Visualizing Your Future-Self

Hi,

Today's email is about how you can motivate yourself to take action by strengthening the bond with future you.

A common reason for procrastinating is that we feel disconnected from our future-self, a phenomenon called temporal disjunction. For example, if working hard now will only benefit us months down the road, we sometimes feel that someone else—our future-self—will be the one to benefit from our work. This can reduce our motivation to act, even when we know it's irrational.

A simple but effective way to address this is to vividly visualize yourself in the future, as you either reap the rewards of working now or suffer the consequences of procrastinating. This episodic future thinking can increase your temporal self-continuity to make you feel more connected to your future-self, while also making the future consequences of your behavior feel more real.

You can combine this with other anti-procrastination techniques, including ones for increasing your motivation, like gamifying your behavior, and ones that work in other ways, like addressing your fears.

I hope you’ll find this helpful.

Have a great week,
Itamar