How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
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day."


The fact is, I, the author, ought to have foreseen that I should
appeal most strongly to those who already had an interest in
existence. It is always the man who has tasted life who demands
more of it. And it is always the man who never gets out of bed
who is the most difficult to rouse.

Well, you of the minority, let us assume that the intensity of your
daily money-getting will not allow you to carry out quite all the
suggestions in the following pages. Some of the suggestions may
yet stand. I admit that you may not be able to use the time spent
on the journey home at night; but the suggestion for the journey to
the office in the morning is as practicable for you as for anybody.
And that weekly interval of forty hours, from Saturday to Monday,
is yours just as much as the other man's, though a slight
accumulation of fatigue may prevent you from employing the
whole of your "h.p." upon it. There remains, then, the important
portion of the three or more evenings a week. You tell me flatly
that you are too tired to do anything outside your programme at
night. In reply to which I tell you flatly that if your ordinary day's
work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and
must be adjusted. A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by
his ordinary day's work. What, then, is to be done?

The obvious thing to do is to circumvent your ardour for your
ordinary day's work by a ruse. Employ your engines in something
beyond the programme before, and not after, you employ them on
the programme itself. Briefly, get up earlier in the morning. You
say you cannot. You say it is impossible for you to go earlier to
bed of a night--to do so would upset the entire household. I do not
think it is quite impossible to go to bed earlier at night. I think that
if you persist in rising earlier, and the consequence is insufficiency
of sleep, you will soon find a way of going to bed earlier. But my
impression is that the consequences of rising earlier will not be an
insufficiency of sleep. My impression, growing stronger every
year, is that sleep is partly a matter of habit--and of slackness. I am