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WHY THERE’S ALWAYS TIME TO DO IT TOMORROW
Our optimism about the future extends not just to our own choices, but to how easy it will be to do
what we say we will do. Psychologists have shown that we wrongly predict we will have much more
free time in the future than we do today. This trick of the mind has been best demonstrated by two
marketing professors—Robin Tanner at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Kurt Carlson at
Duke University—who were intrigued by the mistakes consumers make in predicting how much they
will use exercise equipment, 90 percent of which is destined to collect dust in the basement. They
were curious what people thought about when they imagined their future use of those barbells or ab
machines. Did they imagine a future much like the present, full of competing time commitments,
distractions, and daily fatigue? Or did they imagine some alternate reality?
To find out, they asked a whole bunch of people to predict, “How many times per week (on
average) will you exercise in the next month?” Then they asked another group of people the same
question, with one important preface: “
In an ideal world
, how many times per week will you
exercise in the next month?” The two groups showed no differences in their estimates—people were,
by default, answering the question “in an ideal world” even when they had been asked to predict their
actual, not ideal, behavior. We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This
convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do
today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for
it.
This psychological tendency is difficult to shake. The experimenters tried to prompt more realistic
self-predictions by giving some people the explicit instructions, “Please do
not
provide an idealistic
prediction, but rather the most realistic prediction of your behavior that you can.” People who
received these instructions showed even
more
optimism about their behavior, reporting the highest
estimates yet. The experimenters decided they had to give these optimists a reality check, so they
invited them back two weeks later to report how many times they had actually exercised. Not
surprisingly, this number was lower than predicted. People had made their predictions for an ideal
world, but lived through two weeks in the real world.
The experimenters then asked these same people to predict how many times they would exercise in
the
next
two weeks. Ever the optimists, they made estimates
even higher than their initial
predictions
, and much higher than their actual reports from the past two weeks. It’s as if they took
their original predicted average seriously, and were assigning their future selves extra exercise to
make up for their “unusually poor” performance. Rather than view the past two weeks as reality, and
their original estimates as an unrealistic ideal, they viewed the past two weeks as an anomaly.
Such optimism is understandable—if we expected to fail at every goal we set, we’d give up before
we got started. But if we use our positive expectations to justify present inaction, we might as well
not have even set the goal in the first place.
WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A TOMORROW JUST LIKE
TODAY
Behavioral economist Howard Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem
of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the
variability
in your behavior, not the behavior itself. He has shown that smokers asked to try to
smoke the same number of cigarettes every day gradually decrease their overall smoking—even
when they are explicitly told not to try to smoke less. Rachlin argues that this works because the
smokers are deprived of the usual cognitive crutch of pretending that tomorrow will be different.
Every cigarette becomes not just one more smoked today, but one more smoked tomorrow, and
the day after that, and the day after that. This adds new weight to every cigarette, and makes it
much harder to deny the health consequences of a single smoke.
Apply Rachlin’s advice to your own willpower challenge this week: Aim to reduce the
variability of your behavior day to day. View every choice you make as a commitment to all
future choices. So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I
want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?” Or if you’ve
been putting something off that you know you should do, instead of asking “Would I rather do this
today or tomorrow?” ask yourself, “Do I really want the consequences of always putting this
off?”
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