making purchases like roasted chickens and figuring out foods like stirring boiling water into oats for oatmeal, etc – this is valuable. You can eat healthy without spending a lot of time on it. It takes practice and research, but is possible. Again, 3 hours per day on cooking and eating is 21 hours per week – if you get it down to 10-14 hours or less, you get those hours to spend doing things more meaningful to you.
You can and also should experiment with eating once or twice per day – it suits some people more than others, but eliminating an entire meal goes a long ways.
***
INTERMEDIATE SUGGESTION: ANATHEMATIZE STATISTICALLY DOMINATED ACTIVITES
Quitting things is hard.
You should probably quit some things, but it’s hard to do.
A lot of people raised in Western countries, especially America, have a sort of Puritanical streak to them – thus, when they try to quit things, they start by trying to quit the stuff they enjoy the most, or the stuff they feel like will be hardest to quit.
This seems to be a losing strategy to me.
I don’t mean on a spiritual level, but on a very practical one. Quitting things is hard. Quitting the hardest thing to quit is even harder.
If you’re looking to redeploy some of your 168 hours per week, then, and you want to quit some stuff, I’d recommend you always start by quitting stuff that’s easier to quit
.
Let’s compare it to eating junk food – if your favorite food is pizza, quitting pizza will be likely be the hardest food for you to quit. You might seem to successfully quit pizza for a few months, but then, after a very stressful day, you go on a pizza binge. After that, you’re back eating pizza with a vengeance – perhaps eating more pizza than you ever did before the (failed) quitting attempt.
I recommend you do something that’s also hard, but much easier: quit stuff that you don’t enjoy very much or get very much out of.
In 2016, last year, I quit four types of food, presumably forever: cookies, pastries, candy, and chips.
It was very easy. I quit them all a couple months apart. I had one final one of each of them, took a photograph of my last time eating it, and then said – never again.
But it was very easy, and I’ve had almost no cravings.
The reason it was easy is because I actually don’t like
any of those four foods at all.
If I wanted to eat cookies, for instance, it was because my body wanted some mix of simple carbohydrates, sugar, a pleasant taste, fats, or I was bored or some such.
But I never enjoyed cookies all that much.
What I did – and this takes more effort than it sounds like – is I sat and thought really carefully. I asked myself,
“If I’m in a situation where I’m hungry, craving carbohydrates, craving fats, wanting something sweet, or just bored, are cookies the best way to get that food/carbs/sugar/fat/sweetness/anti-boredom?”
My answer was: no.
I’d rather, 10 times out of 10, eat ice cream.
So it was actually very easy to resolve to quit those lesser pleasures, they were dominated in a statistical sense
by eating ice cream. If I’m at a party and someone offers a cookie, I say no. If, on reflection, I’d really like something sweet/carb-ish/anti-boredom/whatever, it doesn’t take very long to duck out to a convenience store and have an ice cream.
I placed zero restrictions on the amount of ice cream I eat.
But if you look at the studies on eating, you find that people will tend to over-eat much more when there’s a large variety of food options, and less so when there’s only a single food option.
I mean, how much ice cream can a person really eat? Eating a ton of ice cream is gross.
Whereas it’s easy to eat a little bit of cookies, a little bit of candy, have a little bit of ice cream, then maybe another cookie, etc, etc – it’s much harder to do that with just eating ice cream forever.
Now, this takes more work to do than it sounds. To anathematize – basically, “kill off forever” – a behavior, you have to really understand what conditions you do that behavior under, and find a replacement behavior that fills all those needs.
It’s easy to see that you could streamline all carb/fat mixes of foods into eating only ice cream, and thereby limit the random junk food you eat. It’s what I did, and around a year later, it’s humming along in the background of my life easily enough.
The trick is, though, to really be honest and introspective about what payoffs the behavior is serving.
Applying this time, if you typically procrastinate by browsing Facebook, reading a book might or might not
be an adequate replacement behavior. I think if I’d tried to channel all my junk-food eating into vegetables, I’d have probably failed.
In terms of anathematizing procrastinating behaviors, you’d start with ones you like less on all levels
, but which meet the same needs, as whatever you’re doing. So if you surf a semi-learning website like Quora aggressively, you might be able to replace that with a great curated feed of blogs on a particular topic that’s relevant to you.
