How to Accomplish Everything Tomorrow

Picture tomorrow in your mind. What are you going to do? Who are you going to see? Now that you’ve thought about tomorrow, it’s real. Whether or not you meant it to be, the day after today is now a real thing, given substance and possibility by nothing more than the thoughts in your own head.

Of course it would have come anyway. But by making tomorrow part of your life before it even gets here, you have the opportunity to make critical changes to the way that tomorrow will actually take shape. Think about yourself getting up early. If you hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t planned for it, there would be absolutely zero possibility that it would happen. Something as simple as the start of your day – perhaps the most critical part – in fact has to be planned ahead of time or you lose all control over it. What would happen if you put no thought at all into waking up, and merely let yourself rise whenever your body naturally did? Chances are you would sleep much later than you meant to, later even than is healthy for you. So idealizing and planning tomorrow, actually, creating it with your actions today, is extremely important.

What else can you picture for tomorrow? What else can you plan to do? I know that the most helpful thing for me is to create a written list of all the things I want to do tomorrow, today. It’s easy to put things off: all we have to do is say “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” meaning, of course, on a day that has not yet been idealized in the mind. It’s safe; it means that tomorrow, just like Annie says, “is always a day away.” But a list – not just a to-do list, but one with a concrete date on it – will force you to confront it tomorrow as a list of things to do today. Not to be put off. To be done. You don’t even have to get all gung-ho about this and plan your days and weeks so far in advance it feels like you’re living out a script. All I’m asking that you do is make a list of the things you want to do tomorrow.

Because chances are, tomorrow you won’t want to do them. They’ll remind you of that saying about classic books – “everyone wants to have read them but nobody wants to read them” – in a way that’s a bit too frighteningly parallel to warrant any more explanation. And if you don’t write these things down, if you don’t make real the idea that you really will accomplish these things tomorrow, you won’t. You’ll wake up, and contrary to all expectations, tomorrow will be just like today. It will look a lot like today. It will feel a lot like today. And chances are, anything you wanted your future self to be responsible for doing, he or she is also going to want to pass that buck onto his or her future self. Don’t let him.

What if you had woken up with a list of things to do today, prepared by a spouse or an important family member? You’d do them, right? It’s the same idea. In fact, if you really want to bring tomorrow to life right here, right now, and decide what you are going to do, you should tell someone else. Because just thinking something to yourself isn’t enough; sometimes even writing can be ignored by a particularly stubborn future-you. But if you make sure another real person knows what you are going to do, they can hold you to it. You can hold you to it too, so that when the other person asks, “how did this-or-that go?” you won’t have to lie.

So make your future self the person that you wish your present self was. There’s nothing wrong with doing it tomorrow, so long as tomorrow is really only a day away.