Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/93

 "I haven't a minute," was his assertion.

"Won't you keep a record for the next week," I asked him, "of exactly how you spend the twenty-four hours of the day, and bring it back to me?"

I gave him directions as to how the time should be divided: so much for meals, so much for sleeping, so much for school work and study, and so on, and required him to account specifically for the entire twenty-four hours of the day.

"I guess I'm not working as much as I thought," he said when, at the end of the specified time, he came back again. "I'm a good deal more of a loafer than I should have been willing to admit."

His record showed, as yours will quite likely if you will take the trouble to investigate, that nearly one-third of the twenty-four hours of each working day, and much more than that on Saturdays and Sundays was taken up either with doing very trifling things or in actually doing nothing. He had considerable leisure, but he was wasting it. If the boy who thinks he has little or no leisure time will make a similar experiment, he may have his eyes opened. The undeniable fact is that most of us waste our leisure; we get out of it neither pleasure nor profit.

There are few things which more accurately reveal your character than the use that you make of your leisure time or would make of it if you could follow your own desires. If for the next twenty-four hours you could do as you please, go where you want to, and be asked no ques-