The first weekend in October is my favorite weekend all year.
It’s a 9am TX/OU game into brunch into the Fleet Week airshow from my roof. I haven’t missed one in 15 years… until this weekend.
Instead of enjoying my favorite weekend, I worked.
With 15 meeting follow-ups from last week and without my new employees onboarded, it fell on me to get it done.
But choosing between “Present Rick” and “Future Rick” was an easy decision because it was a short time horizon.
THE DECISION
You see if I didn’t work this weekend, then the workload would spill over and I would have to work in Paris next week.
With a shorter time frame, the temporal discounting is less impactful because it’s easier to value delayed gratification that’s only two weeks away.
Where the math gets fuzzy is over longer time horizons.
Choosing between “Present Rick” and “Decades Future Rick” is a much harder decision because there’s so much time to make up for my bad decisions today.
If it’s balanced it’s not a big deal to pick Present Rick.
But if I choose Present Rick too many times it turns into a habit which then programs my mental default to “now” instead of “later”.
That’s why so many people spend a lifetime just “catching up.”
HOW TO COMBAT TEMPORAL DISCOUNTING
The hack I use to negate temporal discounting with longer time horizons is to turn it into a Paris situation.
In other words, I put long-term decisions into a smaller frame and then make it a one-time decision.
So instead of having 2 decades to save, I imagine I have two weeks instead.
And instead of thousands of decisions, I only have one.
Within that frame if I don’t work/save now, then I’ll have to later.
And I don’t want to spend my life “working from Paris”.
