Make Tomorrow Successful

Hey folks, this is an explanation of an obvious idea told in a slightly different way. I hope it helps one other person get there quicker than I did.

I had this idea recently that's helped me break out of a frustrating cycle. Maybe it'll help you too.

Add a new project to your life: "Make tomorrow successful"

This isn't just a philosophy or mindset - it's a literal project that deserves its own repository, JIRA board, or dedicated slot in your task management system. Every day, I allocate concrete time to this project, just like I would for any professional deliverable.

Think of it this way: If you have 2 projects at work and 3 personal projects, you now have a new one: "Make Tomorrow Successful." It gets its own time allocation, its own success metrics, and its own dedicated focus; just like any other important project you're managing.

Here's why I needed this: I'd be working on a project, not be satisfied with my progress, then stay up late trying to finish it. The next day I'd be tired, which made the next day's work harder, which led to more late nights... and so on. I knew this was a problem, but I kept doing it anyway.

Once I stopped asking "How can I be productive today?" and started asking "What can I do today to make tomorrow productive?" I started making different decisions.

This is not a new idea. It amounts to "don't sacrifice tomorrow for today" - a concept that has existed in various forms throughout history, from Aesop's fables to traditional proverbs about saving for tomorrow.

What made it click for me was visualizing this as a concrete project all by itself where I would labor at this. Actually work. Do things in the real world.

Why it works for me

Here's what I've realized: there's a dependency chain between days. When I push myself too far or borrow sleep to achieve today's goals, I arrive at tomorrow already in debt.

My performance tomorrow becomes directly linked to what I did the previous day, which means bad decisions cast a longer shadow. If I stay up late to finish something, the impact isn't just one night's poor sleep—it can derail several days afterward.

By making "tomorrow's success" my highest priority, I'm breaking this link, or at least reducing the blast radius of today's decisions. I'm essentially saying: "Today has limits because I cannot compromise my goal of making tomorrow successful."

Practical Example

Trade low-energy time for high-energy time.

It's late afternoon, I've been working for hours with dozens of browser tabs open, reference materials scattered across my desktop, and everything's slowing down. Previously I would say "dont procrastinate by introducing a new cleaning task, finish the project, then clean up."

But with my new principle, I stop an hour early and invest that time in cleaning up my workspace instead. Its a personal quirk, but mess irritates me. I can power through it, but its not instant, I've found it takes time to talk myself out of it. If I clean up today, then the changes of wasting time cleaning tomorrow morning are lower.

This trades an hour of my lowest-quality time today (when I'm already tired) for 30 minutes of my highest-quality time tomorrow (when I'm fresh). That's a good deal.

We've all experienced how problems that seem impossible at the end of a long day become surprisingly manageable the next morning. That complex code refactoring that would take hours when tired might take just 30 minutes with a fresh mind.

This approach provides a simple lens for decision-making. When faced with competing priorities, just ask: "Which choice best sets tomorrow up for success?"

The answer will often contradict conventional productivity advice, but will ultimately lead to more sustainable progress.

When I'm sick

I've heard the fastest way to get back to productive work isn't to keep working while sick - it's to get well as quickly as possible so I can return to work at full capacity. But that didn't connect.

With modern medicine I'm not sick enough to be bedridden, but I'm not well either. I've always had the impression that technically I am "fine". I can move around and talk. Yes it seems to take longer to read code. Yet since I'm not "that bad," I feel like I should still be working and being productive.

Growing up in public school in America, the education I got about dealing with illness was incredibly vague: "You're sick, so rest." That's it. No concrete plans, no evidence-based approaches, no optimization. Without concrete "resting" work plans, work guilt would creep in, because "resting" feels like doing nothing.

After adopting the "make tomorrow successful" principle, I was able to see it differently. It was much more obvious that the unknown variable of "Will I still be sick tomorrow?" was a much bigger problem than whether I get a few hours of work done today.

I realized I should expand my knowledge about recovery. What does "rest" actually mean? What are my options? What techniques actually work? This became my highest priority because ensuring I'm not sick tomorrow matters more than pushing myself to get two hours of mediocre work done on a project today.

My limited energy should be invested directly in solving my immediate problem: being sick.

Some questions I started asking myself:

For me, the answer was no. I had this nebulous experience of feeling bad, being bored, and sensing I should be productive because I wasn't sick enough to be hospitalized.

Instead of pushing through illness to work on projects, I now use that limited energy to develop an actual recovery system:

The key insight is about alignment. Working on projects while sick directs my energy sideways to my actual problem. By redirecting that same energy toward recovery, I'm moving directly toward solving my challenge.

Footnotes

[1] Let me break the fourth wall for a moment and explain why I think this approach actually works. It's a fascinating example of how our brains adapt to environments and how we can leverage that adaptation.

In American business culture, particularly in tech startups, you spend thousands of hours practicing very specific mental skills. You learn to think rigorously about projects, deliverables, dependencies, and resource allocation. You are punished every time you overcomplicate something and fail to ship on time. You are rewarded for shipping products on deadlines, making trade-offs, and cutting scope when necessary.

Meanwhile, a parallel thing happens: you simultaneously learn, through the same reinforcement mechanisms, that personal preferences or vague feelings are fundamentally less important than concrete deliverables. "I'm tired" carries less weight in a meeting than "I need to ship a customer visible minor improvement every Tuesday." This isn't theoretical. It's baked into how decisions actually get made day-to-day.

The result is straightforward: you develop extraordinarily strong mental muscles for project planning and delivery, while your capacity for attending to internal signals like "I need rest" or "I'm approaching burnout" atrophies from disuse and lack of reinforcement.

This framework is essentially a practical hack that acknowledges this reality. Rather than fighting against years of conditioning or attempting to develop entirely new mental pathways (which is certainly possible but much slower), you can repurpose these highly developed "shipping muscles" to serve your actual wellbeing.

Yes, there's an irony in needing to frame basic human needs as "projects" with "deliverables" to give them legitimacy in your own mind. But pragmatically speaking, it works. When I say "Make Tomorrow Successful is a project," I'm deliberately leveraging the most developed decision-making apparatus in my brain and pointing it toward my own sustainability.

I'm not making a value judgment about whether this situation is good or bad. I'm simply observing that when you've spent years developing strong mental frameworks in one domain, they can be effectively repurposed for another. Your brain doesn't care that these skills were originally honed for shipping products—they work just as well when applied to personal sustainability.

By wrapping tomorrow's wellbeing in the language of projects and deliverables, you elevate these needs to the status that your conditioned brain has been taught to respect. You're using the tools you have, not the tools you wish you had.

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