How to Write a Letter to Your Future Self
To write a letter to your future self, choose the date it will be read first, then write to that reader rather than to yourself today: describe your life in concrete detail — where you live, what things cost, who you see, what you are in the middle of — say what you expect and what you are afraid of, ask them questions, and put the letter somewhere it can be neither read early nor lost. Forty prompts follow, with a structure, the mistakes that make a letter dull on opening, and three ways to make sure it arrives.
Most letters to a future self are written in twenty minutes, in a good mood, and say roughly this: I hope you are happy, I hope you kept going, remember what matters. They are pleasant to write and close to worthless to open.
The letters that land are the ones with a rent figure in them. This guide is about writing that kind.
Updated
Write to the reader, not the writer
The person who opens this letter is a stranger who happens to share your memories, and fewer of them than you think. They will not remember what you were worried about this month, what the flat looked like, or who you ate lunch with. Those things feel too obvious to write down. They are the whole letter.
So treat it as a briefing. You are the only witness to this year, and you are writing to someone who was not there. What would they need to be told to picture it?
It also means you can stop trying to be wise. The reader will be older than you and will know how everything turned out. They do not need your advice. They need your evidence.
Choose the horizon first
The date decides what the letter is for, so pick it before you write a word. A letter to next year and a letter to ten years from now are different documents.
One year
A check-in. The details will still be familiar, which makes the predictions the interesting part: you said you would move, change jobs, finish the thing. Did you? Good for a first letter, and for making it a yearly habit.
Five years
Far enough that you will have forgotten writing it. Prices, routines and some of the names will already have shifted. The best horizon if you are in the middle of a decision and want to know how it looked from inside.
Ten years
Written to someone you cannot picture. Write more, explain more, and assume nothing is remembered. This is the one where ordinary detail pays back the most.
A date that means something
A birthday with a zero in it, the end of a degree, the day a child turns eighteen. A letter that arrives on a day you were already going to be thinking about your life gets read properly.
If you cannot choose, write the one-year letter now. Longer ones are easier once you have opened a first and seen what you wish you had put in it.
A structure that works
Six parts, in this order. A paragraph each is enough; the order does the work of getting you from description to the things that are harder to write.
1. Where you are today
The date, the address, who lives there, what you can see from where you are sitting. What you earn, what the rent is, what is in the fridge. Start here because it is easy, and because it is what the reader will have lost.
2. What you are in the middle of
The project, the argument, the application, the thing you are waiting to hear back about. Anything unresolved. You know how you feel about it today; the reader only knows how it ended.
3. What you expect
Where you think you will be living, who with, doing what. Be specific enough to be wrong. A prediction that cannot fail is not worth opening.
4. What you are afraid of
The part most letters skip, and the part most often reread. Name the fear plainly. Either it did not happen, which is a relief to read, or it did and you got through it, which is better.
5. Questions for them
Did you stay? Do you still see them? Was it worth it? Questions turn the letter into a conversation, and the reader will answer them out loud.
6. What you hope they kept
Not goals. Habits, people, a way of spending a Sunday. The things you would be sorry to hear had gone.
Prompts about your life right now
Twenty prompts for the descriptive half. Answer the ones that make you want to go and check something — those are the details you have stopped seeing.
The ordinary
- What does a normal Tuesday look like, hour by hour?
- What is the route to work, or to wherever you go most days?
- What can you see from where you are writing this?
- What did you eat this week, and where did you buy it?
- What are you watching, reading and listening to on repeat?
- What is on your phone's home screen, and which app do you open first?
- What do you own that you are fond of, and what is about to break?
People
- Who do you speak to most days, and what about?
- Who have you drifted from this year, and do you mind?
- Who makes you laugh at the moment, and how?
- Who are you worried about?
- Who would you call at three in the morning?
- Who did you meet this year that you expect to still know when this opens?
Work and money
- What do you actually do all day, in words a stranger would understand?
- What do you earn, and what does your rent or mortgage cost?
- What does a coffee, a week of shopping and a full tank or a monthly pass cost?
- What is the last thing you bought that felt like too much money?
- What are you good at now that you were not two years ago?
- What part of the job do you dread, and what part would you miss?
- What are you saving for, if anything?
Prompts about what comes next
Twenty more, for the half that takes a little nerve. These are the ones the reader will go looking for.
Predictions
- Where will you be living when this opens, and with whom?
- What will you be doing for work?
- Which of your current habits will have survived?
- Which friendship will be stronger, and which will be gone?
- What will have changed in the world that you would find hard to believe from here?
