‘Air Baths’ and Virtue Calendars: The Eccentric Success of Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Routine

Franklin divided his days into simple blocks of work, study, conversation, and self-examination, all guided by the question, ‘What good shall I do this day?’

Benjamin Franklin structured his days around consistent routines, believing that discipline and intentional habits were essential to both productivity and character formation. Terraxplorer/Getty Images

Benjamin Franklin developed an eccentric habit as part of his daily routine: air baths. Cold baths were the latest health trend in Franklin’s time, something like the 18th-century equivalent of red-light therapy, but he preferred to “bathe” simply in the cold morning air. As he explained in a letter, quoted by Mason Currey in “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”:

“I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution, to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber, without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing.”