One Question to Ask Yourself to Know Your Future.

4 min read

Education & Career Trends: February 16, 2023

Curated by the Knowledge Team of  ICS Career GPS


Wasting time on distractions, which we’ll later regret, leads to a life filled with missed opportunities.

  • Excerpts are taken from an article published on nirandfar.com

The German writer and philosopher Goethe believed he could predict someone’s future based on one simple fact. “If I know how you spend your time,” he wrote, “then I know what might become of you.”

Knowing your priorities and how you spend your time can help you choose where your time, focus, and effort are best spent. The issue is that we spend much too much time distracted rather than paying attention to the important things. A life full of wasted possibilities results from wasting time on things we will later regret.

Who Do You Want To Be In The Future?

In any case, focusing on the qualities—also referred to as your values—that you want to exhibit is the greatest method to create a draught of the person you want to be.

The Happiness Trap author Russ Harris claims that values are “what we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us.” For what they desire, people create time. 

Then, these ideals serve as a guide for developing into your ideal future self. You may utilise them to direct you towards the pursuits that enable you to live up to those ideals.

Any discrepancies between how you spend your time and who you want to become may be found by listing your values and the activities that push you to live up to them.

Let’s imagine your goal is to become a writer. It’s almost a given that you won’t publish much unless you routinely schedule time for writing. It must be scheduled or it won’t take place.

Give Your Future Self Some Time

People don’t prioritise their values enough.

They let outside pressures like external triggers raze how they meant to spend their time or allow internal triggers to drive them to distraction.

But here’s the thing: Unless you gain control over your time and attention, your life won’t look the way you want it to in the future.

Turning beliefs into time is the most effective strategy to ensure that our ideal future is realised. That is made possible by the well-researched time and attention management approach called timeboxing. It entails setting up particular times on your schedule for the things you had intended to accomplish in advance to live according to your values: traction.

Fighting distractions and developing a timeframe for goal completion are made easier when we are clear about what we should be doing each day and when we want to complete it.

Using a timeboxed calendar helps us to understand how long certain chores take us, unlike crossing things off a to-do list. That then contributes to a feedback loop for our development

So, if your objective is to write a book, adding it to your to-do list is a surefire way to never finish it. However, if you schedule 30 minutes each day for writing, you may keep track of the amount of work you make during that time and perform some basic arithmetic to determine when you could finish the first draught.

You may estimate that it would take you around 200 hours to create a 40,000-word document once you’ve determined that, on average, you write 200 words each hour.

The best thing to concentrate on when it comes to living the life—and the future—you desire is making sure you commit time to live your values. Make a time and future plan.


Have you checked out yesterday’s blog yet?

Simple Ways To Make Career Progress


(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)

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