How To Stop Screwing Your Future Self

Ah, procrastination. We’ve all been there. We mean to be productive individuals. Instead, we spend three hours liking memes and spiraling down the endless rabbit hole of the internet, while what we intended to do morphs into what we’ll do tomorrow: that magical place where work gets done and goals are achieved. 

So we pass the responsibility off onto our future selves, dusting our hands of the affair. Past You is the screw-up who got you into this mess and Present You just doesn’t have the time to fix it. But Future You, now there’s the hero (or heroine) of the day. That’s the version of yourself who has it all together.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is just screwing ourselves over. Because tomorrow doesn’t exist. There is only ever today.

Today I’m talking about how to stop procrastinating all the damn time. 

Like many of you out there, I put stuff off. There are tasks which I know I should do but don’t until they’re absolutely critical; until someone calls me out on them; or most troublingly, until I never do the thing at all. Everyone likes to believe in the promise of someday, which is but a cheerful façade over the grim reality of never.

It’s avoiding responsibility, having fun without care for the consequences. Checking out mentally when I should be paying attention. Failing to plan because ugh, plans, right? So much easier to mess around on my phone instead. Failing to act when I have the chance.

Then when the shit hits the fan (as it does) and I have to deal with the fallout of yesterday, I look back at my past self and wonder, what the heck were they thinking? Were they thinking at all? It’s a distinct blend of disappointment, guilt, even self-loathing. Because on a core level, I know that I have made my own life harder. These are issues I could have handled differently. The consequences are no one else’s fault but mine.

And it works both ways. When I do get my act together, avoiding distractions and getting my tasks done on time, I look back at my past self with gratitude. They made the right choices, taking care of business so I don’t have to. They’ve made my life easier.

Because here’s the thing: Future You is just you five seconds later.

We fool ourselves into believing that we’ll act differently after an arbitrary time interval. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But for all of us, there is only ever now. This moment is the only point in time when you exist.

Read that again. 

Procrastination is a complicated issue. Despite what judgmental people say, it’s not about laziness. Putting things off is more often rooted in issues like anxiety, lack of motivation, and the inability to delay gratification. Facing the future can be hard. But we have to start somewhere.

A lot of writers I respect have come to similar conclusions. Mark Manson’s Do Something Principle; James Clear’s assertion that good habits have costs in the present and payoffs in the future, whereas bad habits have payoffs in the present at the expense of the future; and Tim Urban’s realization that life is a series of Wednesdays repeated over and over.

The core of all that is the way we pretend that putting stuff off hurts no one? It isn’t true. When we procrastinate, we’re hurting ourselves, piling the weight onto our future self’s shoulders instead of working to keep it manageable. 

We’re all haunted by the ghosts of yesterday, dazzled by visions of tomorrow. But getting things done is all about doing what we can today.

Might as well start now, huh?