Part A: “Read Before Opening”
Chapter 1: Tuesday Thursday
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
Time
Pink Floyd
Some time ago I came up with a deliberately flippant theory that Tuesday and Thursday had somehow got accidentally swapped around in the week. My logic went something like this:
- Monday always feels like Monday, Friday always feels like Friday, and Wednesday comes in the middle of a week no matter what.
- But on Tuesday, it feels like the weekend was forever ago, it feels more like Thursday.
- And then on Thursday I’ve typically only done about 20% of my weekly to do list, and it feels like it should really be Tuesday.
- Ipso facto, Tuesday and Thursday somehow got switched around at some point.
I actually thought it was a pretty insightful comment on the working week, but I was still surprised at how many people kind of nodded along and agreed with the idea. We all know that of course two days can’t really be swapped around, but as a humorous comment on our lives it obviously gelled with quite a few other people’s experiences as well.
All was well for many years. I periodically rolled out my pet theory at cocktail parties and it could usually be relied on for a bit of a laugh and to kick start a conversation.
Then one day as I listened to the Pink Floyd song Time, it occurred me that the same principle applies to my life as applied to my week. Without ever having considered the concept before, I instinctively felt like I was up to about Wednesday afternoon (hopefully sometime just about when a coffee might be in the offing). I certainly wasn’t old, but I’d been around for long enough that I certainly wasn’t just starting out either. At some stage I guess the midway-point of my statistical life expectancy has already slipped by, happily unnoticed, but I cling to the idea that it’s not yet even the end of humpday.
More concerning though, I was suddenly struck by the idea that what came next was Thursday.
And that meant, if my theory was right, that I was about to feel like I had 80% of my lifetime to do list left and not enough time to get through it all. Unlike at work, I have a suspicion that at the end of my life I’m not going to be able to leave the leftover list on my desk for Monday.
Now that’s not a particularly bad thing. I certainly don’t plan on running out of things to do, but it did make me feel that I should very deliberately take as much advantage of the rest of the week as I could. When you get to Chapter 7, you will understand how that thought led directly to you reading this.
The key message to me from the upgraded Tuesday-Thursday paradox is don’t be surprised or dragged down by the feeling of a Tuesday, and don’t be panicked by the realisation that it’s Thursday. The rest of this collection is about taking control, and making both Tuesday and Thursday really count.
Everything in one place 