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OPINION
Helping future me
Small actions today can reduce stress, improve efficiency, and make life easier for your future self.
S itting on the corner of my desk is a sticker that says, “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” Every time I see it, I imagine a world where present-me has done something monumental for future-me. Will it be maxing out my 401(k) so 76-year-old me is traveling the world? Or hitting those 10,000 steps a day so 80-year-old me is limber? Maybe it’s all the kale I eat – hopefully, that finally pays off.
Janki DePalma, LEED AP, CPSM
I’ve been thinking about how future-me can benefit from the small things I do, due to my obsession with the concept of the 1 percent incremental improvement from Atomic Habits . Are there baby steps I can take now that my future self will appreciate? And, is that future-me only decades away? When I asked my friends on LinkedIn to share the things they do for their future selves, I learned a few things. One, my friends are very clever and creative. Two, the things they do often help them just days (or hours) in the future and fall into a few categories: ■ Reduce decision fatigue. We’ve all heard the stories of tech whizzes like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs who employ a work uniform – pretty
much copies of the same outfit every day. Turns out President Obama had a similar philosophy – either blue or gray suits (except for that one tan suit that caused a ruckus). These decisions aren’t just about opting out of fashion choices. Every day, our brain makes countless decisions. Various studies have looked at the relationship between the number of decisions you make and the quality of those decisions. In the medical field, studies have observed that surgeons were less likely to recommend surgery to patients they saw at the end of the day versus the start. Some have theorized that after all the minute decisions,
See JANKI DEPALMA, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER MARCH 3, 2025, ISSUE 1575
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