A running bit that good friend and colleague Michael Lascelles and I have is the pattern of placing bets on “future me”. This typically manifested whenever were roadmapping or refining a product backlog or requirements. We would find ourselves committing to a chunk of work on behalf of our future selves – knowing that the commitment we were making in the present moment was one that our future selves would be accountable to deliver.
It’s important here to note that, while we all do this to some extent when planning – putting work on a future schedule – in our case, it was usually connected to “big bets” of a semi-possible nature. Asking “Future Me” to solve a big problem against ambiguous requirements on a difficult timeline was a weekly occurrence, and one that we eventually realized could be leveraged for shared understanding of the work we were undertaking.
Eventually, now catches up to the future and the bill comes due. In those moments, “Present Me” could only smile wryly at the promises made by earlier versions of me. What if there was a way to make real what was being cared for in the moments of future promises?
With that as inspiration, I stood up a simple app called Journal For Time, which is essentially a way to leave a video message for a future self. I have been making small tweaks to it along the way, but I have been careful to keep to as simple as usable can be. No account or signup, just a phone number and go. I might expand it later to allow viewing past videos, but for now the focus in on the ephemeral.
In his fascinating book The Order of Time, the brilliant physicist Carlo Rovelli dives deeply into our human conception of time. I was deep into my second reading of the book while developing Journal For Time, thinking about things like the granular nature of spacetime, and how at the smallest scale of the universe, time ceases to mean what we think it means. At any moment, we are the sum of our relationships to everything else – we are not objects, even though our minds like to objectify the world. We are processes and events – we are happenings beyond time.
My hope with my little app is to introduce some timelessness into my work practices – if I can bridge empathy across time, from the moment when caring for the need to commit to something meets the empathy to care for doing the work, I can be kinder to my future self, and have my present self give grace to my past selves, always trying to plan for a future me with ever greater skill, patience, and perspective.