One Big Day Journal

The Museum of What You Used to Know

April 20, 2025

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, the unofficial World’s Most Positive Human, revealed in a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss that he is a ferociously dedicated diary-keeper. Every night, round about midnight, he faithfully jots down notes — just what has shaken out from the day. He has made it his mission to encourage everyone to do this.…

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Big Filibuster Day

April 3, 2025

AP photo Cory Booker once dreamed of playing pro football, and it showed this week, in the sheer athleticism of his speech on the floor of the US Senate. Technically, the New Jersey Democrat’s 25-hour-long stemwinder wasn’t a “filibuster” – that term usually implies gassing on in the Senate in order to delay or defeat…

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Getting your reps in

March 14, 2025

Not long ago the economist Tyler Cowan posed a cheeky question on his blog. “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  Most of us probably don’t have a good answer. In our jobs, we don’t practice skills the way musicians or athletes do. We don’t “train.” But…

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Be Someone Else

February 20, 2025

image: Jaroslav Devia for Unsplash * Oliver Burkeman, the former Guardian columnist, once devoted an entire day to mimicking the rituals of famous artists and scientists. He got up at 5:30, a la Hemingway; sat around naked in the morning, a la Ben Franklin; downed a cocktail at noon, a la V.S. Pritchett; gulped strong…

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Steal This Idea

January 4, 2025

photo: Ameen Fahmy for Unsplash * People sometimes tell me, Hey, I’m digging the whole One Big Day thing. Been thinking of giving it a go. Trouble is, I don’t know what to do. Here’s one option: Choose a theme for your Big Day according to the month you want to try it. The schedule…

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The Walden Pond Chicken Project

December 10, 2024

The other day I stumbled upon an early pitch for this project. My agent, Sam, was going to try to sell OBD as a book. I’d forgotten that it had a different title then. I wasn’t calling it One Big Day. It was The Walden Pond Chicken Project. That title came from Henry David Thoreau’s…

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How to measure out your life

October 30, 2024

brooke campbell / unsplash I’m often asked: Why Big Days and not, you know … something else. Big Hours. Or Big Months. Why this particular unit of time? Is there something especially significant, something magical, about the period of 24 hours? Are we Homo Diem creatures at our core? I have a few answers to…

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The King of the Fells

August 13, 2024

New York Times photo. In early July, hundreds of “fell runners” attended the funeral of Joss Naylor, running eight miles up the valley from his home in Cumbria, England in his honour. Naylor, their quiet king, had died at age 88. Fells are what the Britons call hills and small mountains. Hoofing up and down…

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Last Night in the diner at the end of the world

August 2, 2024

This week the NPR show This American Life rebroadcast a classic episode called “24 hours at the Golden Apple.” It’s set in a greasy spoon in Chicago, one of those always-open joints that becomes a neighbourhood’s centre of gravity. Working in shifts, the show’s producers and reporters went full-court press on the place, from 5am…

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What does a good day look like?

July 18, 2024

Atul Gawande has changed the way he thinks about his job, and that has made all the difference to his impact on the world. He has helped change the way we think about health care at the end of life. The physician and author used to believe that a doctor’s obligation was to fight like…

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