How many of you press the snooze button when the alarm rings in the morning?
And how many of you press it more than once?
Ah, great, so I’m not the only one here
who wants to get up early but fails to do so?
Let me ask you a different question.
Who ever thought of eating fewer unhealthy snacks?
And who succeeded in doing so for more than a month?
See?
Many of us wants to live healthier lives but fail to do so.
So, we want to get up early, and we want to live healthier lives,
but somehow, we don’t.
How about your pensions?
Do you think you save enough for retirement?
Or do you plan to look into this at some future point in time?
Well, then it might be too late.
Imagine you don’t save enough.
Then you’ll have to adopt
a much soberer lifestyle after retirement.
And you’ll have to move to a smaller house,
give up on your hobbies
exactly when you get more time to enjoy your home and your hobbies.
You may even struggle to make ends meet.
Is that what you want?
Well, from these examples it’s obvious there is a gap that we all suffer from:
the gap between planning and doing.
We plan to do the one thing and end up doing something else.
We plan to look into our pension savings in the near future,
but we keep procrastinating.
Why do we have this gap,
and wouldn’t it be great if we could close it?
Well, you might think that closing the gap is not that difficult.
We simply have to care more about the future.
People who don’t save enough for their pensions are just stupid.
It was their choice not to save more, so no pity for them after retirement.
Well, it’s not that simple. We do care about the future.
We have ambitious plans for the future, we just fail to carry them out.
Ironically, the first step towards closing the gap between planning and doing
is to become aware that we cannot escape from it.
And to understand the gap, it helps to think of ourselves in the future
as different persons than we are today.
So, not only our circumstances change; no, we, our preferences, change as well;
from day to day, from minute to minute.
It’s as if we are a different self at every point in time;
the current self is planning, and the future self is doing.
The gap between planning and doing
is essentially the result of a disagreement
between our current and our future selves.
So, the self who sets the alarm wants to get up early,
and the self who wakes up from the alarm
wants to stay in that nice, warm, and comfortable bed.
In general, there are at least three reasons for a disagreement
between our current and our future selves.
First of all, circumstances change.
So, imagine that in the near future,
there will be a great technological breakthrough
that will all of a sudden make us all live ten years longer on average.
Well, then my future self will decide to save more for retirement
than my current self plans to do.
This disagreement between my current and my future self is caused
by this unexpected change in circumstances.
So none of these selves is to blame for making a wrong decision,
they simply have different information on which to base their decisions.
But when I set the alarm in the evening, and wake up the next morning,
circumstances haven’t changed that much.
It’s me, my preferences, that have changed.
I simply want to stay in bed.
So, changing circumstances are only part of the story.
Our preferences change as well.
Why?
Well, most of the plans we make have consequences
for several of our future selves.
So when we make plans,
we have to trade off the well-being of different future selves,
so we have to determine how important we find one self relative to the others,
we have to determine how much priority we give to our different selves.
How do we do this?
Well, in general, we care less about the future than about the present.
So, the further in the future a self, the less priority it gets.
But what causes the gap between planning and doing
is the fact that the priorities that we give to these different selves
may change over time.
The closer we get to our future selves, the larger the priority we give
to the sooner relative to the later selves.
How does this work or apply for my alarm clock?
Well, when I set the alarm in the evening,
I have to trade off the well-being of at least two of my future selves:
the self who wakes up from the alarm and wants to stay in bed,
and the self – the later self –
who doesn’t want to be late at a meeting in the early morning.
When I set the alarm,
I may decide to give equal priority to both of these selves.
I may decide that the discomfort of getting out of bed early
is less painful than the discomfort of being late at the meeting.
So I’ll decide to set the alarm relatively early.
But once the alarm rings in the morning,
I’ll give more priority to the self who wakes up,
and I’ll decide to stay in bed.
So, it is as if the self who wakes up puts too much priority on himself.
In that sense, we could say
that the self who wakes up is responsible for the gap between planning and doing.
But maybe the self who sets the alarm
fails to correctly anticipate
how much discomfort I would feel when waking up from the alarm.
So maybe, it is the self who sets the alarm that makes a mistake.
Maybe it’s that self that is responsible for the gap between planning and doing.
And this brings me to a third reason for a disagreement
between our current and our future selves.
When we make decisions with future consequences,
we have to project ourselves to the future.
We have to imagine
how much our future selves will like
what our current self decides today.
Research has shown that that is really difficult for us.
We tend to overestimate
how similar our future selves are to our current selves.
It’s called projection bias.
It’s as if we don’t have sufficient empathy for our future selves.
So, imagine doing groceries.
When I go to the supermarket,
I buy food that will be consumed by my future selves.
So, what I buy
should depend on what I think my future selves would like to eat,
and it should not depend on my current appetite.
But if you have ever done groceries on an empty stomach,
you know what happens.
(Laughter)
I buy more unhealthy food on an empty than on a full stomach.
And I’m not the only one.
When we prefer a cupcake to an apple right now,
we tend to think that we’ll also prefer the cupcake to the apple in the future.
But in the future, we may well prefer the apple:
a disagreement between our current and our future selves.
Here we can say that the current self fails
to correctly foresee what the future self will need.
So here we could say
that the current self is responsible for the gap between planning and doing.
We’ve seen three reasons
why we make plans that we fail to stick to:
circumstances may change,
the priorities we give to our different selves may change,
and it is really hard for us to guess what our future selves will need and like.
We cannot say
that the gap between planning and doing shows that we fail to do the right things.
No, maybe we just fail to make the right plans.
So, it’s not clear which self is to blame for the gap between planning and doing:
the planner or the doer?
But how could we close the gap?
Well, we could decide to make our plans more realistic.
We could decide
to only make plans that we know that we will be able to stick to.
But of course, this only works if we are aware of the fact
that in the future, we may want to do something different
than our current self would like us to do.
But if we adopt this strategy of realistic planning
then we are essentially shifting some decision power
from our current to our future selves,
because our current self has to adjust to whatever our future self will do.
So, when I set the alarm in the evening, I could decide to set it a bit later,
if I realize that setting it earlier won’t make me get out of bed earlier.
But we could also decide to commit ourselves to our plans.
So, when I set the alarm, I could decide to put it far from my bed
so that the only way to press the snooze button is to get out of bed.
And if I use this strategy of commitment,
then I essentially shift some decision power
from my future to my current self,
because then my future self has to adjust to whatever my current self decides today.
And of course, this strategy also only works
if I am aware of the possible disagreement between my current and my future selves.
So, the gap between planning and doing is the result of an ongoing struggle
between our different selves, and it’s not clear which self is right.
But if we are aware of the gap,
then we can try to make more realistic plans
and commit ourselves to our plans.
All in all, awareness is the first step towards closing the gap.
It will make us suffer less from the tension
between what we want today and what we will want tomorrow.
So, maybe we can find commitment devices
that help us stick to health lifestyles,
or maybe we can be less ambitious
and make realistic plans for living healthy lives.
It’s up to you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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