3 classifications of thinking, and a problem.
I propose 3 areas of defining thinking “past”, “future”, “present”. followed by a hard question.
Past
This can be classified as any system of review, any overview of past progress, and any learning from the past broadly including history, past opportunities or challenges, shelved projects, known problems and previous progress. Where a fraction of your time should be spent in the process of review in order to influence your plan for the future.
Future
Any planning-thinking tasks, or strategic intention about plotting a course forward towards a purposeful goal. This can overlap with past-strategising by the nature of using the past to plan for the future.
Present
These actions include tasks that get done now, This is where stuff really happens; (technically both past-thinking and future-thinking classify as something you can do in the present, and take up time in the present, but I want to keep them apart for now) This is the living-breathing getting things done time. the bricks-and mortar of actually building something; creating and generating progress towards a designated future goal.
The hard question
I am stuck on finding a heuristic or estimate for how long should be spent in each area of being/doing. I reached a point where I uncovered a great deal of neglect for both past events and making future purposeful plans.
Where if 100% of time is spent on the past, nothing will ever get done, other than a clear understanding of your mistakes;
Similarly 100% on the future will lead to a lot of dreaming and no progress towards the future.
Equally if all your time is spent running very fast in the present-doing-state you might be going very fast; but by the nature of not knowing where you are going in the future; you might be in a state of not-even-wrong, and not know.
10/10/80? 20/20/60? 25/25/50? 10/20/70?
I am looking for suggestions as to an estimate of how to spend each 168 hour week that might prove a fruitful division of time, or a method or reason for a certain division (at least before I go all empirical trial-and-error on this puzzle).
I would be happy with recommended reading on the topic if that can be provided.
Have you ever personally tackled the buckets? Did you come up with a strategy for how to decide between them?
Thanks for the considerations.
If you encounter problems or errors increase past time. If you have resources and tools but nothing to use them on increase future time. If your state remains too much the same (ie boredom) increase present time. These should feed into each other. If you stop to analyse or plan for too long a time nothing is happening so you should increase doing. When you do stuff it is either harmful, neutral or positive. If it is positive you can do more of it. If you do something harmful you need to understand it and trigger analysing. If your wheels are spinning empty you need to come up how the activity is meaningful to you. When you are done analysing you either find A) something to positive impact your situation (trigger present mode) B) something negative to avoid (trigger future mode how your life will be without that component). When you have dreamed something desirable you either a) now have a problem of not having means to attain it (trigger past mode) b) have a clear action to follow through (trigger present mode).
These do not translate into concrete divisons but give guidelines how to switch between the mindsets and why.
I’d like to restate your 3 heuristics with some better formatting:
I can probably set arbitrary numbers i.e. 1⁄3, 1⁄3, 1⁄3 on my time and shift based on these and similar reasonings.
Thanks!
Do you think this is a useful model to other people?
I do not personally live by those three categories but I have found use for making triggers for when action needs to happen based on observable need for them,
The confusing thing is when the same action results in benefit occasionally and in drawback occasionally. When you group the occasions into a benefit group and a drawback group you can occasionally see a feature in common in one that isn’t present on the other. That is a good reason to focus on that feature out of the possible multitudes of features situations have.
When there are multiple competing principles that give contradictory advice their assumptions might not all be fulfilled to the same extent. A might be good and B might be good but are A and B always good at the same time?
hypothesis testing, amongst other practices, is regarded as the key to learning. It’s a process of mining the past for clues about the future, in the present.
Framing those 3 time perspectives in terms of procedural knowledge, rather than Zimbardo’s framework or the arbitrary terms of ‘past, present and future’ may be the optimal way of thinking about them, other than for communication.
The above quote is from Wikipedia. I found the original paper here: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA100301
I’m not sure how to interpret this analysis as the paper contains a lot of technical terminology that would take me awhile to get through. The actual results of papers are often much narrower than the mainstream interpretation.
Addendum: This paper is less technical and seems to generally support the Wikipedia quote.
You’re framing this in terms of yourself, but the most important area I’d say appears to be omitted. Learning about problems not involving you can teach you a lot about what you should do. The knowledge of others vastly exceeds your own. I guess this might be past since you wouldn’t hear about it until it happened usually. Future and present planning is best determined by past analysis, but the reverse is not true. You cannot learn much about the past from the present or the future. The present also will not teach you much about the future, but the future will help you with the present. This to me presents a hierarchy of past>future>present.
I didn’t read this as being framed on himself just because his examples were using him as a running example.
I think the classification as such makes sense and can be helpful to even consider a more balanced use of time (whether on an individual scale or for deliberations of/for groups).
Yes, perhaps I should be more specific. This is literally about the self.
I suppose there is a form of philosophising or theorising; but that would either be useless or future oriented. (generating a future hypothetical scenario to consider OR imagining things for no purpose other than fun)
I did try to use the word “history” in the past section to include learning from others’ mistakes. But I guess it was not clear.
Thank you for the hierarchy, I will consider this method of classification and others modelled on it for the future. Do you have any idea of time balance for each area? (how much > is one than the other?)
I think you need to further refine your definitions. In reality, there is no “present”, only asymptotically close past and future. And, of course, you can’t do or change anything in the past—all you have is a choice about how future you uses future seconds.
However, this makes your hard question harder, not easier. It’s not just 3 buckets you need to balance, it’s a continuous function of distance, importance, and expected return on learning (studying the past and planning the future) vs action (executing plans).
A trinary model will help to elucidate a continuous model of decision making. If he doesn’t have enough information to develop a trinary model then a continuous model just adds noise.
It is a hard problem (learning vs planning vs doing), a 3 bucket system is not a terrible one for now. I am glad that you understand it.
Have you ever personally tackled the buckets? Did you come up with a strategy for how to decide between them?