Immanuel Kant's Framework

From his forties Kant kept a day so exact that his neighbours were said to set their clocks by his afternoon walk. His servant, an old soldier under orders to be persistent, woke him at five; Kant was proud that he was never even half an hour late. He drank a cup or two of weak tea and smoked a single pipe, the bowl growing larger over the years, the smoking time given to meditation. He prepared lectures and wrote until seven, lectured from seven to eleven, then wrote again until lunch. Lunch out, with wine and company, was his one real meal and the sociable part of his day; it could run to three. Then the walk, then an evening at his closest friend's house, some light reading, and bed at ten exactly. As a week it is a seven-hour night, an hour of writing before a four-hour teaching block, a four-hour lunch, an hour's walk and two long social blocks. The lesson is not the rigidity. It is that the deep work sits at the front of the day and the people at the back.