I think you need to further refine your definitions. In reality, there is no “present”, only asymptotically close past and future. And, of course, you can’t do or change anything in the past—all you have is a choice about how future you uses future seconds.
However, this makes your hard question harder, not easier. It’s not just 3 buckets you need to balance, it’s a continuous function of distance, importance, and expected return on learning (studying the past and planning the future) vs action (executing plans).
A trinary model will help to elucidate a continuous model of decision making. If he doesn’t have enough information to develop a trinary model then a continuous model just adds noise.
I think you need to further refine your definitions. In reality, there is no “present”, only asymptotically close past and future. And, of course, you can’t do or change anything in the past—all you have is a choice about how future you uses future seconds.
However, this makes your hard question harder, not easier. It’s not just 3 buckets you need to balance, it’s a continuous function of distance, importance, and expected return on learning (studying the past and planning the future) vs action (executing plans).
A trinary model will help to elucidate a continuous model of decision making. If he doesn’t have enough information to develop a trinary model then a continuous model just adds noise.
It is a hard problem (learning vs planning vs doing), a 3 bucket system is not a terrible one for now. I am glad that you understand it.
Have you ever personally tackled the buckets? Did you come up with a strategy for how to decide between them?