Most of us secretly believe we have more time than we do — not because we're optimistic, but because we treat our future hours as somehow more available than our present ones. The 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne noticed something sharper: that we perpetually borrow from tomorrow to excuse ourselves today, and in doing so, we manufacture a self that always exists in preparation but never in action. What's strange is that modern scheduling research by Gal Zauberman and John Lynch (2005, Journal of Experimental Psychology) confirmed this tendency precisely — we systematically perceive future time as more elastic, more abundant, than equivalent past time, even when we intellectually know otherwise. Montaigne's remedy wasn't discipline. It was what he called 'essaying' — literally trying yourself out right now, in the present draft, rather than saving your real effort for a cleaner future moment that will feel just as crowded when it arrives. Today, one thing you're holding back for when you 'have more bandwidth': consider that the bandwidth won't change, only the excuse.

What have you been saving your fuller effort for — and what specifically is supposed to change between now and then?

Drawing from Renaissance Humanism combined with Behavioral Economics of Temporal Discounting — Michel de Montaigne ('Essais', 1580) and Gal Zauberman & John Lynch ('Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments', Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2005)