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Key points
- The future is created day-by-day, in the here-and-now, by our thoughts, dreams, visions, plans, and actions.
- This is a perfect time of year for organizing the future you want.
- Identifying and noting your goals and aspirations helps create your future reality.
With a new year almost upon us, this is a great time to be organizing your life for 2024 and beyond. You'll have no better guide than legendary management expert Peter Drucker.
A central Drucker insight is that the future is created day-by-day, in the here-and-now, by our thoughts, dreams, visions, plans, and actions. His writings, inspired me to conceptualize a Creating the Future notebook to explore, capture, and organize ideas about how to create the future. This self-development notebook is not just reflective but action-oriented. It can be never-ending, with no shortage of potential material.
Leonardo da Vinci’s biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Da Vinci had 7,000 pages of notebooks. Many people have found guidance in recent years through tools such as gratitude journals.
A holistic, future-oriented notebook adds value by providing a container for recording what you learn from and about other people, as well as from online and printed sources. A crucial component is recording your thoughts, dreams, hopes, values, priorities, ideas, philosophy, and attitudes about what the future means to you. These are likely to change and adapt over time, leading to comparisons and ways to gauge progress.
Although you can use digital components, there is a special quality about the tactile experience of writing in a notebook that helps curate, collect, and organize thoughts.
You can build and start working on a Creating the Future notebook with a new notebook of a design or size that feels right to you. It should be spacious enough to capture at least a year’s worth of content. Add to your notebook regularly and as often as possible and practical. I suggest dividing it into eight categories, and then personalizing as you see fit. There are likely to be crossovers between categories.
Eight Holistic Categories
People. This category can encompass family, friends, role models, networking possibilities regarding professional colleagues, and those from your past with whom you’d like to reconnect. List people you believe are adept at navigating the future, consider what you can learn from them, and how you can help them.
Goals and Aspirations. These areas can be as loose or specific as you’d like; a dedicated section for your hopes, dreams, and attitudes about the future, career-related and otherwise. The goals and aspirations can also encompass retirement and related areas, such as Drucker’s notion of planning for the second half of life, as well as charity, philanthropy, and related manifestations of generosity.
Resources and Inspiration. You can include books, websites/social media, videos, podcasts, television, radio, libraries, poetry, sources of wisdom, and quotations. There is likely to be an artificial intelligence component within this category, from ChatGPT or other sources. A Drucker notion particularly relevant is ‘the future that has already happened’: events and trends that have already taken place but whose full effects are not yet known.
Learning and Teaching. Compile lists of online and/or in-person individual courses, potential degrees, certificates, professional certifications, conferences, workshops/seminars, and music or art lessons. Teaching opportunities can include guest lecturing; and possibly related areas such as mentoring or volunteering. The segments of this category reflect Drucker’s well-developed sense of curiosity and keeping an open mind.
Mind-Body. A number of interrelated items are applicable here, including health, wellness, well-being, self-care, mindfulness, faith, and spirituality.
Visuals. Create space to augment your thoughts with diagrams, doodles, sketches, illustrations, collages, mind maps, design thinking, and other devices for creativity. You can draw inspiration for this section from visits (in person or virtually) to museums, galleries, and libraries.
Actions. These items can include specific activities and tasks you would like to accomplish in creating the future, such as follow-up on how you contact people identified in the first category, development of connections through professional associations, enrollment in courses or lessons, application for scholarships or grants, new social media explorations, and new technology gadgets or tools tried out.
Blank Slate/Tabula Rasa. These are pages for random thoughts, storytelling, and ideas that don’t fit into the other categories. This can include additional personalization, plus potential topics that don't have their own category, such as innovation, entrepreneurship, or finances.
Thoughtful and Intentional Living
To my knowledge, Drucker did not keep such a system on his own. But he expertly created his future in a thoughtful and intentional way, and the above categories are aligned with how he lived his highly productive and meaningful 95-year life.
The closest he came to this type of notebook is the book The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done, published in late 2004, one year before his death. It is a compendium of material mainly from his earlier books, with daily themes followed by brief excerpts from his work, and “action points” for specific reflections and activities related to the theme.
In your own notebook, while drawing inspiration from Drucker and other people and resources, you can guide yourself to imagining the kind of world you’d like to see in the future and what needs to be done, in the present moment, to help make that world a reality.
References
Peter F. Drucker (with Joseph A. Maciariello): The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done (HarperBusiness, 2004)
Bruce Rosenstein: Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way: Developing and Applying a Forward Focused Mindset (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013)
