What's a Big Day?
To knock off anything ambitious you generally need two things: unbroken time and sustained focus. But nobody has the first, and we’ve lost the muscle for the second. The solution – one solution, my solution – is Big Days. I’m suggesting you carve out one 24-hour block of time per month and devote it to a single task. When you clock back into your life the next day you’ll have put something significant in the books – be it soul work or work work. And no one will even know you’ve been gone.
One Big Days
Visit Your Mom
Should be beyond debate, right? Of all the things you can legitimately claim you are too busy to do, visiting your mother isn’t one of them. Even if you can only spare a single day. Even if she lives a plane trip away. Even if she can be prickly, and kinda draining. She’s…
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24-Hour Technology Fast
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a little while. Including you.” — Anne Lamott After the US presidential election, a fair number of people went on a digital fast, apparently. It wasn’t so much a choice as a reflex: they recoiled from the social media had helped get Trump elected.…
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Paint-the-House Fail: my first botched Big Day
A coroner’s report would likely chalk up the spectacular collapse of Big Day #6 to overreach and underplanning – a deadly combo. The goal was to paint the house. Inside, not out. And just the main floor, if time got tight. How hard could it be? Originally I’d sold this as a summer family event…
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Listen to a Great Book
If you’ve ever read a novel in one sitting, you know it’s a very different experience than nibbling your way through one over weeks or months or years. You’re dialed in. The characters are in your head—there’s no paging back to try to remember who’s who and where you are. The story is running…
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Walk the Longest Street in Town
Toronto’s Yonge Street isn’t just a long street. At 86 km, it’s the longest street in Canada, and one of the longest streets in the world. That makes what Kyle Park and Michael Carnevale did this past May long weekend pretty impressive. At twelve midnight on Saturday the two friends set out from the TorStar…
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Learn a Skill: Jack Williams Cracks Rubik’s Cube
One Saturday morning in January when he was eight years old, Jack Williams was seized with a strong notion to solve his Rubik’s cube. The cube had been a Christmas present — two Christmases ago. He’d noodled around with it for awhile and then, as small kids who get Rubik’s cubes for Christmas tend to…
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Undertake an Epic Family Quest
The Hero’s Journey is, mythologically speaking, a solitary venture. When you’re out there alone against nature and time and fate, you really have to double down on your courage to get back home to Troy. But who says one can’t have a great quest en famille? Imagine if you stumbled on an adventure so perfectly…
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Prepare a Speech
What do you do if you have a big speech to give and you haven’t even finished writing it, let alone memorizing it? Take a Big Day. Go somewhere quiet and inspiring. And get ‘er done. Huge thanks to my pals Nancy and Iain for making available their cabin in Whistler for this, my…
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Make a Home Movie
My second Big Day could not be simpler. I will make a movie. Not a scripted movie with commercial aspirations. No, just what we used to call, back in the day of Super-8 film and those big banks of lights Dad schlepped around, a “home movie.” Digital media has made movie-making ultra-convenient; but the downside…
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Write and Record a Song — Curtis Galbraith Rediscovers the Old Mojo
Curtis Galbraith was a songwriter, vocalist and bass player for a number of indie bands of some repute. Then he became a suburban dad. The music’s still in him — it’s just buried under ten pounds of laundry. So Curtis took the Big Day challenge. He retreated to his basement studio – complete with…
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Create a “Theme Day”
Not long ago I found myself in the Chicago area with a day to … I almost said “a day to kill.” Days are not cockroaches — don’t even think about “killing” them. Look upon a day, instead, as a pile of Lincoln Logs. You’re going to build something. The possibilities are endless, but odds…
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Go as Far as You Can Under Your Own Power
Failure is an option — but it’s obviously not Plan A. There’s no avoiding the brute truth: this, for me, is a ridiculously big bite. I haven’t done anything like it since I paddled a kayak across the Georgia Strait, through the shipping lanes, from Victoria to Vancouver. That was 25 years ago. Another lifetime.…
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Set a World Record: John McAvoy’s remarkable row to freedom
Feb 16, 2011: Lowden Grange prison, Nottinghamshire, England. The first question John McAvoy had was, What time to start the clock? When you’re about to bear down for 24 hours straight on an endurance record, timing matters. “If you start in the morning, you’re going to finish in the morning,” said Darren…
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One Big Day Journal
Large Language Models work by guessing what you’re going to say next. That’s their job. AI is a prediction machine, like the human brain itself. You may have noticed: it’s getting pretty good at this. But wait, you’re thinking: Chat GPT doesn’t even know me! That’s true. But what it knows is … us. It…
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Craig Mod has maybe a different idea from the rest of us about what constitutes a “full” day. To him, it basically means putting in the miles. On foot. All. Day. Long. Mod is Homo Ambulans: Walking Man. A human defined by, and increasingly well known for, the epic strolls he takes and writes about…
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I will confess that watching TV for eight straight hours would not be my own choice for a Big Day (though we did do it once – in our defense, it was during Covid). But I appreciate that someone thought up Frozen Frenzy, and made it happen – yesterday. As a result, a particular kind…
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I love stories of how a single meeting between geniuses produced a Cambrian explosion of new art. A classic example involves authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, whose long walk down the leafy paths of Oxford one day in the fall of 1931 spawned both The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) and The Chronicles of…
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That pointed phrase, coined by the children’s book author Denise Brennan-Nelson, has been poached by motivational speakers, financial advisors and shoe salesman (looking at you, Phil Knight), to the point where it’s been blunted like a dum-dum bullet. But the original source remains a modern classic. In the book, three-year-old Max keeps begging Grandpa and…
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