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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
This lands with teenagers and with anyone bristling at being told what to do, because it is funny and the joke is what does the work. Turning the later self into a character is what makes them vivid enough to matter. Keep it warm rather than sarcastic, since the point is to get someone caring about that person, not to hand them another stick.
'That man will only have what he has worked towards' (Quran 53:39). Whatever Thursday you is holding got put there by Monday you.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In children, episodic future thinking reduced delay discounting and reduced how much they ate, extending a finding first shown in adults. So making the future concrete works with younger people too, which is where this playful version usually gets used. It was a controlled study of a laboratory task, not evidence that a joke about Thursday changes homework habits.
Daniel TO, Said M, Stanton CM, Epstein LH. (2015). Episodic future thinking reduces delay discounting and energy intake in children.. Eating behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A future self you can picture as somebody is much easier to be kind to than an abstraction.
Anything you do more than a few times deserves a written list. Not the obvious items. The ones you forget: the belt, the charger, the odd adapter nobody else in the room needs.
Two things depend on the same small gap: looking back at how the last one went, and looking ahead at how this one is likely to go. Neither can happen once you are already moving.
Usually it is not that you did not know better. The obvious option had already taken hold before anything you know got a chance to speak.