The time capsule is a great journaling tool you can use to raise awareness about the direction your life is taking, as well as capture your current wisdom and memories. More than that, it allows you to have this valuable knowledge delivered to your door in the future. Oh, did I mention it’s also a lot of fun?
In its simplest form, a time capsule is just a letter you write to yourself to be opened in the future. All you need is to write it and set a target date to open it — say, five, ten or twenty years later. No matter how mundane your letter is, you’ll be amazed at its contents when you open it.
Take a Picture of Your Mind
To create a time capsule, write a letter just as you would to your best friend. Be conversational and friendly; have fun with it. Write about whatever you want, but always remember to capture your current reality as thoroughly as possible.
Just like a photo is a snapshot of your body, think of a time capsule as a snapshot of your mind. Be aware that just like your body changes, so does your mind. Remember that each ‘version of you’ has its own wisdom. Things that we know we won’t forget are indeed forgotten as the different winds of change come and go in our lives.
Remember that when the letter is read, you, as you know yourself today, will not be around anymore. Your current self won’t be there to answer any questions. So, don’t focus much on predicting the future, but rather on describing your present time. Focus on capturing ‘how it feels to be me today’ — your private zeitgeist, so to speak.
Here are a few specific suggestions to consider including:
- Lists of favorites. What do you like most today? What are your favorite movies, books, television shows, songs, moments, people, celebrations, surprises, lessons, quotations or achievements?
- Important questions and feelings. What are the big unanswered questions currently in your mind? What feelings predominate in these times? How do you feel about your life and the world around you? What do you enjoy about today? What are you thankful for?
- Goals and aspirations. What do you pursue today? What is the vision for your future life? What are the things you’re looking forward to? What are your hopes for your future self? How much or in what way do you expect to be different when you get the letter?
- ‘A Day in the Life…’. How’s your everday life? How’s a typical day at work? At home? Who do you interact with daily? What do you enjoy doing every day? What are the daily trivialities you’ll miss tomorrow?
- Highlights of the year. Which funny facts do you want to remember or laugh about in the future? What were this year’s 10 best things/worst things that happened to you? How would you describe this year in one sentence? In one word?
- Lessons learned and advice for yourself. What advice would you give to your future self? What important lesson did you learn recently and don’t want to forget?
When to Open the Time Capsule
For each different time span you set, you will get different feelings associated with reading the letter: the emotions evoked when opening a 5-year time capsule are of course radically different than when opening a 30-year capsule. Although it might be amusing to open an ancient time capsule, we want to make the experience not only fun, but also useful from a personal development standpoint.
Having just recently opened my first time capsule, I can say that a 5-year time span worked great for me. Five years is long enough for having had major life shifts, and short enough for the letter to be still meaningful and actionable.
If you get into the habit of creating time capsules — every year for example — one nice side effect is that after you open your first one, you’ll then have an ongoing supply of time capsules to open. What a nice ritual to keep — creating new capsules and opening past ones: couldn’t this very well replace the habit of making and breaking New Year’s resolutions? And what about giving yourself a time capsule every year as a birthday gift?
Another interesting idea is setting to open the letter on a specific event, instead of on a specific date: How about ‘To Open When My Son is Born’ or ‘To Open Before Committing to Marriage’? Wouldn’t it be interesting to take a look at your former thoughts, opinions and beliefs in these events?
Don’t Limit Yourself
Another interesting feature of the time capsule technique is that it’s very versatile. Use your imagination and make it fun by inventing your own variations. Here are a few suggestions to get started:
- Experiment with different formats. Instead of sending a letter, send a colorful mind map of your life, or maybe a drawing.
- Reply to the letter. Now that you got the letter, why not connect back with your former self by replying to it? This brings an awesome sense of change and temporal awareness. Keep both the letter and the reply together to review them again in the future.
- Involve others. Create an annual tradition in your family to create and open family capsules; ask your kids to contribute. Write a letter to your spouse. Write a letter to be opened by your kids when they’re the same age you are now. Use time capsules as holiday gifts for your loved ones. Involving others opens an entire new dimension to the technique.
- Create a REAL time capsule. Make the experience of opening your letter even richer by including mementos of the times you’re living in? Real time capsules are everywhere, so why not create yours? Take a shoebox (or a more durable container, depending on the capsule target date) and include photos, receipts, admission tickets, magazines and any other meaningful items alongside with your letter. What car do you drive? How much memory do you have on your computer? Have fun collecting different tidbits of everyday life!
