Posted August 25, 2009
Whether you've given it a thought or not, the way you perceive time can influence your happiness today and all your tomorrows. Does that sound too soft or New-Agey? I think that's because we're being asked to peer deeply into areas of consciousness that we usually take for granted. But by not exploring deeply, you risk carrying on family "traditions" that could inhibit your full potential.
A pair of psychologists, John Boyd and Philip Zimbardo (he of the famous Stanford prisoner experiment that showed what vile behaviors people are capable of under certain conditions), developed the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. You can find it online, along with information about their current book The Time Paradox, which contains various inventories and checklists. Where you fall on the line between living within a past, present, or future time perspective (including positive and negative sub-categories) explains a lot about who you are and how much you accomplish in your life, as well as how you feel about where you've been and where you're headed.
All multiple-choice questions are suspect, of course. At least I suspect them. Many of the ones in the time inventory are thought-provoking, and some are as hard to answer as you'd expect. Here's one sample:
It is important to put excitement in my life. (A yes gives you credit toward a Present-hedonistic time perspective. I responded no because, these days, excitement in my life tends to be entwined with negative change and anxiety. Except mental excitement from reading a terrific novel. So just give me peace and time to do my work, please. OK, so I'm not a hedonist. Check.)
THE BEST ROAD?
An optimally balanced time perspective is the route to the most effective life, Zimbardo and Boyd theorize. Here, in a neat set of bullet points, is what their research (Western-biased, they admit) has shown to be optimal:
There's also a still fairly rudimentary international site for scientists and practitioners that's devoted to all aspects of the study of time psychology.
PSYCHOLOGY VS. GEOGRAPHY ?
This psychology of time business reminded me of a book I read about a dozen years ago, A Geography of Time (Basic Books, 1997), by psychologist Robert Levine (and which Zimbardo blurbed]. Offering a different and quite broad perspective, the book's subtitle is descriptive: The temporal misadventures of a social psychologist, or how every culture keeps time just a little bit differently." Accordingly, what Levine calls "R-mode," or right-brain thinking, is also typically time-free thinking. Aha! Flow strikes again.
Levine enriches the multicultural perspective when he asserts that "some cultural groups tend to engage in the R-mode of thought more than others." He sites the Balinese, who talk about clock time as "rubber time." Levine concludes, specifically of the experience of time pressure, "It is in the middle ground between two much and too little pressure that people enter the experience. called flow."
That's why, for creative flow seekers, taking some time to think about how you think about time is very likely a worthwhile investment.
