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Your Future Self

How to stop your procrastinating tendencies and make overall better lifetime decisions

Any conscious decision in your life depends on a conscious thought. Due to the simple fact that many solutions seem common sense, we tend to dismiss those claims and never receive any positive impact from them.

 The claim that I'm about to assert was revealed to me within a very common-sense article: that we have a "Now-Me" and a "Future-Me." The Now-Me tends to repeatedly win regardless of the situation; your Future-Me on the other hand suffers even though he or she's equally as important as your Now-Me. 

Hindsight's 20/20

How many times have we reflected about what we should have done and where we would have been if we stuck through with some certain task/procedure/challenge? I think it's best to demonstrate this with examples.

1. A simple example: You tell Now-Me that you're going to start exercising and eating healthier. You may or may not start immediately but you have a goal, and it's an easy goal, to exercise for 15-30 minutes/day for 3 months and see the results. The first session flies by quickly: you feel great. Then your Now-Me starts making excuses: I had a long day, it's 11:00pm and I'm burnt out. I'll continue tomorrow. Three months later, you didn't exercise more than a handful of times and your Future-Me, which just became your current Now-Me, tells yourself, "It was only 15 minutes a day; I could have done it even if I was completely exhausted!"

2. You have a project that you're working on. You keep getting distracted and you justify the reasons each time since you don't want to criticise your Now-Me. Instead of putting in 90-100% on completion/accuracy/urgency, you place about 20-30%. What should have taken 1 month has now dragged out over a year. If this was work related your Future-Me is telling you right now, "If I only completed that project, I could have completed 11 other ones: my resume would be amazing! I could be making six figures right now with the amazing portfolio that I could have had." The project could be something around the house as well; you have a drainage problem in the front yard but it's not bad. You keep putting it off. All of a sudden, a year down the road, you notice some water spots in your basement where the water has cracked the cement. You call the repair-man to fix it and you rush to Home Depot to finally fix that drainage issue. It takes you about an hour. Your Future-Me is furious with you at this point since you just blew an unnecessary $500.00 to $1000.00 on something that took you less than an hour to fix.

3. You graduate high school and are entering your first year of college. You're pretty excited! The classes are difficult but you know that it's going to pay off. Halfway through, you get a promotion at your job and you realize that a person that graduates from college will make the same amount of money as the amount of money that you just received, so you dropout. Ten-years down the road your Future-Me is disappointed with you. If you would have only taken 1 class per semester, you could have completed college by now, been one of the top students to graduate (due to only taking 1 class per semester), had 10 years of experience and a degree in your field with top rankings. Your Future-Me is telling you how you could have been set for life, demanding the pay you want and never fearing that someone else is going to swipe the job from underneath you.

The next time you think about procrastinating, place yourself in your Future-Me's shoes. What will he or she say?


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