'In Bennetts' 'How to live on 24 hours a day' he lays down the philosophical argument that the majority of us simply do not use the time we are given to best advantage. Given that most of us spend eight hours daily in work for an employer and some of us may even give that our best efforts and enjoy the work, it is the other 16 hours plus weekends (days off) that Bennett tackles here.
Take example the journey to work, travelling to the station, the time the train station blatantly wastes as you stand waiting for it's arrival, the trivial reading of the newspaper in the time allocated to arrive at your destination, and the same on the way home; Bennett has far better uses for your time than to squander it away reading the daily papers.
At home you feel lethargic, you eat later, breaking up the night, you consider going to bed a good forty minutes, and when you look at the clock 6 hours of your time has elapsed as if in the twinkle of an eye, nothing very productive having been done at all.
Bennett blasts through excuses of tiredness, socialising and any other excuse with a logic that is hard to dis affirm, there is no way around it, we should all be not just doing more with our daily allocated amount of time currency, but simply thinking about how we use that allocation can lead to much more productivity in just 2 - 3 hours of our spare 16!
I also found the very last few pages to be very productive to me on a personal level as Bennett praises the benefits of poetry and states if we really can not abide the subject of Philosophy or History as a substitute, that made me chuckle as some of my associates are heavily invested in the study of History, one being a PhD.
Den.