Do It Today, Be Glad Tomorrow
While the idea of intentionally sending information to the future is not new, it’s a great fun way to provide yourself with valuable material for self-reflection.
For a great time capsule that is both inspiring and useful, Trent of The Simple Dollar recently shared a letter to his 10-year future self. Do you think there’s any chance of not enjoying yourself when receiving one of these?
Get cracking and create one time capsule now. Your future self will thank you — guaranteed.
Thanks amazing you know…
Honestly seems cool… reminds me of times when in childhood I used to read snippets of my life in a diary only to lose it somewhere, behind the cupboard or under my book racks… only to find it years later and read it again…
I Zoomed it!
I enjoyed this latest post! I just posted the other week on the benefits of listing your accomplishments for the past year, rather than concentrating on resolutions, and the idea of using a time capsule to do such a thing is ingenius! (yes, I know you posted about more than listing accomplishments…)
I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before, as I’ve used futureme.org to send my future self e-mails for just this reason.
I hope you don’t mind, I just cited this post on my blog.
Focusing on listing your accomplishments is a great idea.
I found out that the best motivator for me is not shouting ‘affirmations’ but to look what I’ve done in the past for real.
Thanks for the contribution and for the mention from your blog!
This is a nifty idea. I’ve never sent out my own capsule before, but I think I will soon. A simpler, digital version of this would be to use one of those websites that allows you to send an e-mail to yourself at a certain time in the future. There’s several of them out there, though I don’t have the URL of one handy at the moment.
Hi, Adam. Thanks for your comment.
FutureMe.Org seems to be the most widely used of such reminder services. Although I didn’t find any complaints about them, I wouldn’t rely on any third-party to deliver anything else than very short-term time capsules…
Hi, Luciano.
From the beginning of Litemind I have been reading your “posts” and thinking over them for some time. I wonder how such a young person can explain life’s mental facts in a way that we commonly believe is a privilege of old and experienced people. This last one -”Time capsule”- for instance, reflexes a rare quite accomplished maturity we seldom see in other more pretentious sites. Well done.
This is a great idea. My wife and I had our first child this year and had a similar idea that we’ve already put into practice. We both wrote a letter to our daughter before she was born and plan to let her read them when she turns 16. We plan to write a letter to her every year as she grows up and let her open a new one every year. If we have more children we’ll do the same. I think I’ll incorporate more of the common daily life stuff into mine for the one year letter, though, as I think that would be really interesting.
Xoel: Thank you so much for your compliments — I really appreciate it. I do my best trying to create quality content, and it’s very satisfying to have it recognized as such.
Jason: Thanks for sharing. Including common daily life stuff may seem pointless today, but it’s exactly that stuff that will bring the most joy in the future (especially for a large time span such as 16 years!).
What a fabulous idea!! Wish someone would mail the letters back to us though. I belong to a little Unity study group. Every year at first of the year, we have a Burning Bowl service. we burn the things we don’t want to take into the new year (on a list — a piece of paper) and we write a letter to God about the new year. the letters are sealed and self addressed and stamped. They are kept in the prayer room and in November of the new year, our letters are returned to us. It is always fun to see what our hopes and dreams were a year before. Now you are talking a 5 year time capsule! Sounds wonderful! I just wonder if in five years I would remember that I did it.
Thank you for a super thought provoking idea. I will figure out a way to do it!
@Joan: That’s so excellent that you do such a thing every year. When my husband and I went to pre-cana, they had us write letters to each other that they would then mail out to us in a year.
I’m not quite sure where the mix-up was but, instead, they mailed them to us within two months! Bummer.
Cool. If we expand the idea a little bit we can project a software or imagine some new technology in the future. When I was a kid I used to search for old magazines (about 10yr) in the library. It was really fun. I’ve heard about some project from Forbes Magazine about time capsules:
http://www.forbes.com/2005/10/.....email.html
I do this every year, together with my kids. Even with a one year time span, it is amazing to see how you grow, develop and change.
Thanks Joan, stephanerd, Fier and Benjamin for enriching the conversation by sharing your stories.
It’s really interesting to see how you’re using different variations of the idea.
