How to Reclaim Yesterday, Enjoy Today, & Master Tomorrow

Time is, as Plato put it, the soul of this world. It knows no age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, geographic location, or political persuasion. Even the mightiest king and the most powerless pauper are equally bound by time. In the 2,000-plus years since Plato, the importance of time has only increased. We live longer today, our actions have longer-term consequences for the earth, and there are ever more options to which we can allocate our limited time. More than any other single factor—emotion, intelligence, relationships, stress, traffic, snap judgments and mess—time permeates every facet of our lives.

Despite this centrality of time to our lives, few of us are masters of it, though many of us are ruled by it. We are slaves to Blackberries, alarm clocks, emails, calendars, to do lists, appointments, due dates, and deadlines. Even our vacations and “free” time are painstakingly scheduled. We as a society have unwittingly applied Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management theories to our personal lives. And yet the more tightly that we try to seize time, the more time slips through our fingers, much like sand in an hourglass. Time—and our personal relationship with it—determine who we were, who we are, and who we will become.

As behavioral scientists, we have spent the past 25 years working to fill this void in temporal understanding. We have come to believe that our attitudes toward time are the most powerful influence on how we think, feel, and act – every day of our lives. We’ve studied how people’s attitudes toward and beliefs about the past, present and future affect how they live their lives. For example, human memory is notoriously fallible, and, even if it were accurate, we each extract differing meaning from memories of the past. The horrific acts that cause one holocaust survivor to see the worst in others and in himself can lead another survivor to exude a joy in the simple pleasures of life. Similarly, beliefs about the future—hopes, expectations, and fears—can consume people, whether or not the future events eventually occur. Even though the sky never actually fell, Chicken Little was miserable. For others, the future is a fount of challenging possibilities. More than ever, the time is right to share our accumulated wisdom with the general public, a public that increasingly has less time to do more, a public that is increasingly crucified on the hands of time.

The Time of Your Life will reveal the power that time—and your perception of it—has in your life. It will give you insight into yourself and others by demonstrating that the past and future do not exist in a tangible sense. They only exist as constructions of your mind, and your temporal perceptions have a profound impact on how you live your life. All past experiences can be remembered in both positive and negative ways, and we often don’t recognize our own ability to choose how we perceive the world around us. Recognizing that choices can often be made consciously is an important first step, but the choices themselves remain difficult. Learning how and when our attitudes toward time—our time perspectives—are advantageous may allow us to get the most from life. Similarly, realizing how and when our attitudes toward time are disadvantageous may also allow us to avoid failure and heart ache.