If like most people, you think of yourself as continuously having free will in the future, you may have thoughts like:
(1) “I’ll have an hour to do this project tomorrow, so I don’t need to do it now.”
(2) “Once I’m back from vacation, I’ll start going to the gym every day.”
(3) “I don’t need to make this decision about where to invest my money now; I can make it at any time.”
(4) “I’ll choose not to eat these delicious cookies that I’m leaving out on the kitchen table.”

When you start thinking of your future self as having free will only intermittently, you instead ask yourself things like:
(1) “Do I expect that during that hour I have available tomorrow I’ll do this project? What does my past behavior imply about whether I will actually do it?”
(2) “Based on what I know about myself, will I start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation? If I had to bet money on it, which side would I bet on?”
(3) “If I don’t make this investment decision now, when do I predict I will make it? Will it be later this week, or more realistically, months from now?”
(4) “Even if I successfully avoid eating the cookies on the table a few of the times that I pass them, do I expect that I will avoid it every time? Or will I eventually give in and eat them?”

Additionally, when you think of yourself as having a reliably controllable free will for only the next 5 minutes, and start, therefore, viewing free will as precious, you may say to yourself things like:
(1) “Since I don’t actually expect I’ll spend that hour tomorrow doing the project, I’d better do it now.”
(2) “Since I probably won’t start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation as things currently stand, I’d better use the next 5 minutes to begin tweaking the situation to increase my odds of success, such as by picking the gym I’ll go to, and asking a friend that lives nearby if he wants to go to the gym with me regularly “
(3) “Since this investment decision will never feel urgent, I know I’ll probably by default put off making it for a long time, but since I don’t have time to make the decision thoroughly right now, I should set aside 3 hours on Saturday to do it, which I can block off in my calendar right now.”
(4) “Since I am in control of the decision right now, I should put the cookies into a jar that is out of sight, so that I won’t be tempted over and over again every time I pass the table.”

A second way to think of this:

If you almost always drink more than you want to when you go out with your friend Don, you’ll almost certainly do it next time, too, unless something about you or that situation is significantly different next time around.

More generally, if you almost always do action A1 in situation S1, why would you assume you’ll now instead do a different action A2 in the same situation? The fact that you can “choose” to do A2 instead of A1 is not convincing because last time and the time before that, you could have chosen A2 instead, but you didn’t, you chose A1.

The causes of you doing A1 last time will likely cause you to do A1 again. If you want to do A2 instead of A1, then you should do what you can right now (while you have awareness and control over the next 5 minutes) to change the future situation from S1 to S2, where S2 is a new situation that pushes the balance towards you doing action A2 instead of A1. It could be that the change from S1 to S2 is a change you make in the surrounding environment (e.g., moving the cookies), or it could be a change in yourself (e.g., reminding yourself regularly about why you care about going to the gym), but, whatever it is, it had better be a change. Otherwise, you’re stuck doing A1.

A third way to think of it:

It’s often useful to predict the behaviors of your future self, much like you’d predict the behaviors of other people, adopting the “outside view.”

You have 5 minutes of free will available to you right now, at this moment, if you choose to use it. It’s precious. What will you use it for?

Imagine throwing away a crumpled piece of paper in a waste bin. Now imagine doing it again, but assume this time that you set the goal of throwing it in from 6 feet away. As your tossed paper ball sails through the air, you may feel an edge of nervousness. When it falls into the bin, you may feel a small jolt of excitement. And if it lands short, some disappointment. In the end, it’s just a paper ball, but your goal imbued it with meaning for you.

The bright side of this psychological quirk is that we can hack it to make mundane things fun just by setting challenging goals all the time. Going for a bike ride to somewhere you bike often? Set the goal of noticing five interesting things along the way that you’ve never noticed before. Going to check out some coffee shops with friends? Set the goal of finding which one really truly has the best coffee. Doing some boring data entry? Set the goal of completing the most entries you can in 10 minutes, or finishing before a certain song ends.

Warning: there is a substantial dark side to goal setting.

Many of the video games people get addicted to are like the crack cocaine of goal achievement. In the real world, you don’t get to succeed at a seemingly-important goal every 5 to 30 minutes, but in video games you do, and we humans love it. Even worse, once you’re used to achieving goals so frequently, real-life can feel like garbage by comparison. Be very wary if the goals from your games (when you’re not currently playing) start seeming as important as the goals of real life.

While video games are an example of very rapid goal achievement, some goals can be extremely sticky, motivating us for years or decades to take action after action after action (e.g., people who set the goal of becoming a doctor when they are 15, and who may not end up finishing all their training until 14 years later).

What’s scary about this is that sometimes we are so focused on the goal that we forget why we set the goal in the first place. But, just as we don’t need a good reason to choose to throw a piece of paper in the trash from 6 feet away, and it’s still satisfying if we achieve it, our goals from years ago may not have been set for good reasons. Or maybe the reasons were good ones at the time, but not ones we currently endorse. Yet the goal doesn’t instantly disappear. Goals are independent entities, divorced from the causes that brought them into existence. And working toward a long-standing goal can easily become a default mode. Unless you force yourself to reevaluate the reasons behind it, a goal you’ve had for a long time will probably keep persisting even if it’s reasons no longer make sense to you.

Perhaps even worse, we buy into goals that others set for us, and then let these goals dictate our behavior. Sometimes these goals are broadcast to us by the culture we’re in (e.g. “popular=good”). In other cases, adults are still stuck chasing the goals that their parents gave them as children, even though these goals don’t align with their adult values.
Not having goals can also be a painful existential state. Goals are part of what makes life feel meaningful. So the solution is not to avoid them but to consciously create them.

Goals are powerful, useful, and dangerous. We should set small goals to give life more fun and meaning. In weightier areas, though, we have to set our goals very carefully, and not let others do it for us. We need to reevaluate the causes and value of our goals regularly. Otherwise, we may spend decades chasing goals long after we’ve forgotten their meaning.