You are about to get 111 hours free. Don’t waste them.

This week, you get an amazing gift. No, Ed McMahon won’t be showing up with a humongo check. You won’t have wise men pop in unannounced to drop off gold, fruitcake and myrrh. Instead, you will get the precious gift of time. Time away from work, or school, or even working at a school.

But you don’t just get 1 or 2 hours free. And not just 8 or 24 hours either.

You get a shipload of time.

In fact, you get 111 hours free!

The Math

If you are one of the many who don’t have to work or go to school Thursday through Sunday, your time off starts at 5pm on Wednesday and ends at 8am on Monday.

In between there are 111 hours for you to spend wisely.

You can use it on quality time with friends and family. There is plenty of time for talking, playing, singing, and laughing until liquids sprays our of your nose. And if your friends don’t make you laugh until you leak, you need better friends.

You can invest in your health. Walking, turkey trotting, hiking, or any other calorie burning activity before or after the meal is a great idea.

You can read. You can read a lot in 111 hours. In fact, you could probably read all 1032 blog posts I have written here at The Adam Albrecht Blog. You could read my book What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? Or you could read an important piece of literature, a valuable self improvement book, the biography of a wildly successful human or a tale of epic human adventure and triumph. But my blog will have more random pop culture references. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

You can schedule that health checkup, or that therapy session you know you need. You could enroll in a program to stop doing that thing you know you shouldn’t do no more, like Phil Collins said.

You can start working on that master project you have always dreamed of. Or that mini project you couldn’t seem to find time to do, Mickey.

You could plan a vacation. Or book a vacation. Or at least watch National Lampoon’s Vacation.

You could transfer money to savings. Or to that investment account. Or to me.

You could plan a dinner with people you love chewing the fat with.

You could schedule a Zoom with friends or family that you won’t see in real life this holiday. But not if they are no longer in real life. (Zoom hasn’t worked out that technology yet.)

You could plan impromptu in-person get-togethers, right now, over me.

You can play games. Board games. Card games. Football games. Reindeer games. We don’t game enough.

You could start planning your own business. (Not that that’s any of my business.)

You could start filling a notebook with everything you know about a specific topic. That’s a great way to start writing a book.

You could volunteer. Even if you are not in Knoxville.

In fact, you can do just about anything you please.

But please, please, please don’t do nothing, Sabrina.

You can do nothing anytime.

Key Takeaway

You are about to receive the most precious gift of all. The gift of time. 111 hours. A stately sum. Invest it any way you like. But whatever you do, don’t waste it. Because you will never get it back.


If you found something valuable or rewarding to do with your 111 hours, please shoot me a note to let me know what you did at 614-256-2850 or at adam@theweaponry.com. I am always looking for good ideas and success stories.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Are you creating Onion Days?

I had a pretty bad day on Saturday. I coach 8th-grade football on Saturday mornings. And we lost. Like nothing-went-right lost. Like The-Bad-News-Packers lost. Like that-TV-show-about-the-plane- crash-on-that-island lost.

Then I couldn’t get myself motivated to do anything productive the rest of the day. By Saturday night I felt like I not only lost the football game, but I lost the rest of the day as well. Unfortunately, when you lose a day you never get it back, Jack.

But on Sunday, I bounced like Flubber. Before I went to bed Sunday night, I reflected on my day. And I realized that my Sunday was as good as my Saturday was bad. I had created an Onion Day. A day with layer after layer after layer of good stuff.

My Onion Day.

I woke up early to write and publish a blog post about the importance of planting yourself in soil that enables you to thrive.

Then my family and I went to the 9am church service. (God knows that service helps you get the most out of your morning.)

We took the slow Sunday drive home along Lake Michigan, avoiding the usual interstate route. It’s the automotive version of stopping to smell the roses. Although you can’t actually smell roses at 25 miles per hour.

I cleaned out a significant part of our basement that had become cluttered with random stuff during the renovation we did on our home over the past year.

I watched some of the Patriots -Bengals game, and watched my Pats look like a real team again for the first time since Tom Brady left to spend more time looking at himself in the mirror.

I helped my son Johann think through a writing and research project for an AP class he is taking.

I took a long walk with my wife Dawn, son Magnus and dog Lola along Lake Michigan. Which looks like an ocean, but is unsalted and shark-free.

I picked up fun food for dinner for the family, because I was too hungry to wait for the ribs Dawn was planning to make for our Sunday dinner. (And apparently, a commercial I watched during the football game worked on me.)

I broke down game footage from our team’s ugly loss so we could coach the team on how to do things better next time. (If they don’t do better I will cry myself to sleep every Saturday night until November.)

I talked to my daughter Ava on the phone on the last day of her 18th year and caught up on her day at college.

I worked out, like LFMAO would say.

The Reflection

I looked back at my day. And I realized that I had a near-perfect Onion Day.

  • I created
  • I churched
  • I meandered
  • I familied
  • I worked
  • I taught
  • I explored
  • I treated
  • I coached
  • I connected
  • I exercised

It was a great Onion Day, a great way to bounce, and a great example of time well spent.

Key Takeaway

The best days are Onion Days. Those are the days when you layer in as many of your favorite and most important activities. Know what your perfect Onion Day entails. Then work to create as many of them as you can. That’s how you build a great and rewarding life without regrets.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.