Samuel Johnson's Diary of Failed Early-Rising Resolutions

At Easter 1764, Samuel Johnson wrote a list of purposes in his private diary, and two of them were to avoid idleness and to rise early. He was fifty-four, he had finished the Dictionary of the English Language nine years earlier, and he had already been praying against his own sloth for more than a quarter of a century.

Johnson’s diary is the best-documented case in English of a brilliant person who understood the problem, wrote it down, prayed about it and renewed the resolution every few years without it ever quite taking. The reason, I think, is simple and a little unflattering to the whole genre of self-improvement: every one of those resolutions had exactly one person in it.

What did Johnson actually write, and when?

The diary was published in 1785 by George Strahan as Prayers and Meditations. The early-rising entries make a tidy timeline.

Year	What he wrote	What happened
1738	A prayer (7 September) asking to be enabled to redeem “the time which I have spent in Sloth”	The earliest dated prayer in the book already names the problem
1764	Easter Day, 22 April: a list of purposes that includes avoiding idleness and rising early	He records that he “rose, took tea, and prayed for resolution and perseverance,” then formed the resolutions at the altar
1765	Easter, 7 April: “I purpose to rise at eight”	He admits he often lies in bed until two, and that since the last Easter he had “reformed no evil habits”
1773	Spoken, not written: “I have, all my life long, been lying till noon”	Recorded by Boswell on the Hebrides tour, 14 September
1775	Good Friday, 14 April: his purpose is, from Easter Day, “to rise early, not later than eight”	The target is now eight o’clock
1777	Easter, 6 April: “My purpose once more is, To rise at eight”	The words “once more” carry the whole story

The 1765 entry deserves a second look. Johnson sets the target at eight not because eight is early, but because it is “much earlier than I now rise.” A man who sometimes got up at two in the afternoon is negotiating with himself, and the terms get gentler each time.

Was this just a quirk of one man’s sleep?

Partly. Johnson’s biographers describe disturbed nights, and sleep that comes late is hard to cut short. That is a real excuse, and I do not wave it away.

But the excuse does not explain the pattern, which is the repetition. Johnson did not discover the problem in 1777. He had named it in 1738. What changes across forty years is the size of the promise, which shrinks from “rise early” to “rise at eight,” and the wording of the confession, which hardens from regret into something closer to resignation. Poor sleep made the habit hard. The structure of the promise made it impossible to enforce.

His 1773 remark to Boswell is the neatest summary. Johnson said he told all young men, “with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.” He believed it completely. He was lecturing from a bed he had not left, and nobody in the room was in a position to say so.

Why did a resolution this sincere keep failing?

Look at who attended each of these resolutions. At the altar on Easter Day 1764 it occurred to Johnson that he ought to form some resolutions, and he made them “in the presence of God” but without a vow. The witness was supreme, silent and forgiving. Nobody would check on Tuesday whether he had been up by eight, and the next Easter would arrive with a fresh page.

That is the mechanism. A private promise has three properties that make it decay:

• The breaker and the judge are the same person. Johnson prosecuted himself every Good Friday, and every Good Friday he sentenced himself to the same resolution again.
• The penalty is delayed. The reckoning arrived once a year, long after the particular mornings it concerned.
• Renewal is cheap. Writing “I purpose to rise at eight” costs a line of ink and feels like progress. It may even have relieved the guilt enough to make the next late morning easier.

Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals and the morning schedules of Darwin, Kant and others show the opposite design, where the day is built around fixed points other people can see. Kant’s neighbours reportedly set their clocks by his walk. Johnson’s day had no fixed point of that kind before noon, and he left no record of ever building one.

What would have been different with a witness?

I will not pretend to know what would have gotten Johnson out of bed, because I cannot verify any account of it, and the diary does not offer one. What the record does show is the missing ingredient. Across forty years of entries there is no appointment he arranged to be accountable to, no companion who was told the target, no person who would notice on a given morning that he had not appeared.

The same shape turns up in unrelated places. A promise to a person you can disappoint behaves differently from a promise to a future version of yourself, and small, observable details tend to stick because someone is in a position to check them.

This is the one place I will mention the app this site is about, because it is the thing Johnson did not have. DontSnooze is an iOS alarm that puts witnesses on the morning. When the alarm goes off you record a short video that your small group of friends can see, and if you do not, a random photo from your own camera roll is posted to the group for 48 hours and then deleted. Watching your friends’ proof is free; posting your own needs DontSnooze Pro. It is a blunt instrument, and it does one thing a diary cannot: it makes the Tuesday morning visible to other people.

I would not claim it would have cured Johnson. A man who lay in bed until two in the afternoon had a great deal more going on than a missing audience. But the audience was the part nobody supplied.

What the timeline leaves us with

Johnson died on 13 December 1784. The diary he left, with its annual confessions of morning beds, was printed a year later, so the failure became public only after the man could do anything about it. It is some comfort that the author of the Dictionary failed at this so thoroughly and so openly. It is also a quiet instruction. His resolutions were written in the most honest private voice in the language, and they were still undone by the plain fact that the only person who would ever know was Johnson.