Freewriting Exercise: Write A Letter to Yourself in the Future

This exercise will only take about fifteen minutes but it’s guaranteed to make your day.

It involves spending a few minutes now to write a letter that will get delivered to yourself in the future.

Think of it as an electronic time capsule. A secret message you can send into the future for yourself.

  • Who will you be in a year? Five years?
  • What will your life be like?
  • Where will you live?
  • What will your average day feel like?
  • Who will be in your life?
  • What goals will you have accomplished?

Before you write, choose a date in the future. That’s who you are writing to. Yourself-in-the-past is sending a communique to yourself-in-the-future.

Using a service like futureme, you can have this message delivered as an email to yourself.

As a preliminary exercise, look back at yourself five years ago. Think back to what you were doing, what your life was like. If you’d like, you could actually go through your calendar and pick a date, and if you use gmail, you can very easily search your messages for what you received and sent for a given date range.

Emails can give you an interesting glimpse of what was happening in your life at a give time.

The exercise

Spend just ten minutes drafting a quick letter to yourself.

Only you will read this, so you can say whatever you’d like, as long as it’s something you’d like to say to yourself.

  • Is there anything you know you would appreciate hearing from yourself in the past?
  • What questions do you have now that you would like yourself in the future to answer or respond to?
  1. Set a timer
  2. Draft the letter
  3. Spend a few minutes revising what you wrote
  4. Send it via some place like futureme

Then go about your business — return to your life. If you’re like me when I did this several years back, you’ll probably forget you even did this exercise until you actually receive the email. Then in a year or a few years when you get the message, I would love to hear from you about your experience.

Leave a comment