By Chef K.T. Murphy
Our society tends to put a lot of emphasis on planning. It starts when we’re little kids and people ask us what we want to do when we grow up. It gets even more common in high school when everything becomes about where we want to go to college. Then 
in college it’s all about what internships we have or what companies we have “ins” at.
All of this planning for the future leaves out one very important question: What about today? It turns out, you can live just for today. In fact, there are a number of benefits to doing so. It may sound crazy now, but think about it as you read the following 5 great benefits of living just for today.
1. Living For Today Is Preparing For Tomorrow
Most of the things that most of us worry about are things in the future that we can’t do anything about until they come about anyway. Worrying about the future can hamper your productivity in the present and make the future seem that much more hostile when it does finally come around.
As long as you put all of your energy into doing the best you can in the present, you will be as prepared as possible when the future comes along.
2. Preparing For Tomorrow Limits Today’s Flexibility
When you plan too strictly for the future, it can be easy for the future to throw you for a loop. After all, no one can predict the future, so why is that where we put all of our hope and ambition?
Having a strong plan means that disasters are even more traumatic, and opportunities often go un-used because they were not part of the plan. Focusing on the present rather than the future allows you to make each moment as good as possible because you have more flexibility.
3. Today Is Much More Certain Than Tomorrow
Flexibility is not only good because it allows you to make certain choices, it can be good because it can help you make choices that you might not have otherwise had. Sometimes the opportunities that come to us when we are not looking for them come to us because we are the best person to take advantage of them and because they are the best thing for us at the time.
Your plan might be like a route calculated on an outdated map: there’s a quicker way to get where you need to be, but if you put all of your faith in the route that you have calculated you’ll miss all of the best turns and off-ramps.
4. Living For Today Changes How You See Yesterday
Putting emphasis on the present instead of the future also makes the problems of the past seem less important. After all, when you think about the past do you think about in terms of where you are now or in terms of where you thought or planned you might be? Living just for today can help you think about the past in terms of how it led to your present rather than in terms of how it derailed your future.
5. Living For Today Makes Today So Much Richer
We’ve talked about how living for today makes yesterday and tomorrow more approachable, but we haven’t talked about the obvious yet: the way that it makes today more approachable. If today is seen as only an afterword to yesterday or a forward to tomorrow, it becomes easy for today to get lost in all of the importance that we attribute to everything around it. By focusing on what you are doing today and why, the experience of everything that you do can become so much more impact.
Maybe you still think it sounds like a bunch of wish-wash. Maybe some of it made sense but you still want to think about it for a bit before you throw away your planner. Maybe your sold. Whatever you think about living one day at a time, hopefully this article has been enough to make you listen a little closer whenever someone mentions it.
I work with a simple three subject binder. Long term goals in the front short term or everyday stuff in the rear and the cloud in the middle. Every night I rewrite my daily stuff and when I have an idea i put it in the cloud. Just to get it on paper and out of my mind so that I can concentrate on my list of now and today.
All the best
Chef Murph
