Living day by day does not preclude planning for the future. I'm in AA, sober slightly over 6 months and have found that the idea of "just for today" to be incredibly powerful. The idea is that you don't let yourself ruminate on things that happened in the past because you can't change them, and you don't obsess about the future and what could go wrong, because you can always deal with the future when it arrives. All you have to focus on is dealing with one day - today, and if today is a crappy day, that's ok, because tomorrow is going to be another day and it might be better, but all you have to do is get through today, in my case without picking up a drink. That's a lot easier to think about than not picking up a drink for forever. In a lot of ways its' like mindfullness meditation which is about living and appreciating fully each experience in the now.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't have goals and plans for the future though, but I look at is a question of what can I realistically do about it today. For example I was unemployed for 15 months due to mental health problems and my addiction and for the first 12 months I didn't think about working at all because I knew I needed to get healthy first. Then when I did start job hunting, I broke it down into activities I could handle. Today I'm going to redo my resume. Today I'm going to go for interview coaching. Today I'm going to check these job boards and apply to X number of jobs and then once I've finished with today's tasks I tried not to worry about finding a job. It didn't work 100% of the time, but it did make life easier.

Good luck.

--splitimage