It has been too long since I last challenged you to an Everyday Adventure.

I hope you have been squeezing the juice out of life these past months but I fear you may have let it slip you by. What have the last few weeks held for you? If the answer is some permutation of “Not enough”, then I will kindly ask you to set your alarm for early tomorrow morning because you are making up for lost time.

This month I would like you to squeeze in an extra day before the real one starts. Mountaineers will know this as an “Alpine start”. They do this for the best snow conditions but you, however, are doing it just for fun.

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Rise in darkness, ignore the urge to snooze and roll, no, jump out of bed before your mind has a chance to trick you into doing anything else. Maybe you’ll get some exercise in to set your body off for the rest of the day; it could be that you’ll now have the time to do that thing you keep putting off; or perhaps you will find novelty in an otherwise routine task, polished, as it now is, by the devious thrill of doing it at an ungodly hour.

Here are three reasons to start your day off early:

1. It is different and therefore exciting
2. It is proactive and therefore fulfilling
3. It gives you more time (and who doesn’t want that?)

And here are three whining voices you can hear in your head:

1. “I’m already tired enough”
2. “I’m not a morning person”
3. “I get up at 7am/6am/5am anyway…”

These things may be true but you will not remember, when you are 70 years old and entertaining your grandchildren with stories of old by an open fireplace, the amazing week in which you were well rested. You would bore them to tears as well as yourself.

Sleep is important, I don’t dispute that and I suspect that most of us could do with more. But it is also the enemy. It consumes one third of our lives and there are times when we simply need to fight back and win ourselves some more precious time on this earth.

Don’t do it every day. Then you really would be tired and, besides, you’d be removing the adventurous novelty from it. But do it once and do it good. Arise at the crack of dawn. Skip breakfast and instead cram fists-full of life into your wide open mouth and enjoy happy satiety for the rest of your day, smug with the knowledge that you have done something on this day that few else can claim.

You have lived.

This is an Everyday Adventure…

…and it is here for you to try.

There are no rules, constraints or conditions. Treat this as a spark for your imagination. Use it as an injection of excitement into your daily routine.

Please spread the word, email a link to this page or share it on Twitter and Facebook with the buttons at the bottom right. There’ll be a new idea for each month of 2010 along with another fantastic image courtesy of David Tett Photography.