This might sound like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty big if you can add it to your toolbox – by reducing and streamlining all “junk behaviors” in a particular class (online procrastination, for instance) into a single one, there’s only so much of it you can do before you get bored and go back to work or whatever it is you wanted to be doing.
Second, and more importantly, it gives you greater skill at quitting-in-general.
The ability to quit things, and fight off dumb impulses towards doing the activity you quit, is a skill. It can be trained. Success helps a lot with developing new skills, and it keeps morale up. You can try quitting things that aren’t very important to you and streamline those into (very slightly) better behaviors, and you become more skilled at self-regulation and quitting. It gradually frees up hours of the week to redeploy.
***
INTERMEDIATE SUGGESTION: SEQUENCING
Bennett: “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), and that
you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal.
By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours.”
This is also harder to sound than it sounds at first.
When you start taking the puzzle of your 168 hours per week seriously, you eventually get to the point where getting another 5-10 hours per week of good work is quite a challenge.
At that point, sequencing
becomes very important.
I’ll go a step further than Bennett – one of the largest gains for me was shifting my morning around.
Like most people, I used to:
1. Wake
2. Shower
3. Do morning routines
4. Have breakfast
5. Start working
I changed it to:
1. Wake
2. Work, immediately, until a little tired
3. Have breakfast
4. Work some more
5. Do morning routines
6. Shower
7. Work some more
This must have been worth between 5 and 20 hours per week of work.
At some point, fatigue becomes the limit on work, and the mind needs time to compile between types of hard work.
It takes time and practice and study – it’s harder than it sounds – but you can sequence your day in a way that it’s possible to get a lot more done. Merely working 30-60 minutes before your shower makes the shower a recharging and mind-compiling activity, as opposed to routine. It also feels more like a reward, more “earned,” when done that way – it’s more enjoyable to shower after completing an hour of solid work upon waking. Breakfast tastes better after work is done, too.
If you really study the pattern of your life, you’ll probably find 5-10 major sequencing changes you can make, that add up collectively to dozens (no exaggeration) of excellent hours each week.
Some people are useless before their morning coffee. I used to be. I bought caffeine pills equivalent to a cup of coffee, and take one immediately upon waking.
Bennett lists a number of these within How to Live on 24 Hours
– stupid little elements of sequencing that make a major difference.
The world has obviously changed a lot since 1910, but the general practice is still sound. Things like batching phonecalls to all happen on a specific day of the week or within certain hours, carving out time for naps in the middle of the day, and going to bed earlier and waking earlier. All of these are known to work, but take some effort and practice to put into effect.
***
ADVANCED SUGGESTION, MAYBE
I think the suggestions above – estimating where your 168 hours are currently going, filling dead time, reducing time on insignificant things, quitting less-enjoyed procrastination in favor of something clearly better, and sequencing your day more carefully – are very much good enough to get started.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the average person could 5x to 10x their output on what’s most important to them from those changes alone. This doesn’t need to be made harder than it is.
With that said, I know we do have some hardcore readers who have already taken the most basic of steps.
For them, I’ll finally note something that’s expensive and inconvenient and not-worth-it for most people, but if you’ve already squeezed most of the juice out of the easy and intermediate suggestions, you could try tracking your time down to the five minute block.
It takes about 30 minutes per day, and a couple hours to review once per week, to do that.
I do it. It’s useful and I’ve learned a lot from it, but I only started doing it after around five years after looking to get basic patterns in place.
If you’ve already got the fundamentals mastered – and seriously, if you haven’t, it’s really not worth it – but if you’ve got the fundamentals mastered, the first step to doing it would be just to write down the start and stop time of activities, and broadly classify them.
I’ve got some categories like “Logistics” (planning, basically), meetings, measurement and analysis, high-technical work, routine work, etc.
Not too many categories. 5-10 is more than enough, maybe too much.
The first step would just be to track all of that for a few weeks. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how long things take – some things you think are difficult actually don’t take very long, and some things you think are trivial are actually taking a lot of time.
