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    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: With linked Table of Contents
    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: With linked Table of Contents
    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: With linked Table of Contents
    Ebook53 pages49 minutes

    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: With linked Table of Contents

    By Arnold Bennett

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Bennett address the problem of never having enough time. In this book, he 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!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilder Publications, Inc.
    Release dateMay 8, 2015
    ISBN9781633849525
    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: With linked Table of Contents
    Author

    Arnold Bennett

    Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist renowned as a prolific writer throughout his entire career. The most financially successful author of his day, he lent his talents to numerous short stories, plays, newspaper articles, novels, and a daily journal totaling more than one million words.

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    Reviews for How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

    3.5/5

    126 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book shows some signs of age in its racist and sexist (gendered) language, but if we can accept the less-developed aspects of the times and focus on what is good, this book (or more accurately, books) will give the reader an immediate benefit if one is only willing to give Arnold Bennett's methods a try. This self-help book predates Dale Carnegie by a few years. If one were to sum-up Bennett hastily, I would say he was England's Dale Carnegie. Bennett received criticism from the likes of Virginia Woolf for his novels, but after one reading and implementing two of his ideas, I am hooked.
    • 2/5
      really, a serious attempt to provide tips for getting more out of your 24 hours; very 1908 intensity
    • 2/5
      Well written skepticism about how to live 24 hours a day by the magnificent Arnold Bennett. Good writing is the cornerstone of all good literature.
    • 4/5
      Arnold Bennett was a very prolific writer, perhaps the most successful Edwardian author. He was a self-made man, originally from very humble origins. His success and self-confidence led him to the conviction that he could often do things better than other. At the height of his career he published a number of non-fictional works advising readers how to improve themselves.[Bennett wrote two guides for aspiring writers: [How to Become an Author] in 1903, and The Author's Craft in 1913. His own credo about authorship was expressed as follows: "Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself?"He also wrote several books advising common people on how to improve themselves. These range from titles such as Self and Self-Management, Mental Efficiency, to guides on developing literary taste (Literary Taste: How to Form It ) and how to change one's life-style in such a way that the emerging class of white-collar workers might make more of life. The most well-known, and still read, of these is How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. This short work may be so popular still because it is so recognizable and so practical. Everyone wastes time doing nothing, which could in a very simple manner be turned into time well spent. By getting up a bit earlier, and systematically devoting increasing amounts of time, up to an hour and a half each evening to reading Great Literature, rather than the newspaper, improve self-discipline, reflect on life and on the Great Literature one has read, and develop an interest in art, etc, anyone can improve and rise above themselves.
    • 4/5
      Refreshing way of looking at the 'normal life' (the rat race), packed with memorable quotes, and a delightful audiobook-companion while planting a fig tree.
    • 4/5
      Not nearly as enjoyable as his fiction, is right. He veers close to sounding like the prig he derides in the last chapter. Still, worth a quick read, comparing self to the standard he is setting.
    • 3/5
      Short and, determinedly, sweet. Bennett's advice is quite straightforward: determine something you like to do, plan out a program of how to do that thing that you like to do, and then do that thing you like to do. Bennett likes to read and to meditate on Marcus Aurelius. He is gracious enough to consider that someone else may "have a like for the natural history of street-cries". That's OK, it's all one. The hallmarks of Bennett's style are consistent with his program for spending his and your time: charm, conviviality and adherence to a clear plan.
    • 2/5
      A somewhat sententious analysis of how time seems simply to evaporate in modern life (written about 100 years ago). I found this short book (well, scarcely more than a long essay) was a little disappointing after having read some of Bennett's fiction set in the "Five Towns", though I did acknowledge that his argument was well-constructed and lucidly expressed. Still, i think i will stick to his fiction for the foreseeable future.
    • 1/5
      I could have liked it if the book offered me some solutions. Just using a snippy language never takes as somewhere.
    • 5/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day is a short read by Arnold Bennett where he explains his thoughts on time management. A few takeaways from the books are as follows: Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Some people are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with their own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the dealing that you are leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have "more time". The most important preliminary task is arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of twenty-four hours. Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own. A man should not make two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely excitement from. How can he hope to live fully and completely if he did? 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.One of the chief things which man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like and arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest. Cultivate your mind while on the street and on the train. While idle, concentrate your mind on a subject. It does not matter what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. It is important to realize happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles. It is important to have your conduct and principles agree.

    Book preview

    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett

    Preface to this Edition

    This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book.

    I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of it–some of them nearly as long as the book itself–have been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however, been offered–not in the press, but by sundry obviously sincere correspondents–and I must deal with it. A reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is as follows:– In the majority of instances he [the typical man] does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with some reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines, while he is engaged in his business, are seldom at their full ‘h.p.’

    I am assured, in accents of unmistakable sincerity, that there are many business men–not merely those in high positions or with fine prospects, but modest subordinates with no hope of ever being much better off–who do enjoy their business functions, who do not shirk them, who do not arrive at the office as late as possible and depart as early as possible, who, in a word, put the whole of their force into their day’s work and are genuinely fatigued at the end thereof.

    I am ready to believe it. I do believe it. I know it. I always knew it. Both in London and in the provinces it has been my lot to spend long years in subordinate situations of business; and the fact did not escape me that a certain proportion of my peers showed what amounted to an honest passion for their duties, and that while engaged in those duties they were really living to the fullest extent of which they were capable. But I remain convinced that these fortunate and happy individuals (happier perhaps than they guessed) did not and do not constitute a majority, or anything like a majority. I remain convinced that the majority of decent average conscientious men of business (men with aspirations and ideals) do not as a rule go home of a night genuinely tired. I remain convinced that they put not as much but as little of themselves as they conscientiously can into the earning of a livelihood, and that their vocation bores rather than interests them.

    Nevertheless, I admit that the minority is of sufficient importance to merit attention, and that I ought not to have ignored it so completely as I did do. The whole difficulty of the hard-working minority was put in a single colloquial sentence by one of my correspondents. He wrote: I am just as keen as anyone on doing something to ‘exceed my programme,’ but allow me to tell you that when I get home at six thirty p.m. I am not anything like so fresh as you seem to imagine.

    Now I must point out that the case of the minority, who throw themselves with passion and gusto into their daily business task, is infinitely less deplorable than the case of the majority, who go half-heartedly and feebly through their official day. The former are less in need of advice how to live. At any rate during their official day of, say, eight hours they are really alive; their engines are giving the full indicated h.p. The other eight

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