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Tomorrow
4 min read · 790 words
Tomorrow is a projection of conditions the inhabitant expects to exist. The system uses the projection both to plan usefully and to defer indefinitely.
The hardware was built to model future conditions. The capacity to project tomorrow is part of why the inhabitant can prepare, plan, and select actions for outcomes that have not yet arrived. The capacity is genuinely useful. It also has predictable failure modes: the inhabitant overestimates how much will be different tomorrow than today, and underestimates how much tomorrow’s inhabitant will resemble today’s inhabitant in disposition, energy, and willingness to do hard things.
TWO COMMON FAILURE MODES
Deferring to tomorrow’s inhabitant. The operations today’s inhabitant does not want to run get assigned to tomorrow’s inhabitant — who is imagined to have more energy, more time, more motivation, more readiness. Tomorrow arrives. The inhabitant who shows up is not the imagined version with surplus capacity. It is the same inhabitant with similar capacity, plus the additional load that the deferred operation has now accumulated. The pattern repeats. The operations continue being deferred to a tomorrow that does not arrive in the form the system kept promising.
Discounting tomorrow as not real. The opposite configuration. The inhabitant treats only today as substantive and makes decisions that produce satisfaction today and substantial cost tomorrow. The meal. The spending. The conversation handled poorly. The recovery operation skipped. Tomorrow arrives and the inhabitant absorbs the cost — often without connecting the cost to the earlier decision that produced it. The today-only configuration treats the future inhabitant as someone else’s problem; the future inhabitant turns out to be the same inhabitant, holding the bill.
THE DIAGNOSTIC FOR DEFERRAL
When an operation is being deferred to tomorrow, assess honestly whether tomorrow’s conditions will actually be different.
The question: what specifically will be different about tomorrow that makes the operation more likely to be run then? Will the schedule be lighter? Will the energy be higher? Will the willingness be greater? Will the conditions have changed in some way the inhabitant can name?
The honest answer is often nothing meaningful. The schedule will be similar. The energy will be similar. The willingness will be similar. If nothing meaningful will be different, deferring the operation will produce the same avoidance pattern tomorrow — and the day after, and the day after that. The pattern has a name. It is the configuration the inhabitant has been running, in tomorrow’s clothing.
FOR CHRONIC DEFERRAL
Complete the operation today, in whatever reduced form is possible.
The hour spent on the difficult task today, even though full focus is not available, produces more than the hypothetical tomorrow with full focus that will not arrive. The version that gets done is the version that exists. The version that gets deferred indefinitely does not exist.
This is not heroic execution. It is the recognition that the conditions today are likely the conditions the inhabitant will have. Working with them, even imperfectly, produces output. Waiting for better conditions that the pattern suggests will not arrive produces no output, with the deferral compounding across weeks and months.
REALISTIC ALLOCATION
When planning future operations, allocate based on what today’s inhabitant can actually do — not on what an imagined surplus version of the inhabitant could do.
The schedule that includes thirty productive hours per day for an idealized version of the inhabitant will not be executed. The schedule that includes ten productive hours per day for the actual inhabitant can be executed. The realistic allocation produces more completion than the inflated one, because the realistic allocation gets run while the inflated one collapses and is replaced by whatever the actual day permits.
The pattern of inhabitants who reliably get things done: they have calibrated their planning to who they actually are rather than to who they wish they were. The pattern of inhabitants who chronically feel behind: they have been planning for a version of themselves that the actual inhabitant cannot deliver.
DEFERRAL VS. DECLINE
Distinguish the two.
Sometimes the right answer is that the operation should not be run at all — not today, not tomorrow, not next week. The inhabitant pretending to defer when the actual decision is to decline accumulates the cost of the operation appearing on every future planning cycle, weighing on the inhabitant every time the list is reviewed, generating low-grade guilt about the continued deferral.
The clean decision to decline is cheaper than the indefinite deferral. The operation gets removed from the list. The weight comes off. The inhabitant accepts the absence of the operation rather than continuing to perform intent to eventually run it.
Tomorrow’s inhabitant will resemble today’s inhabitant. Plan accordingly.