My Future Inventory: Values-Based Action Clarification

When the future feels blank or scattered

Many patients arrive knowing something is wrong with how they spend their time, yet cannot articulate what they actually want instead. Asking them verbally to "imagine an ideal life" in the room tends to produce vague, socially acceptable answers, not genuine self-disclosure. The question is abstract, the stakes feel high, and the reflective distance simply is not there.

This is exactly where values-based future projection meets a concrete clinical wall. Tools like the Exploring Values worksheet or the My Values clarification exercise can identify what a patient cares about, but they do not always surface how that patient would actually choose to spend their life if constraints disappeared. The gap between stated values and imagined time allocation is clinically rich territory, and it rarely opens under direct questioning.

What this exercise contains

My Future Inventory is built around a single, precisely worded question. The patient is asked to list the actions they would like to carry out in an ideal world, then to order that list from the action that would occupy the most time to the one that would occupy the least.

The image below is a static preview of that question as it appears in the exercise structure. The full guided exercise, with patient-facing instructions and space to respond, is experienced by the patient autonomously in the app, not in this preview image.

The elegance of the ranking instruction is that it does the clinical work quietly. Simply listing desires is one thing. Being asked to prioritise them by time forces the patient into a concrete, imaginative commitment. The result is not a wishlist but a draft timetable for a meaningful life, and the ordering itself reveals what the patient genuinely values most, beneath the noise of obligation and habit. This makes it a natural companion to exercises like 10-Year Goal Projection or Setting 6 and 12 Month Goals, which can follow once the raw inventory exists.

> This exercise is available to patients through the mobile application that is the dedicated patient-side interface of SessionFuel: you assign it directly from your SessionFuel account, and your patient completes it on their own phone, between your appointments, at their own pace.

How to put it to work between sessions

My Future Inventory suits a wide range of profiles: patients in a vocational crossroads, those experiencing low motivation or anhedonia, patients who engage well with goal-setting and behavior change work, and anyone whose therapy has surfaced a gap between current life and felt meaning. It is also a useful early-phase tool before engaging with more structured work such as Life Goals Across Eight Domains or the Personal Meaning and Direction worksheet.

Introduce it plainly: tell the patient you would like them to imagine a world with no practical constraints, list what they would do, and rank those activities by how much time they would genuinely give each. No censorship, no realism filter.

When the patient returns, the ordering is your primary clinical material. What sits at the top? What is conspicuously absent compared to their current week, auditable with a tool like Current Activity Inventory? Is there tension between what they ranked first and what they feel entitled to want? The list also opens naturally onto committed action work and can feed directly into professional life assessment or work-life balance reflection when the context calls for it.

> Key insight: The ranking instruction transforms a vague aspiration exercise into a concrete self-portrait of priorities, giving the clinician something specific to discuss, challenge, and build on.

Adaptations and articulations

For patients who feel blocked by the "ideal world" framing, a brief normalisation helps: the question is not asking for realism, only for honesty. If the list is very short or stays generic, that itself is clinically informative and worth exploring. For patients already engaged in ACT-informed work, this exercise pairs naturally with the Choice Point model or the Psychological Flexibility worksheet, as it makes values-based direction visible in a concrete, rankable form that patients can revisit across the course of therapy.