Katy Milkman

And our brains are very confused by compounding.

We sort of assume processes are linear and that we can add them linearly and I can catch up because I'll just...

do all the savings when I'm at my peak income, which I assume I'll reach in my 40s.

But here in my 20s, I'm like, you know, I'm barely able to get enough together to go on a vacation.

So this isn't the time to save.

But that's wrong because of compound interest and how massively beneficial it is to be putting even a little away early compared to more away later.

So I do think that is also an issue.

When we think about there's a lot of unfortunately, unfortunately, when it comes to saving for retirement, there's a whole lot of human operating system features that are not working for us that are working against us.

Also a great question.

So there's a lot of different strategies that can be helpful here.

Most of them boil down to trying to change the calculus of it's only going to have payoffs in the distant future.

And even though I keep saying, oh yeah, tomorrow I'm going to get to that.

Tomorrow I'm going to prioritize that.

You've got to break that cycle.

And to break that cycle, you need to figure out a strategy that will ensure that

When tomorrow becomes today, you actually want to be locked in to taking care of it as opposed to able to easily procrastinate yet again.

So essentially, you want to entrap your future self, like tomorrow you, into doing something.

So there's a variety of strategies you can use for that.

One form of entrapment that's pretty light touch and can help a little but may not be enough for most people.

But it's just sort of like, I'm going to put it on the calendar.