My time horizon today is much longer than it was in the past.
I’ve written before about how time horizons expand as you age. While I’m engaged with projects with time horizons ranging from a few days to a few months, I’m increasingly interested in projects whose time horizons are years. When I was younger, either those projects were invisible to me, because I couldn’t see to their time horizon, or I completely misjudged how long they would take.
If I could rewind my age to childhood again, I would find that the time horizon would shrink with each erased year. The extent of my temporal vision might be only a few days, or a few hours!
With that perspective, it’s easy to see why students struggle in preparing for a project with an 8- or 10-week window, such as a concert. Until the concert date comes into view on the horizon, it’s unseeable.
It’s a situation that athletic teams are much better suited to overcome. With a game every week – or multiple times per week – there is always something on the time horizon to work towards. This is just not a regular part of the choral calendar.
What strategies do you use to make sure that growth and progress is towards a goal that is within the visible time horizon of teenagers?