Stop Letting Future You Carry Your Load

Show Notes

The level is one of Freemasonry's most underused operative tools, and the place where it fails us most consistently is time. Brian opens this week by naming a pattern most people recognize the moment they hear it: the habit of loading obligations, decisions, and uncomfortable tasks onto a future version of yourself who, by the way, never agreed to any of it. The pile on the desk. The conversation you keep not having. The health change that starts Monday, forever. These aren't just procrastination habits. They are compounding debts with real emotional and cognitive interest.

Brian draws on the software concept of technical debt to describe what happens when we ignore the limits of the current system and let problems accumulate for future versions to inherit. The same dynamic applies to the self. Past you made commitments present you is stuck with. Present you is quietly doing the same thing to future you right now. The level, applied honestly, asks whether you are distributing that load fairly across time, or whether you are quietly bankrupting the person you are becoming.

The fix Brian offers is deliberately small: when you walk by the pile, take one thing out of it. No four-hour block required. The micro swing of the gavel, not the heroic clean sweep, is what builds actual capacity over time.

• The level as a tool for evaluating how you distribute work across past, present, and future selves
• How deferral creates compounding emotional and cognitive debt
• The tech debt analogy applied to personal habits and obligations
• Why big-block solutions fail and small consistent actions build real capacity
• Using micro behavior changes to reduce future you's inherited load

This framing sets the foundation for the rest of the week, where Brian works through specific ways the misapplication of the level shows up and what to do about each one.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] Hey, welcome back to another episode.
[00:02] This week we're going to be talking about the application of the level.
[00:08] It's interesting how often we tend to get very messed up when it comes to things like
[00:16] time.
[00:19] Let me give you a quick example of how you might be doing this, you know, to yourself.
[00:27] So, uh, imagine you're walking in your house apartment, what have you, and you keep walking
[00:38] pie, that pile of documents and bric-a-brac and stuff sitting on the table that future
[00:49] you one day is going to figure out, going to spend the time, sort it out.
[00:57] Or, one day, future you is going to have all of the energy and enthusiasm you're going
[01:06] to need to exercise and eat by.
[01:13] Or, future you is going to have the ability or capacity to have that tough conversation.
[01:22] When we look at the level and how we use it, more often than not, we have a misappropriation
[01:32] of the person who's going to be able to solve some of these problems.
[01:39] And, to be fair, the past version of you also made the same kind of mistake, setting you
[01:49] up to not be successful, to not be able to execute on the promises that they thought one
[01:57] day you'd be able to handle.
[01:59] Now, this isn't about using the level to beat yourself up, so I want to be clear.
[02:04] This is about understanding that when we have irrational expectations about the capacities
[02:12] of our past self or our future self, we lose the opportunity to really meaningfully task
[02:18] that version of yourself with the right scope of work.
[02:22] If the pile keeps getting bigger and you don't work to set up how you're going to solve that
[02:31] problem, future use load increases.
[02:35] And what happens here every day that passes every chance that you miss to solve that problem,
[02:42] you're just increasing the debt.
[02:46] In computer technology, we call this a tech debt, where you don't acknowledge some of the
[02:51] limitations of the existing system, and in the process, compound the impact on the future
[02:57] system.
[02:59] When you do this to yourself, it has an emotional weight, it has an energy cost, and it generally
[03:07] doesn't bode well for your long-term mental health.
[03:10] So, this week, we're going to talk about how some of these little quick things, these decisions
[03:16] that we make on the fly seem innocuous at the time, start you down a path that is either
[03:24] unsustainable or really just doesn't give future you enough wiggle room, enough of the trowel,
[03:35] enough kindness and care, enough of the things it's going to need to solve the problem.
[03:41] And how some of that comes from the past version of you and what you can do to heal some of
[03:47] that as well.
[03:49] There's a lot of work here, there's a lot of little nuanced stuff, but this is all relatively
[03:55] kind of high-level easy-ish mind hacks that you can take back to your everyday life.
[04:01] So, how do we solve the pile problem?
[04:04] Let's start with the easy thing, okay?
[04:08] Every time you walk by, take one item out of the pile.
[04:14] That's it.
[04:17] You're not setting up this whole timeline where you've carved out four hours to deal with the pile.
[04:26] Just one thing when you walk by.
[04:30] This kind of microscopic behavior change or this little commitment to the versions of yourself
[04:37] starts you down a path to build resiliency and capacity.
[04:41] When we do this well and do it correctly, you are not adding a meaningful heavy load
[04:48] or creating this opportunity to try and put out all of the fires all at once.
[04:53] What you're doing is micro swings of that gavel to take these little bits off of tomorrow use pile of work.
[05:04] Doesn't take much.
[05:06] It's not that big of a deal.
[05:08] Stop trying to turn it into one or creating this huge debt of time that has to be paid
[05:17] by the future version of yourself.
[05:20] We'll get into more of these throughout the week.
[05:21] Thank you.
[05:22] As an Темrà
[05:23] The End