Today, you will receive a precious gift: an extra day.

Because 2020 is a leap year, you will have 24 hours more in your year. Even those who pretend that they don’t have enough time have no more excuse not to do what they want to do.

Make use of this rare opportunity! Don’t go to work! (You can blame it on not knowing about this oddity or on operating on last year’s calendar.)

Instead, use this unexpected extra day to do what you have always wanted to do:

• Go hitchhiking. It doesn’t matter where to.
• Learn how to dive.
• Climb a volcano.
• Send a letter to a relative or friend that you haven’t contacted in years.
• Learn the cricket rules.
• Make a barbecue.
• After reading this article, spend the whole day internet-free.
• Milk a cow.
• Use a bus or a train that you have never used and see where it goes. Walk back.
• Draw a pirate treasure map and hide it where people can find it.
• Use rope skipping as your only means of moving all day.
• Wash your cat.
• Join a narco syndicate for an undercover report.
• Cook as much spaghetti as you can and invite your friends.
• Write a short story.
• Run for public office.
• Plan a world trip. (Just planning, not actually doing it.)
• Tell your children the truth.
• Repair your bicycle.
• Learn how to say “hello” and “thank you” in five new languages.
• Give chocolate to everybody whom you meet today.
• Enroll in university.
• Start a flash-mob.
• Go walking into the same direction as long as you can or until you reach the sea (or fall off the earth).
• Build a snow sculpture.
• Plant a tree.
• Talk to the beggars and homeless people.
• Drive backwards all day.
• Pretend that you don’t speak your native language.
• Build an aquarium.
• Eat only ice cream all day.
• Go to your kebab shop and offer to help in the kitchen.
• Put up a zip-line in your backyard.
• Do some parkour jumps.
• Join the military.
• Fix the buttons on all your clothes.
• Catch a fish.
• Get vaccinated against the flu.
• Try to buy a train ticket for 30 February.
• Paint your house in a different color.
• Give away all the clothes you have not worn in a year.
• Write a sudoku.
• Go to the park and ask strangers to play chess with you.
• Join a monastery.
• Record the sound of a helicopter and play it as loud as possible when people are close.
• Read the constitution.
• Eat vegetarian for a day.
• Talk about bombs and explosions all day to attract the attention of the FBI.
• Volunteer at an animal shelter.
• Buy a Chinese newspaper and sit in the park in Chinatown, pretending to read it.

I hope you will enjoy your extra day! Let me know what you did.