Benjamin Franklin 1733 · Philadelphia
Sleep
00:00–05:00 · planned
“Sleep.”
Verbatim excerpt · Benjamin Franklin
Line breaks and page markers omitted.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Part Two, written 1784 · 1909 edition
Part Two · daily schedule table
Passage: Daily schedule table · Night, hour labels 10 through 4
Timing & context
The full planned sleep period is 22:00–05:00. It is split at midnight to keep this calendar within one day.
Weekday in the source
Friday evenings and Sunday study
“we met on Friday evenings.”
Part One, paragraph introducing the Junto, the club of mutual improvement View passage ↗
“Sunday being my studying day”
Part Two, paragraph beginning ‘I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian…’ View passage ↗
Franklin names these weekly habits in his autobiography. His 24-hour timetable is a separate ideal daily plan, not an account of a particular Friday or Sunday; the calendar does not combine the club meeting with that plan.
His ideal timetable, not a record of a particular day. Franklin said business interruptions made exact adherence difficult.
1733 is a representative display year selected by Typical Tuesday. The approximate 1730s period is inferred from the autobiography’s Philadelphia library and virtue-project sequence, recalled in 1784. This is an ideal plan.