If you wanted to go really hardcore after doing that successfully for a couple months, you could then set up a spreadsheet and classify your time into something like “Excellent”, “Okay”, “Bad”, and “Leisure” (I classify “good leisure” as its own thing, and distractions and procrastination as “Bad”).
At the end of it, you can output numbers like these for a week –
Excellent
1660 total minutes
258.57 minutes per day
Okay
2340 total minutes
354.29 minutes per day
Bad
565 total minutes
80.71 minutes per day
Leisure
1775 total minutes
253.57 minutes per day
Ratio: E as % of Work
42.19%
Ratio: E as % of Day
27.3%
Ratio: E+L as % of Day
54.07%
Ratio: E+O+L as % of Day
91.48%
That was an unusually good week – the first week of 2017 for me. Of course, divide by 60 to get hours. 1660 total minutes = 27.7 hours spent on excellent work.
I’m pretty strict in what I classify as “Excellent” time – it’s almost always large-scale design, innovation, and so on. “Okay” is by no means bad – a perfect week for me would never be more than 70% Excellent and 30% Okay on work ratios, and that would be unusual. There’s always some meetings and email and paperwork and taxes and such, at least for how my life is set up.
The chief value in doing this is not for eliminating bad time, but ensuring you’re not being excessively busy and neglecting to do really excellent work. That’s where a lot of people get into trouble – being busy with calls and meetings and email, but not doing really needle-moving hugely-important things.
***
PATCHWORK IMPROVEMENTS AND ONGOING GAINS
Again, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I don’t recommend setting up a complicated spreadsheet thing to start.
People tend to look for a “single solution” on the most important areas in life, but almost none of life works like that. If you decided today that you wanted to live precisely as excellently as you can (by your own definition), it would be 5-10 years of nonstop tweaking and improvements as a way of life
towards getting towards there.
For most people, that’s not even necessary anyways – I’m aiming to do Elon Musk-esque things in the world, that’s part of it, but I also get a genuine kick out of doing this. If you don’t enjoy this sort of thing immensely, it’s still worth doing the basics once or twice a year as a quick overview and making some small improvements, but by no means necessary to approach fanatically.
And on that note, I’ll leave you with some final cautionary points that Bennett made and that I’ll echo –
“Let us now see where we stand. So far we have marked for saving out of the waste of days, half an hour at least on six mornings a week, and one hour and a half on three evenings a week. Total, seven hours and a half a week.
I propose to be content with that seven hours and a half for the present. “What?” you cry. “You pretend to show us how to live, and you only deal with seven hours and a half out of a hundred and sixty-eight! Are you going to perform a miracle with your seven hours and a half?” Well, not to mince the matter, I am—if you will kindly let me! That is to say, I am going to ask you to attempt an experience which, while perfectly natural and explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations. You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical outlook changed. Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind?
More time might assuredly be given to the cultivation of one’s self. And in proportion as the time was longer the results would be greater. But I prefer to begin with what looks like a trifling effort.
It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.
And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously.
When you have conscientiously given seven hours and a half a week to the cultivation of your vitality for three months—then you may begin to sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you are capable of doing.”
Nothing succeeds like success, eh? If you’re just starting with this sort of thing, aiming to get an average of 1-2 hours a day of excellent work is already a pretty hard challenge – my default recommendation for someone starting out is to get 90-120 minutes of excellent work in during the morning, and build the rest of your life around that.
That gives a lot
of flexibility in where to start. It could be waking a little earlier and sequencing your morning a little smarter to get some good gains. Bennett recommends aiming for 7.5 hours per week to start; I recommend aiming for between 9 and 11 excellent hours each week reliably as a starting place.
You’ll find that’s plenty hard enough, and if it’s easy after a couple months, by all means keep improving and ratcheting the difficulty.
But all the while, little lessons and skills and habits and patterns you pick up, those stay with you. They make the rest of your life easier, probably forever, and they increment and add up.
There’s no “single secret” – it’s a patchwork of improvements and gains, as you push up against this fundamental limit and fit your movement and action in as the Earth spins around and orbits the Sun and does its thing.
It’s satisfying – incredibly satisfying – and I do recommend you give it a think through. A good starting place, if you haven’t already done so, is sitting down and doing a rough estimate of where your 168 hours per week are going.