I have actually done something similar this a number of years ago. We had to say where we saw ourselves in fives, hopes, dreams and goals. It was a a Youth training seminar – I was about 17 years old at the time.
The organisation hosting the event posted it to us five years later. There was only one thing on my list that I had not yet completed/achieved but was in process of doing so.
Simone: Out of curiosity, do you actively pursue the goals and dreams you wrote about in your capsule? Or did you forget about them and only when you reopened the capsule you became aware you once set them?
Great idea! Here’s a suggestion: put a pair of your underwear in the real time capsule. 20 years later take them out and see if they still fit.
The Beautiful Kind: That’s pretty funny and creative! It’s definitely a more tangible way to grasp your body differences than just looking at an old photo…
(sorry my english is not my main langauge)
Hi. I arrive to this blog because im searching for months a sort of “time capsule” to send my little daughter (she is almost 2 years old now)lots of thing i want.
as i am 43, not too old, but also not young , i want to write down and “send” her my daily thoughts about, me , she and her mother.
sort of daily notebook for her.
i want to write some stories of my and her mother, how and when we felt in love, anecdotes of she now, etc
also i want to to send her some of her /our photos and videos i take almost daily. i have several GBs of this.. i was thinking a way to haver more presence of me when she grows up but in a “digital way” . paper method is good but i was wondering what has 2008 technology bring us to do this,
for example when she was 25 or 30 or whatever age. maybe i have not will be physically at her side.
i would love to have the opportunity to had this for me, a daily or monthly letter from my dad when i was a little kid. also i want to other relatives write letters for she, so she could read then later years, when they passed away even.
now hoy can i do this?
i was thinking to set a gmail account, but they have a 9 months of no login maximun time. after that they delete “dorman” accounts.
i want to say, dont want to login every time to mantain it alive.
i only want to write in a paper in sealed envelope an account an password, and save it in safe place when she grows.
one approach could be buy a domain name for 25 years for example, and a log termn webhosting and setup a email accoutn by myself, but i think is not a safe method or that could be for that long time in uattended way. lots as webhosting providers dissapears on time.
i was thinking that going in to a major brand name, could bring me a little more chance to stay for a long time. ( i mean aol, gmail, yahoo or msnlive although i always have been very clear on this two lasts, as a very bad way to keep anything on their mail servers…)
also im not rich
so looking for something that is not driving me on bankrup, i prefer to leave this money to her 
, (im i latinamerica so 100 bucks here are ONE HUNDRED , you understand)
sorry if this badenglish is very difficult to read., hope to have exposed good the whole idea.
Do you have some advise on how to do this?
H.R.P. : Figuring out a reliable way to send a time capsule far in the future is a huge problem. I didn’t try it myself exactly because I didn’t yet take the time to figure out the details.
First of all, I wouldn’t rely on any third-party company. It’s not safe to assume that any company will be alive and well 25 years from now. Especially in the technology business, 25 years is way too long — even for current “safe” brands.
Second, I would try to avoid going digital as much as I can. Will the OS or the programs still be available? Will be DVD readers available? Also, I don’t think digital media is reliable for such long periods of time. An interesting idea might be to send the information in two different media types, to serve as backup. You might for example, include both DVDs and an external HDD with the same information.
Either analog or digital, you need to make sure you take measures to preserve the materials: one link that I found might help you: Builing a Time Capsule – Guidelines for Preserving Materials (pdf).
Let me know how it goes… Good luck!
Thanks for the post. I wrote letters to myself three years in a row and opened each the next year and replied to it. It was very interesting and entertaining to see how much I had changed, and to see problems I had in hindsight, knowing how they worked out. Reading through your ideas makes me want to start again. Thanks
i just received a message from the past
i was surprised because i don’t remember to have ever written such a message, let alone sending it to my future self 
it’s a nice feelong though!
A good way of rethinking about and rediscoving the values of our lives
I just put a time capsule outside my backyard on Monday and I dig it today I was really surprised the letter that I wrote wasn’t there it was different. Inside the envelope I got a lot of things that I asked it really works.
I don’t follow you, Blue. Can you please clarify your comment?
Really interesting theme. I use http://www.myfuturemail.net for my time capsules.
Thanks for sharing Julie! As for myself, I don’t trust third-party companies for long-term time capsules, though.
For this kind of stuff, I prefer low-tech (paper) or a solution that I have more control over (say, a text file in my hard drive).