This book was full of good content that was lost in the presentation. Even when I first got the book (as a promotional item), I was suspicious of it. The title and the reviews on the back work together to make it sound more self help oriented than science oriented. The content supported this instinct. The opening chapters on the different time perspectives are well written, but the rest of the book contains a bunch of loosely related ways to use time perspectives to improve your life. They would have made for great blog posts, but they only made for an okay book.

That said, unlike a lot of self-help books, this book at least has the advantage of being based on real and interesting science. Zimbardo and Boyd both have backgrounds as researchers who have studied time perspectives. Citations abound, and the authors do a good job of making the research accessible. This could have been a great book, and I was quite disappointed that it turned out to be only an okay book.

Zimbardo and Boyd have found time perspectives can explain a lot about behavior. In some ways, this is just yet another way of slicing and dicing people to understand how they behave (that's a good thing; every new perspective gives insight). However, time perspectives have an advantage over many of the currently popular ways of slicing and dicing: they can be changed. Thus, the authors spend a fair amount of time discussing the different time perspectives and outlining the "ideal" time perspective.

Zimbardo and Boyd have found six major time perspectives. The time perspective of an individual is a mixture of these six types. The time perspectives they present are:

Past positive: strong positive feelings associated with the past. Family and group oriented. Fond of tradition.

Past negative: strong negative feelings associated with the past. May have feelings of guilt, resentment toward the past. Feels trapped by their past.

Present hedonistic: focuses on the present, rather than on the past or the future. Committed to enjoying themselves. May be perceived as irresponsible.

Present fatalistic: believes they cannot escape their present. Subject to depression that is made worse by the feeling that it is inevitable.

Future oriented: focuses on outcomes, consequences, planning and saving. Sacrifices in the present for the future. Subject to stress.

Future transcendental: focuses on the distant, impersonal future whether through religion or a concern for future generations.

Zimbardo and Boyd believe that the ideal time perspective is high on past positive, fairly high and balanced on present hedonistic and future, moderately high on transcendental future, and low on the negative perspectives. They authors spend a fair amount of time going into why this is a good time perspective, but their suggestions are, largely, consistent with common sense. Overall, I found this book a useful read, although I could have got by with skipping the second half of the book. ( )

Ik haat zelfhulp-boeken. Hoe is het dan toch mogelijk dat ik me heb laten verleiden tot de lectuur van dit boek? Al van bij de inleiding had ik zin om het dicht te slaan, zeker na het lezen van deze zin: “We will first help you to identify your personal time perspectives and then we will offer exercises designed to expand your time orientation and to help you make the most of your precious time.” Jekkes. Hoe is het mogelijk dat iemand zo naïef kan zijn en denken dat je je leven kan veranderen door gewoon anders om te gaan met je tijdperspectief?
En toch ben ik blijven doorlezen, al moet ik toegeven dat het naar het einde toe, in het echt therapeutische gedeelte, heel diagonaal was. Want er zit toch ook iets intrigerend aan de benadering van Zimbardo en Boyd en hun analyse van tijdperspectieven. Zie daarvoor mijn review in mijn Sense-of-History-account op Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2310588479 ( )

questo libro mi ha dato spunti di riflessioni interessanti....a volte prende la piega di self help, ma è stata una lettura in generale interessante ( )

Each one of us has a different relationship to the present, past and future. We may be classified as predominantly: present, past or future oriented. Then this orientation may be fatalistic or positive. Most of us are mixtures of the above, but we all seem to have a dominant tendency. For the record, futures are the healthiest, presents most inclined to be late or to take drugs, and pasts (fatalistic) to be stuck in life and depressed.

The new Zimbardo-Boyd book is a crossover of a popular science book and a self help manual. It discusses what a healthy balance is, offers inventories to check what orientation the reader predominantly has and then strategies to change unhealthy tendencies.

Even though this book was far from the promise of changing my life, there were some things that I enjoyed there: Time inventories were fun. False memories were revisited- there is a lot of research pointing to the fact that memories can be both implanted (with apparently little effort) and recovered. The caveat with those is that both true and false memories can be recovered. An analysis of a suicide bomber was quite interesting as well, even though it was obvious enough, just clad in a different lingo. ( )

The authors show how the mental representation of time can have a large impact on individual behaviour and well-being.

I think they focus a little bit too hard, though, when they attribute problems as disparate as the third world poverty, intramarital sex problems, and suicide bombings to the mental representation of time for the actors involved. ( )