A longer time horizon creates the conditions for abundance

In their book Scarcity, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan suggest that scarcity often starts with abundance. Imagine you have a deadline next week. That’s plenty of time to do the task—abundance—so you figure you’ll do it later. Eventually, you forget about it, and you only remember the day of the deadline. Now there’s scarcity: you have to do it, today, or you’ll face the consequences of missing the deadline. That’s just a simple example. That day would be stressful; you have your regular errands to run, and a task on top of that. You have less time and energy to focus on what’s happening around you. This is known as tunneling. Instead, imagine if you decided to do the task and submitted it that first day. You’d be completely free of it, and you’d have the options to spend your time however you like. You focused on doing something that first day, which created abundance in the future. Buying a gift a month before your friend’s birthday means you have many more options. Buying a…