The Walden Pond Chicken Project

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 observations out the window of his cabin in Concord, Mass. He was watching his chickens one day when it occurred to him that a hen’s day consists of laying an egg, and then building the material to make the next egg. In other words, one big push, bookended by plenty of incubative leisure. What a great way to live, Thoreau thought.

I took away a simpler message: You can’t lay an egg a little at a time.

“So here’s the deal,” I wrote in the pitch: “What if periodically — say once a month — we lay an egg. By which I mean, we produce some new thing. Doesn’t have to be a tangible thing. Could be a new skill we develop, or an old one we resurrect. Something that’s important to us, something that’s hard. Maybe something we’d promised ourselves we’d do but have kept putting off till it was all but dead from neglect. And we devote a whole day to this enterprise. The goal is to get that one big thing completely, dead-to-nuts done.”

That was it in a nutshell. Big Days were about getting measurable stuff done via pulses of strategically applied effort. And those once-monthly, super-productive days would ease the load on all of our other days; it would make the rest of our life easier.

Basically, I was proposing a productivity hack. (An alternative title to the Thoreau one was “Overachiever for a Day.”)

Looking back, I suspect that’s why no publishers bit. There are tons of books on productivity hacks –an ant-trail led by David Allen and Tim Ferriss. Unless you can write a better one than those fellas did, maybe keep your chicken butt in the coop until you lay something less derivative.

There’s a saying: “You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from.” If I’d sold OBD on the basis of that pitch, I’d have been locked into writing that kind of book – a stocking stuffer for the optimization bros. It would have been a disaster.

Where exactly I peeled off of the original flight path is hard to say, but some nudges from soulful people no doubt factored in. Alan Jacobs, in his blog The Homebound Symphony, persuasively raised an alarm about devising hacks to race through life more “efficiently,” knocking off task after task. “My question about all this,” Alan said, “is: And then what? You’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing.”

The poet Devin Kelly admits he was once likewise ensnared by this fool’s gold of “optimization. “I too want to fit things in. I want to reduce my conception of what my day is into easily manageable tasks, which I can then complete, and can then feel better for having completed them. I often reduce, reduce, and reduce until everything is small enough to fit into one place and I no longer have a gaze big enough to allow for the beauty that is light, or leisure, or laughter that laughs longer than I had ever thought possible.”

You can optimize yourself right out of the ballpark. That’s basically what was happening to me. Eventually I could feel my enthusiasm for the project wavering.

Remember Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who was stricken with pancreatic cancer and given a year and a half to live? He became very focused on how to squeeze every last drop out of his remaining time on earth. But that didn’t mean trying to be more productive. To him the question was, how to allocate his time so as have more fun. “The end is maximizing fun. I figured the way to maximize fun was to just … make time for it.”

It shouldn’t take a fatal disease to wake us up to the wisdom of that.

Over the years, my own Big Days have tended to migrate across the work-play axis: less work, more play. The best ones often have no real utility at all; they’re maybe best classified as “explorations.”  Making room for the possible. OBD has become almost the opposite of a productivity hack: it’s a sandbox for experiments in new ways to live, new ways to be, new selves to try on for a day to see how they fit.

Unearthing the story of Thoreau and his hens put me in mind of Jane Goodall. Not long ago, in an interview, she shared the story of how she got her start as a zoologist.

As a little girl growing up in London, she became fascinated with the family’s backyard hens. Where do the eggs come out? Her four-and-a-half-year-old mind said, Girl, you’d better investigate.

Wee Jane camped out in the corner of a henhouse, just observing, until she got her answer. She watched a fat hen produce a huge egg.

Meanwhile, her parents, alarmed at her absence, had called the police.

Jane was not punished.

“I had this enormous benefit as a child,” she recalled, “in that my mother was so supportive. Instead of telling me, ‘How dare you scare us like that, don’t you ever do that again!’ she said, ‘You just got a wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.’

As a guiding principle, that one’s hard to beat.

It’s not about the egg. It’s about the story.