Meaning of “Life in day-tight compartments.”

Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim connects disciplined use of working time with the ability to gain leisure.

The Way to Wealth; a Poor Richard maxim on delay and useful employment of time.

Past and Present, Book III, Chapter XII, “Reward,” printed page 251 in Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works, Library Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Chapman and Hall), Project Gutenberg #26159. Carlyle says one shall “work while it is called Today” immediately before “For the Night cometh, wherein no man can work,” retaining the biblical allusion and nineteenth-century religious exhortation rather than reframing it as productivity science.

The Master-Word in Medicine, 1903. Osler immediately acknowledges that acquiring the work-habit can be a hard battle; the context therefore supports persistence without turning the passage into a modern workaholism prescription.

A Way of Life, section IV, printed page 14, London: Constable & Company Ltd. (1913), Project Gutenberg #73116. “Concentration is an art of slow acquisition” follows Osler’s advice about steady daily dedication and hour-tight focus. It remains historical educational/professional counsel rather than a quantified modern efficiency rule.

Men of Invention and Industry, Chapter IX, “Charles Bianconi: A Lesson of Self-Help in Ireland”; Project Gutenberg #725. This excerpt is Smiles’s narrative conclusion immediately after an anecdote about saving time.