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How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
page 4 of 47 (08%)
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 convinced that most people sleep as
long as they do because they are at a loss for any other diversion.
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