Omondi codes in night-and-day marathons in a packed Ngong Road office centre, browsing social feeds when exhaustion hits and making vows after just one more scroll to create magical results.
Screens glare and minutes pass, dinner is rushed fries, and morning meets him with red eyes and half-completed modules that need to be quickly stitched together before clients wake up and start calling.
Managers see sloppy coding sprint reports and redirect high-visibility work to colleagues, and Omondi cannot comprehend why unremitting drudgery still yields diminishing returns.
Remorse fills him with every drive home, but the cycle self-perpetuates because he never pauses to consider the cost accruing to his future self.
Nafula sits at the nearby workstation but with a mini-ceremony, sets about her deadlines. In her mind’s eyes, she sees vivid images of next month's product demo and the satisfaction that accompanies perfect delivery.
She shuts her laptop for five conscious breaths, pictures herself welcoming investors with refined poise, and enjoys an evening jog through Karura Forest that accompanies early code completion.
That mental mini-holiday sparks refocused priorities, eliminates web procrastination, and energizes crisp commitment by evening, with time to spare for a Swahili literature class and relaxed family suppers. Her module’s stability is subsequently praised by investors, and promotion panels note her name for fast-track leadership paths.
Researchers Daniel Schacter, Roland Benoit, and Karl Szpunar demonstrate through cognitive and neuroimaging science that episodic future thinking, which involves conscious simulation of unrealised personal events, engages a core brain network that recruits information from memory and reconstructs it into elaborately detailed predictions.
The study synthesis concentrates on decision making, emotion regulation, and prospective memory benefit when individuals mentally practice future events with sensory vividness.
Laboratory tests reveal individuals who more vividly envision reward gathering end up finding that they are more patient at inter-temporal choices, or essentially at different points along long arduous tasks.
Interestingly, MRI scans map the brain’s hippocampal activity that weaves together past and future events into complete mental films that play out in our minds.
Legendary organisational psychologist Adam Grant comments on the findings that a simple way to resist bad habits is to imagine how you will feel afterwards. Your future self is smarter than your present self.
Essentially, using your brain’s visions of the future through the episodic future thinking methodology can serve as an antidote to a variety of behavioural glitches that we get stuck in. Some examples include procrastination, overeating, and unintentional doom scrolling on social media.
Premonitions of morning grogginess or chances wasted nudge our minds toward better decisions because the disappointment hurts us in advance rather than waiting for damage to build up in the future.
In the positive episodic simulation theory that people who preload bits of memory about prior failures and successes into their future imagining of stories they tell themselves, will then more effectively guide their own behaviour than people who simply employ abstract intentions in their brain like “I must finish this task” without any visioning around what success and failure in the future will look like.
Some real-world applications outside the workplace include smokers who mentally rehearse taking energetic walks with their future grandchildren experiencing fewer cigarette cravings; dieters who imagine themselves wearing photo-ready outfits in a fitting room ahead of a future family celebration ordering lower-calorie meals at cafés; and students who mentally rehearse their pre-test routines distributing their study time more evenly throughout the week.
The benefits accrue because episodic simulations shrink time in our brains, displacing far-off rewards into the near future, and emotional wiring imprints simulated success with real motivation for us to act.
Kenyan businesses hungering for wholesome productivity gains can incorporate episodic future thinking into team meetings by starting stand-up meetings with brief guided visualisations of finished milestones, customer accolades, and post-launch parties.
Having learning-oriented teams can include asking workers to write brief future diaries outlining project impact six months in the future and then have them read excerpts out loud at peer review or team meeting sessions.
Managers can schedule calendar invites called “Coffee with Future Self” that encourage quiet reflection on consequences before big budget choices.
Finance departments that put quarterly goals on complete community outcomes, like new school roofs, clinic wings built, will engage employees so much more than dehumanized numeric target figures.
The Business Daily readers can take simple action steps today. Begin with a handwritten postcard from your future self, one year in the future, with health statistics, skill levels of certifications, and friendships flourishing because of decisions that you will make tomorrow morning. Put the letter or postcard in a wallet or phone wallpaper.
Phone reminders with feelings of task completion instead of general reminders, for example, “Experience the relief that comes with filing reports.” Substitute evening social media browsing with sixty-second psychological time-travel flashbacks of the next day's weightlifting victory at the gym or refined sales pitch. Remember that the study indicates that such flashes inhibit spontaneous behaviour and activate goal achievement behaviour instead.
In summary, episodic future thinking recasts distant goals as vivid experiences that inform daily decisions. Research reveals hidden neural choreography underlying the phenomenon.
As workers then begin interacting routinely with their older and wiser future selves, their previous counterproductive habits lose traction as energy is invested in high-impact activities, while distant visions are translated into achievements celebrated.
