What is One Big Day?

The way most people are managing their lives isn’t working. Workaholism is poison. Yet the alternative, “work/life balance,” is a pipe dream. Nobody’s getting much done that they can be proud of — not at the office, not at home: they’re too swamped.

This project offers a quirky, concrete solution: Big Days.

I’m suggesting you can do more in one big push, over a 24-hour period, than you could in a month of our typical piecemeal, interruption-filled, staggeringly compromised normal days.

But if Big Days have that kind of power, it’s worth thinking about how you’d ideally want to spend them. With spreadsheets? Administrivia? Or rather on some achingly neglected item on your ideal-life list: the earth-moving novel sitting in the drawer half-finished, the romance language you never mastered? What if you finally learned to write code, drive a standard, read music or compose to an estranged relative the best fence-mending letter that is in you?

Of course you could also devote that 24 hours to work — pay-the-bills work, not feed-the-soul work. Either way you have leaped ahead. You’ve created breathing room, lightened the impossible load that every working parent bears. And all it cost you timewise was a single day — a rounding error in a lifetime.