Hi, how are you doing? I hope all is well for you.

Earlier I met a fairly young woman who had bipolar disorder. She had a tactic to help her cope with daily life that I think we could all use.

She constantly was making decent, if not good, decisions. She always took her medications and went to therapy, even though she had not had an episode in over a year. She was careful that she didn’t spend too much at a time at the store, and made budgets that she forced herself to follow.

She went to bed at the same time every night and woke up to her alarm set for the same time every morning. She exercised and ate well. She went to work, and never missed a day unless she was genuinely sick. She just generally had her life together.

I asked her what her trick was. How was it that she, a person who had a disorder that generally impairs things like this, had her life more together than even the average person? Her answer was a great one.

Are you ready for this?

She told me that she lived today like she wanted to live tomorrow. Wow. Isn’t that a concept we could all use? And it doesn’t even matter if you have bipolar disorder, or if you are a supporter. Either way this is a good trick to learn.

I read a poem once, that said something similar to this. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do remember it’s sense of irony. Basically what it talked about was procrastinating on everything, and “throwing it to tomorrow.” And then, when the person in the poem got to tomorrow, all this stuff was piled up to do, and in order to stay sane, they had to “throw it back down to today.” LOL.

But isn’t this true? In order to stay sane, we have to do the things we want done, and we have to do them today. Otherwise, they may never get done.

Maybe you are one of those people who procrastinates. Or maybe you know someone like that. I’ve heard someone tell me before “I don’t ‘procrastinate;’ I just work better under pressure.” Personally, it sounds like the same thing to me. But maybe that’s just me.

But I think that this lesson is not just about whether or not you procrastinate. I think that there’s more to it than that. I think it’s also about goal setting and prioritizing.

You have to know how you want to live ‘tomorrow’ if you are ever going to get there. That’s where goal setting comes into play. And then, in order to live like that today, or at least as close as is possible, you have to prioritize your life and set the most important things first.

Some things aren’t possible to do all at once, which is fine. But what you can do in those cases is to live like you need to in order to aim for those goals.

What ways do you want to live in order to get to the places you want to be in life? And what ways can you implement them into your daily life?

Well, I have to go!

Your Friend,

Dave