How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Arnold Bennett 1908
This short guide offers practical advice on using the hours outside a full-time job. Bennett suggests setting aside ninety minutes on three evenings each week for serious study.
46 pages 54 min reading time
- An early classic of self-help and time management that is still widely read more than a century later.
- Argues that each day's twenty-four hours are a gift everyone receives equally, and that how we spend them decides the quality of our lives.
- Argues that the time outside work is not leftover time, but a "day within a day" that belongs fully to us and can be used to grow the mind.
- Helped shape the modern genre of personal productivity books, and its core idea of reclaiming small pockets of time still appears in today's advice on habits and routines.
Began as newspaper articles
The book first ran as a series of pieces in a London evening paper before being collected into a volume.
Written for office clerks
Bennett aimed it at city office workers who spent their days at desks and their evenings feeling tired.
Published by a small magazine
Its first book edition came from the press of The New Age, a small London magazine Bennett wrote for.
Readers wrote back
Many readers sent Bennett letters about it, and he answered their praise and complaints in a preface for later editions.