- Which opinion that you hold firmly today do you expect to have dropped?
- What is the thing you keep saying you will do, and will you have done it?
Fears and unfinished things
- What decision are you in the middle of, and which way are you leaning?
- What are you most afraid will happen before this opens?
- What are you putting off, and what is the honest reason?
- What would you do if you were certain it could not go wrong?
- What are you hoping nobody notices about you at the moment?
- What would you like to be forgiven for, by someone else or by yourself?
Questions for the reader
- Did it turn out to matter as much as I think it does?
- Are you still in touch with the people I named above?
- Did you go, or did you stay?
- What do you know now that would have saved me a year?
- Is there anything I am doing now that you wish I had stopped sooner?
- What did I get right?
- Are you all right?
Forty is a menu, not a form. Ten answered properly make a better letter than forty answered in a line each.
What makes a letter dull on opening
Advice. A letter full of instructions — stay humble, call your mother, do not give up — is addressed to the wrong person. The reader is older than you and has more information. Advice from the past is the one thing they cannot use.
Vagueness. “Things are hard at the moment but I am hopeful” will mean nothing in five years, because you will not remember which things. Say what was hard: the name, the sum, the date of the appointment.
Performing. Some letters are written as if they might be read aloud at a dinner. You can hear it in the phrasing. Nobody else is going to read this one, so there is no one to impress, including the reader, who knows you.
All three come from the same place: writing about how you would like to be remembered rather than how things are. The cure is detail, and it is the same every time.
What makes it land
Five kinds of detail that reliably survive the trip. None of them requires you to write well.
Prices
Rent, a pint, a loaf, a train ticket, your salary. Numbers date faster than anything else you can write down, and they need no commentary to be interesting later.
Names
Colleagues, neighbours, the person at the café, the friend of a friend you see every weekend. Half of them will have left your life by the time this opens, and you will have forgotten that they were ever in it.
The route to work
Or any routine you could do with your eyes shut. Which door, which seat, which song. Routines feel fixed and are the first thing to vanish when a job or a flat changes.
An unresolved decision
Whether to move, leave, stay, ask. Write down both sides as they look today, and which way you are leaning. The reader knows the ending; only you know how open it felt.
A prediction you can be wrong about
Name a city, a number, a year. Being wrong is the entertaining outcome, and being right is more satisfying when you committed to it in writing.
What a good paragraph looks like
An illustration, invented for this guide, of the difference. A first draft tends to read: work is stressful, money is tight, but I am trying to stay positive and I hope you are doing well.
The same paragraph, rewritten for a reader who was not there: “It is a Sunday in March and I am at the kitchen table because the desk is covered in boxes. Rent is 940 a month and goes up in June. I have an interview on Thursday for a job I am not sure I want; if I get it, we move, and I have not told my sister. I think I will take it. I think by the time you read this you will have stopped noticing the sound of the trains. Did we get the dog?”
Nothing in the second version is well written. It is simply full — a date, a figure, a decision, a secret, a prediction and a question — and every one of those will be worth more on the day it is opened than it is today.
Add a voice note and a photograph
A letter is text, and text flatters you. It lets you tidy up. Two additions do not.
Record two minutes of yourself talking — what you did today, what you are thinking about — on your phone's own recorder. Your voice will have changed more than you expect, and so will the way you talk about your life. Say the date at the start.
Then photograph the things no one photographs: your desk as it is, the inside of the fridge, the view from the window, the shoes by the door. Do not tidy first. In ten years the background of that picture will be the interesting part.
Where to keep it so it actually arrives
A letter to your future self fails in one of two ways: you read it early, or you never find it again. There are three common places to put one, and each handles those two risks differently.
A paper letter in a drawer
The oldest method, and the only one that keeps your handwriting and involves no company at all. Its weaknesses are that nothing stops you opening it on a bad evening, and that it has to survive every move and clear-out between now and the date. Write the opening date on the envelope, tell one person it exists, and keep it with the documents you would never throw away.
An email scheduled to yourself
Most mail services let you schedule a message, and some services do nothing else. It costs little or nothing, and it arrives without you having to remember. It depends on the address still being yours on the day, it is usually text alone, and in your own mailbox the draft may sit in a folder where you can reread it.
A sealed digital capsule
A capsule holds the letter together with the voice note and the photographs, and stays locked until its date. With ours, sealing makes it read-only: you cannot edit it or open it early, and on the date it unlocks and you are emailed. A capsule that opens within a year is free; longer ones are a single payment. It depends on a company still being here, and we say plainly what that means on our preservation page.