Pretty sure we aren't there yet.........

      Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically."  Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate.  Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock

Anticipation......................

"It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action."

-James Clear,  Atomic Habits

Seven.......................

....................................................."Dangers of  Busy":

        5.   Reptile Brain takes over and we become reactive rather than 
              proactive. The latter anticipates problems; the former 
              accumulates them.

You can't delegate thinking.................

     Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us.  Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react...


     So what is the solution?  If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories.  Narrate your life as it's occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you only have minutes to reply, the spotlight inside your head will be ready to shine the right way,
     To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.  When you're driving to work, force yourself to envision your day.  While you're sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you are seeing and what it means.  Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them.  Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what's next.  If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table.  Then  you'll notice what goes unmentioned or if there's a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.
     "You can't delegate thinking," de Crespigny told me.  "Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail.  But people can't.  We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention.  The key is forcing yourself to think.  As long as you're thinking, you're halfway home."


-Charles Duhigg,   Faster Smarter Better:  The Secret of Being Productive in Life and Business

Reacquiring the privilege.......................

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."
-Vannevar Bush, anticipating the Intertunnel, as excerpted from his 1945 essay As We May Think

Anticipation......................

"Finance is a black box covered by a veil.  Not only are the inner workings hidden, but the inputs are also obscured, by bad economic data, conflicting news reports, or outright deception.  What coefficient of correction should I apply to a broker's self-serving stock tip?  And then there is the most confounding factor of all, anticipation.   A stock price rises not because of good news from the company, but because the brightening outlook for the stock means investors anticipate it will rise further, and so they buy.  Anticipation is a feature unique to economics.  It is psychology, individual and mass - even harder to fathom than the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.  Anticipation is the stuff of dreams and vapors."
-Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson,  The (Mis)Behavior of Markets:  A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence

Speaking of anticipation...............