At a fundamental level, many of us are mentally living somewhere else. We're thinking about the future, whether close or distant, or we're ruminating on the past. This probably isn't a surprise to you. This concept that we're not living in the present moment is both invoked but also timeless. Today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about how to intentionally choose to think about the future and to reflect on the past rather than doing it unintentionally and the difference between the two. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and I'm listening to Developer Tea. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. If you're living like the average developer and you have a lot of things coming up, you have plans, you have events on your calendar, you have holidays in the future, you might be planning your travel months and advance and naturally that has us looking towards the future. And simultaneously we're looking back at the past. It's less reviewing the events on our calendar and more thinking about the thing that we said in that meeting. And so it's easy to bounce between these two things. We can imagine the future and use the past to try to predict the future. Of course, this default mode of thinking is actually really flawed in the average person. But perhaps the more stark reality that we need to face is that often we're doing this without thinking about it. We're doing it automatically. When our mind is wondering, whenever we are idle, when we're not engaging something intentionally, like for example this podcast, we're thinking forward or thinking backward. And the truth is, even during this podcast, you're probably trailing off a little bit in your mind to think about something else that you're getting ready to do, where you're going to have for lunch today or how that meeting is going to go tomorrow morning. And we should be clear that there's nothing inherently wrong about thinking about the future or inherently wrong about thinking about the past. But where we end up going wrong, where we go off the rails, is when that energy is pointed in those directions without any real benefit or purpose. And when we are missing out on whatever is happening in that present moment. So if it makes sense to think about the future and the past on occasion, then how can we do that without defaulting through these useless modes, these anxiety driving modes of randomly thinking about something that has happened in the past and the negative ramifications that it might have on our future? Well there's no single method for doing this. First, it makes sense to address the fact that you have to make time for this. And we're talking about creating a new behavior, but there's plenty of discussion on stopping that old behavior. In other words, stopping the automatic thoughts, especially automatic negative thoughts, and focusing on that present moment. For the sake of today's episode, let's talk about that new behavior, the intentionally thinking forward and thinking backward behavior. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we're going to come back and I'm going to give you some structured ways of thinking in a retrospective manner, in other words, thinking about your past, and then constructive ways of thinking about your future. But first, let's talk about today's sponsor, Linode. With Linode, you can deploy a new server in the Linode Cloud in just a few minutes. Linode offers cloud computing plans for every workload. This includes the smallest website that you can possibly build all the way up to CPU-intensive needs like video encoding or machine learning, running models. Linode offers a balance of power and price for every developer need. You're going to get $20 worth of credit if you're a new customer. If you've been listening to Developer Tea for a long time, you probably already knew this, but want to point it out, $20 is worth $20. That's money that is in your pocket on day one. You can build pretty much anything on Linode, distributed applications, hosted services, websites, even continuous integration or continuous delivery environments. Linode has an instance type for pretty much any workload. Of course, Linode servers are on state of the art hardware and you can pick from any one of the 10 worldwide data centers that they have, including their two newest data centers in Toronto and Mumbai. Go and check it out. Head over to linode.com slash Developer Tea. That's linode.com slash Developer Teaall one word and use the promo code Developer Tea2019. That's Developer Tea 2019. Check out. Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So let's intentionally perform a retrospective. The idea here is to try to pull out insights. You don't want to just go over the facts of what happened. That can be helpful sometimes, but what you want to do is dig out new insights that maybe you didn't feel or didn't experience in the moment that you are thinking about. To rather than being descriptive, you want to shift that concept to being inquisitive. And this is going to be true for a future thinking as well. Inquisitive. This means that you're answering from a different kind of thought process. Instead of remembering something, you are constructing the kind of the connections between the question and the experience that you had. So for the sake of these exercises, we're going to assume that you have some event or some period of time in mind, perhaps it's the last week. And you can kind of focus on that period of time, either in the past or in the future. And the first question that I want you to ask about both the past and the future. This one applies in both directions is what was or what is my primary motivation. This week, based on all of the activities that I spent my time doing, could I make a case for myself based on that evidence that some particular thing was my motivation. And it's critical here that you don't substitute a wrong question. And that is you don't substitute the question of what do I wish my motivation had been? This is very easy to do. If you look back and you say what was my primary motivation, you may have an idealistic motivation, something that you value and that you explicitly care about. But if you look at your actual behavior over the past week, what would you say based on that evidence was your true motivation. And remember that the whole point here is to become better, to improve based on this retrospective look on the past week. And you're not going to improve if you can't be honest with yourself. So be kind to yourself when the answer to what your motivation was is less than ideal. Don't beat yourself up over this because that's what you're going for. You're trying to find out what kinds of things are motivating me and what do I wish was motivating me. But looking forward into the future, you can use the same concept of motivation. What is my primary motivation? But now you can do the opposite. You can say how can I choose my activities to match my motivation? How can I plan my week to actually match my priorities? If you look at your week plan and you've got a bunch of meetings or you know you're going to spend your time in a particular way and it doesn't match up with that motivation, now you can ask yourself why. What does my plan say about my true motivation? But the great thing is that at this juncture point, you now have the power to change it. So that's the first question, both retrospectively and into the future. What is my? What was my motivation? The second question is also for both retrospective and into the future, but it's formed a little bit differently for each. In the retrospective version, we're going to look at the past week and ask ourselves a very difficult question. If we knew we only had a couple of months to live and put a specific number on it, if we knew that we only had two months, for example, to live, what would we have wished we had done differently last week? Now the reason we put the date out by two months here is because most of us would say, well, I wouldn't have worked a single day had I known that this was my last week alive, right? Nobody's going to waste time doing that. So what this allows you to do is look at your actions less through an invincible lens. We have to recognize that we kind of intuitively imagine that we will have time to get to things later, but at a fundamental level, this is at odds with reality. And if we apply the question forward into the future, we can ask ourselves a productive question. If I knew that I only had two months left, how would I spend this week? What would I do with my time? Now this can be a little bit of an anxiety-provoking question and that's kind of the point. I don't want you to get to the point where you become debilitated by this. So instead, I encourage you to think about specific interactions you have with people. Don't necessarily think about the big decisions that you might make. Start with those basic interactions. So perhaps instead of saying, what would you do with this week, you can ask yourself, how might I treat people this week if I knew I only had two months left? Who might I call on my drive home from work? Or who might I spend a little bit of extra time with in my family? Contrary to what we might intuitively think about these questions, people tend to be happier when they are aware of their mortality. So I want you to hear me very clearly about this particular exercise. The goal is not to focus on the process or the fact of your mortality, but instead to focus on the shortened timeline. To imagine that the time that you have is less than what you had expected. Encourage you to try this even in the very light way that is most suitable for you and try to take one actionable thing away from each of these questions. Whether that is a simple shift to your calendar or maybe you set a reminder on your phone to call someone, go and do something about these particular exercises that changes your life for the better. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Linode. Head over to Linode.com slash Developer Teato get $20 worth of credit as a new customer. Use the code Developer Tea2019 at checkout. Today's episode wouldn't be possible without our excellent producer, Sarah Jackson. This episode and every other episode of Developer Teacan be found on spec.fm, but of course the best way to keep up with Developer Tea is to subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.