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.
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.