In 1843, four years after the Edict of Gulhane, with which the Ottoman Empire entered its long nineteenth century, an unsigned piece appeared in the official newspaper of the empire. This piece, after evaluating the empire's position within the rapidly changing world, ascribed its politico-economic weakness directly to a sole reason: the laziness of the 'Ottoman nation.' In this paper, I discuss how body and time was reconfigured at a period when a series of modern binaries, such as productivity/laziness work time/leisure time, were becoming hegemonic in late Ottoman society(1839-1920). The focus of this paper is based on the ethic books of the period, which display an 'elective affinity' between the mobilization for productivity, modern conceptualizations of body and time, and nation formation. Transformation of the use of terbiye (self-discipline) was one way in which this new awareness became visible at a discursive level. The ethics books, an old genre that had new incarnations in the late nineteenth century, offered emergent discourses on work, body and time, self-discipline, and self-monitoring. These ethics books illustrate how productivity was articulated in normative terms and how religious idioms played a role in establishing modern concepts of work ethic. The ethics books, in their multilayered formulations about notions of work and productivity countering laziness and idleness, not only became an arena in which a new self was debated, but also a sketching ground of an ideal citizen and ideal society. Unlike the state orders that specifically targeted the bureaucrats in the governmental offices as 'bodies at work,' the authors of ethics books, most of whom were bureaucrats themselves, addressed the entire Ottoman 'nation.' As the building block of a nation, the human body became the site where laziness and indolence ought to be defeated in order to establish a 'productive nation.' Body became a topos where the forces of work and productivity fought the contagious virus of laziness. The Ottoman body, deemed as 'accustomed to slacking,' and far from an idealized 'machine-like' discipline, became a culprit of many social vices, and even military defeats. Interestingly, what was 'national' had to be filtered based on their contribution to productivity of the nation, and productiveness proved to be a very volatile term. Emphasizing social practices of the Tanzimat reforms that these new configurations were rooted, in this paper I attempt to place the discourses on body, time and productivity at the center of an Ottoman modernity.