If you want to re-ignite your hunger and focus for a given objective, pay attention to any "temporal landmarks" between now and the completion time of the goal. Use public events, birthdays or planned breaks as episode dividers in the path ahead.Arrange a book deadline for after your birthday or a weight-loss target for when you get back from a conference.

Temporal landmarks

If your goals are unrealistic or too daunting, seeing them lying ahead in a future Season could backfire, damaging your morale and pushing you to procrastinate.Keep this technique for when you're confident this isn't a risk.

Before mapping out

Our lives are often referred to as a stream or a journey, yet our minds more naturally divide life into episodes or seasons, like a DVD boxed set.The Boxed Set approach helps us to think of a future self as being in a different season, separate and distinct from the person we are now. This sense of distance is energizing because it makes the future path more visible.

The "Boxed Set Approach"

Writers often refer to life as a stream or a journey - a continuous, ever-changing flow of events. It's poetic but doesn't capture how the human mind construes the passage of time. Our natural inclination is to chunk our lives into episodes and seasons, rather like a DVD boxed set.

Before mapping out

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