Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule | Hacker News Reader

Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule

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88 pointsthankuz31 comments

You may be interested in reading the many comments from when this was submitted earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=765113

Franklin's autobiography (where this comes from) is a fantastic quick read with lots of thought provoking ideas relavant to the HN crowd. Definitely recommended!

For anyone whose interested, its available as a free kindle download.

And in PDF:

http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/franklin/BenFranklin6x...

It's on page 74 (in the PDF).

You can get it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148

Franklin's autobiography is my top pick in the "books for entrepreneurs" category, and is also simply a must-read Americana book.

Amazing that a must-read American classic was written in a week:

... expecting the enjoyment of a week's uninterrupted leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write ... for you.

Yea totally - some great stuff in there. Wisdom!

Yeah, but Mr. Franklin goes on to explain that he was able to stick to this schedule for about a week... Funny guy. His autobiography is worth reading.

I wonder what time Barack Obama, Nicola Sarcozy, Vladimir Putin and other presidents/prime ministers go to bed at. And how much sleep they get.

Thinking about it, a study on how and why "sleeping" has changed over the years would be really interesting.

Putin: calls himself an early riser, goes to bed at 10-11-12. (source http://www.gazeta.ru/2001/03/06/intervjuprez.shtml)

Medvedev: wakes up at 8, goes to bed at 2 or later. (http://www.kp.ru/daily/24089/320586/)

Obama: shows up at the office shortly before 9. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/us/politics/29whitehouse.h...)

G. W. Bush: early riser, goes to bed at 10 (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=1474572)

Similarities to Google calendar daily view are striking.

Was Franklin the first agile hacker? The questions are very similar to the ones you do in the daily stand up.

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/daily-scrum

Hmm. Looks very similar to my own typical work day. Except I get up at 6 instead of five which means I have one hour less a day to spend per day. However, I would no be able to function properly after a while without that one extra hour of sleep.

You should give it a try. You might surprise yourself. I recently started getting up at 4 just to see what would happen. I've got a ton more time and occasionally need to take a nap around 5-7pm, but other wise have been fine just getting 4 hrs a night.

Hmm. I doubt that would work for me. Less than 8 hours sleep and I'll be s total wreck in no time. I also read somewhere (don't have references) that 7-8 hours sleep is optimal. Naps give me a headache. Can't sleep on a bus/train/airplane either.

No commute to and fro work!?

I thought this was funny/sad too. I spend approx 2.5 hours a day commuting. Clearly, I have found something in my schedule that needs to be cut.

I spend about two hours commuting myself. For me, the worst part is the fatigue that hits you afterward and the affects of it that linger for many more hours that keep you from doing more productive things.

Oh, how America has changed.

No exercise, unless it was somehow included in "Work." Of course, the three hours before work in the morning would leave time for half an hour of exercise.

Ben Franklin was actually fairly athletic. One of his many occupations was being a printer, which required carrying around heavy equipment. He was known to carry 2 trays where many Printers only managed 1.

He was also a very avid swimmer (unusual as at the time, many people couldn't swim at all) and promoted physical fitness and moderation.

(I come from Philadelphia: a town where BF is a revered local hero, to the point we have an "official" BF impersonator.)

I'm from Philly, too. Early in the book, where he talks about his impetus for all the early inventions, there's a section discussing how he rigged a kite to pull him downstream while swimming.

I don't think exercise was a huge concern in his day. Scheduling times to exercise is a modern invention.

Also, many of the things that qualify today for activity level we would deem "exercise" was reached by everyday chores, such as chopping wood, feeding livestock, walking, &c.

They also died extremely young, so they didn't have to worry about a lot of the diseases that come with not being in shape.

I like how sometimes the most mundane details are sometimes the most interesting.

Very cool

Related and highly recommended are:

* Daily routines - How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/

* How we work - We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2004/12/how_we_work.html

Thanks a lot for these. I was looking for things just like this the other day - something like usesthis.com, but for other fields. And the fact that dailyroutines starts of with Simone de Beauvoir, one of my favourite authors, gives me great confidence in the site.

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