Max your days

Almost 10 years ago The North Face put out an ad campaign called Max Your Days which was all about trying to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the summer solstice. It was really well put together for the time.

For a long time I’ve been striving to try and “max my days” with activity or productivity but that was abruptly halted at the start of this year. After a busy festive period running the kids around to various parties I finally succumbed to what I thought was “just lurgy” but in hindsight I think now it was likely one of the COVID strains that was doing the rounds.

I ended up feeling not-100% for the best part of 3 months and even ended up with a blood panel and chest x-ray to make sure there wasn’t anything more sinister at work!

This forced downtime left me wondering what to do with my time-- how do I “max my days” when I’ve got incredibly low energy?

This is when I started to realise that sometimes maxing your days can mean taking it as easy as possible to let your body rest and recover. It can mean taking the time to watch a really good set of films (here’s looking at you, David Fincher) or a brilliant TV series that you’d missed out on (Mindhunter). And when I watch something properly I start getting into how scenes were shot, what camera setups might have been used, how much was shot live and how much was pulled together in post-production.

All this is to say, I firmly believe you can “max your days” in almost any way you can think so long as you’re doing it with a degree of intention and design.