Act for Tomorrow!

We make thousands of little choices each day. The choices with the greatest leverage often regard how we spend our time. This is true both in professional environments and in our personal life. As you’ll learn throughout our learning modules, the brain is wired to make tomorrow like yesterday. Our behavior choices tend to replicate the past and we have a rearward decision and attention bias.

As we look more forward and bias our choices toward the future we choose, we start to find something new emerges. What we do today becomes what we will feel good about tomorrow.  When we align our choices and actions throughout the day with our near-term future, rather than moment-to-moment wants, we can reverse many biases all at once.

The moment-to-moment, stream of consciousness, that justifies and influences our behavior, works from the past. It has very little interest or machinery to make you satisfied, happy, or fulfilled tomorrow. We see this in many forms of procrastination, but also in excesses of immediate pseudo-gratification. 

Procrastination is not doing now what you can and believe you should be doing. It’s not forgetting to do something, or not getting something done when other reasonable or higher priority tasks were attended to. It is the willful delay of what you actually believe should be done, in favor of much less important, or unimportant activities. In most cases, we also expect a meaningful benefit or payoff from completing the very thing we procrastinate on. Not only does putting things off impair your dependability and achievement, it also makes you carry around a burden unnecessarily. Putting things off doesn’t offer any relief, it just adds stress, delays the outcome, and usually reduces the quality of your efforts.

So why is it that our moment-to-moment choices often fail to get beyond procrastination? For some, it is prevalent in many areas of life, for others, it’s a nagging, but less frequent affliction. Your immediate experience and choices need to be wired for tomorrow, not yesterday. A yesterday focused mind always under-values the satisfaction that comes from completion and moving forward.

The other behavior that pushes out the future is immediate gratification and distraction. We have a built-in bias toward inaction. Maybe it saves energy, maybe it reduces risk, but mostly it just reduces change and progress. Clearly, life is much more use-it or lose-it than use-it and lose-it. We’re not talking about contemplative walks, meditation, engaged reading, a daily crossword puzzle, or anything of that sort.  We are talking about choices to spend excessive screen time, chat and gossip time, or otherwise burn away your days in activities that don’t make tomorrow better. Real play, having fun, and vacation are a key part of a healthy, expansive life. You can tell the difference in those exciting times and allowing your days to wither away.

So why do people watch so much TV, play endless trivial games, and so on? It appears these activities give the brain a quick rest. They allow you to spend time without actually engaging your machinery. Further, insignificant activities are just that, insignificant. You won’t inadvertently change your future by watching an extra couple of episodes of your favorite show. Of course, inaction over time has a big effect.

All of this points to a rearward bias in our behavior. The brain stimulation training will help to reverse this and create a future bias and make it much easier to shift. Your future needs you to think for tomorrow. You don’t need to think years ahead all the time, though occasionally you do, but make a habit of thinking at least a day ahead. Will you be genuinely pleased tomorrow with what you did today? You don’t need to live every day like it’s your last, but you do need to live every day like it’s important!

Think About…

1. What activities in your life burn time but don’t seem so good the next day?
2. In what areas can you spend more time to make today better tomorrow?
3. Notice how that seeing a view back tomorrow is empowering, but a rearward bias today is not.

Take Action…

1. Cut some filler activities either way down or out completely.
2. Make a notes in your journal when you do something new for tomorrow.
3. Notice and acknowledge what you accomplish. Make lists, tell people.