free worksheet
The future-self worksheet.
Twenty-five prompts in five groups, a ten-minute structure, and space to write your answers. Two pages. No email address required.
What is in it
Page one is 25 prompts, sorted into five groups by what you actually need today: working out what you want, feeling stuck in an old version of yourself, overthinking instead of acting, building better habits, and wanting perspective on right now.
You are not meant to answer all 25. Pick the group that matches the week you are having and find the one question that makes you stop.
Page two is the ten-minute structure, with lines to write on. Choose a future moment, describe an ordinary scene in it, introduce something difficult, find the connection to today, write your next step. That last part is the one most people skip and the one that turns an imagined future into something you can act on this week.
There is deliberately no scoring, no streak and no framework with a name.
Why a worksheet and not an app screen
Writing by hand is slower, and for this particular exercise slower is the feature. The research on expressive writing consistently involves people writing at length rather than tapping a response, and the prompts here work better when you cannot delete a sentence as fast as you wrote it.
If you would rather do it on a phone, the same prompts live in Lab notes inside the app.
What to do with the answers
- Do not act on all of them
- Pick the one answer that surprised you and ignore the rest for now. Twenty-five intentions is a list. One is a change.
- Turn it into a rehearsal, not a resolution
- Take that answer and decide what you will do the next time the obvious obstacle appears. That is the step most people skip, and it is the one with the best evidence behind it.
- Come back to it in a month
- Not to check whether it came true. To see whether the question still feels like the right question, which it often does not.
The article this came from
The worksheet is a companion to future self journal prompts, which explains each question and what the research does and does not support about this kind of writing. If you want the reasoning rather than just the page, start there.
Related: future-self visualization and our evidence index.