Anticipating the future by backcasting
There’s a problem with the way we plan. The problem’s that we plan looking forward but we see better looking back.
What if you could imagine the end–end of a project, business plan, career switch? What if you could, as Shane Parrish says, make the hindsight of your future self the foresight of your current self? This is where a little reverse engineering helps. The general approach is called 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠.
‘I’ve always only forecasted and it’s worked out fine for me’. It’s not that forecasting is useless but that it works in a narrow set of circumstances. Forecasting works short-term when present trends are likely to continue. Stretch that on the time scale and the future is nothing like the past. Why didn’t we forecast COVID? Or social media? Or 9/11?
Backcasting doesn’t bother with predictions. Any meaningful future (career, relationships, business, health) is long-term and uncertain. So instead of asking ‘what will happen’, it helps you work out how something you want will happen.
All you need to do to backcast is reverse-engineer.
1️⃣ Place yourself in your ideal future. Capture detail. What do you feel like? What does the world around look like?
2️⃣ Write down what you did to get there. List specific actions/behaviors/decisions. Don’t say ‘I have to do this’; say ‘I did this’. Saying so brings ownership.
3️⃣ Now that you’ve a rough path of actions, you need signposts to hit. Where will you be:
👉Three-quarters of the way
👉Halfway (when will halfway come timewise)
👉In the near future from now
Here’s how I reverse-engineered a plan to prepare for and run six marathons south of 4:30 hours. I didn’t know the approach formally as backcasting but I followed the basic principle of it.
#1: My desired future state
I’ve run 42.195km in four hours. It’s warm, sunny, after 10am. I’m tired but I’ve got enough to savor the moment. I can walk and talk.
#2: Behaviors repeated to get to the end
I mirrored run times with the race-day time (only morning runs)
I ran 4 times a week for 12 weeks
I did my longest weekly run over the weekend
I upped my weekly mileage by 15–20%
I took no fluids for any sub-10km run
I did not miss my Sunday football matches
#3: Signposts along the 12-week program
Week 9: I did 31km in 2:45 (three-quarters)
Week 6: I did 21km in 1:45 (halfway)
Week 3: I did 10km in 0:50 (near future)
Though I aimed for a 4h finish each year, my times across six years were spread between 4 and 4:30. Looking back, I didn’t think much about nutrition and recovery. But I knew what was most important to me, and that was enough to bring me close to my goal each time.
You can make better decisions to get to your desired future if you fully understand all that is required to make it happen. Backcasting helps by placing you at the summit and identifying what’s needed each step of the way.
