Hey friends,
🥳 Quick thing before we start – I’d love to hear what you think of LifeNotes. Take 5 minutes to share your feedback here (which has the chance of being featured on my new website)
A while ago, I stumbled on the idea of the “other 8 hours” in Arnold Bennett’s timeless book “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day”. Here’s a quote that I love:
So let us begin to examine the budget of the day’s time. You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood—how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.
In the book, our friend Arnold breaks down our daily 24 hours into three segments:
The first 8 hours – Sleep. Even the richest person in the world needs to sleep.
The next 8 hours – Work. Everyone needs to work. If you’re employed, you work. If you’re an entrepreneur, you work. If you’re a trust fund baby, you want to work. If you’re a parent, you do the work of the family and the household. If you’re free from having to work, you’re likely to eventually realise that you want to work anyway because it gives your life purpose.
But then we have the other 8 hours – for everything else.
What do we do with the other eight hours? How we use the other 8 hours is the difference between a life that we love, and a life that we don’t.
If I’m not intentional, it’s easy for the other 8 hours to look like this
- 2 hours playing World of Warcraft
2 hour scrolling on social media or watching YouTube videos
A few hours scrolling on the internet
A few more hours eating and chilling
And boom. Just like that, the other 8 hours are gone.
My ideal way of spending these other 8 hours actually looks something more like this:
- Learning (2 hours): dedicated time to learn something new – a language, guitar, music theory, coding a website, etc.
- Health (2 hours): going to the gym, taking long walks, playing padel and squash with the gang 😉
- Something social (3 hours): chilling and spending quality time with family and friends; hosting dinner parties
- Solo time (1 hour): journalling, reflecting, other things that people say are good for the soul (whatever that means)
Have a great week!
Ali xx
