The Next Challenge

Catch the Worm – Everyday Adventure #5

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by

Tim Moss
in

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.

Comments

2 responses to “Catch the Worm – Everyday Adventure #5”

  1. Michael Halls-Moore avatar
    Michael Halls-Moore

    Coincidentally, I managed to get up at 5:30 today, commuted into London from Hampshire, did a cheeky spin session on the bikes in the gym and still made it in for 8:30! My first time trying the gym and commute. It was fine – mainly because I went to bed at 21:30.

    That’s all it really takes, just going to bed a bit earlier. People always complain about not having enough time. Everybody in the world has 24 hours in the day. What people are really saying is “I don’t want to prioritise my time for the gym or learning some new skills, I’d rather prioritise watching Eastenders/X Factor/Coronation Street (delete as necessary!) instead.”

    A few good tricks that I have learnt to save time (perhaps slightly controversial):

    1) Don’t eat dinner. WHAT?! At the moment I basically have a huge breakfast, a medium lunch and a reasonable snack at dinner time. Plus a few fruit/protein bar snacks during the day. The body needs the most energy at the start of the day, so this seems to make sense! Having a huge evening meal is relatively pointless from an energy perspective as it just gets digested overnight and not burned, so it just makes you fatter. Not good. It also means that my evenings are my own and I don’t have to worry about fixing a meal which can be 2 hours worth of purchase, preparation and eating. It also stops impulse ready meal purchases which are terrible for the body and expensive.

    2) Don’t waste the commute reading trashy newspapers or novels. They don’t add value. Who cares if a celebrity is going out with another celebrity or which club they visited the night before? It was only fed to the paper by their publicist in the first place. Instead, read an (auto)biography of somebody you would like to learn from, a textbook on an area you’re less strong at or study a new language. I’m studying (with pen and paper!) a physics textbook and a biography of Ben Franklin right now on my hour train commute and I’ve learnt loads. Of course, there are times when I’m tired and I want to snooze on the train, but they’re the exception, rather than the rule.

    3) Do something useful in the evenings. Don’t sit in front of the TV or surf Facebook for 4 hours before bed. This is not bragging nor is it made up (although it’s not a typical week, admittedly!), but this week my evenings are Monday: Passive income development (article writing and distribution for a website), Tuesday: Climbing at the Westway wall, Wednesday: Scuba diving try-dive with my girlfriend in Holborn, Thursday: Thesis corrections (although I’d rather watch some TV with this one!), Friday: Travel up to Northampton to do DIY all weekend for a house sale. Yes, I’m going to be a bit tired due to getting back to Hampshire at 11pm most nights. But then again…I’ve got an hour on the train to read cool stuff and I will have carried out some awesome activities. It’s not difficult, nor does it really require much effort – it’s just planning in advance.

    I’ve struggled for the best part of my adult life to find motivation to do these things and I consistently slip up. The trick is just to get back on the saddle and carry on. After a while, they pay huge dividends, not only in terms of awesome memories being created but the skills learnt ALWAYS come in handy in professional life.

    Life really is there for the taking, none of us are getting any younger, so why not just fill up your spare time with cool stuff rather than mindless media?

    (Tim, yeah I know I should write these things on my blog too – I really need to get around to that, haha!)

    Oh yeah, for my next everyday adventure (which HAS actually been inspired by your cool posts!), I’m going to buy a pair of Astronomy Binoculars (far cheaper than a telescope) and go to Greenwich or even out of London one evening and try to see the Orion Nebula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula) or the rings of Saturn, depending on the weather.

    Keep on writing the cool motivational posts. They ARE worthwhile and they do motivate, trust me!

    Mike.

    Reply
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