Like all good time management courses, we're going to start this one with a picture of an animal. She knows sort of animal. This one is. Yes, it's a sloth. And the reason I've given you a picture of a sloth is because a sloth is emblematic of a type of attitude to time management, that kind of maybe I'll just think about it. Hmm, perhaps it's not worth it, a kind of slothful attitude.

In fact, as far as I know, there is only one animal, that shame that shares a name with one of the seven deadly sins, and it's the sloth and whilst sloths aren't lazy They just move slowly because their nutrition is very poor. They do stand in my mind, for one extreme of attitude to time. Let's have a look at another animal. Do you recognize this one? Yes, it's a mayfly. And whilst there are many, many species of mayfly, all with slightly different characteristics, what most people know about a mayfly, and what is true for some species is that they only live for a day.

Imagine that imagine only living for a day, everything that you want to do everything that you want to achieve in your life. You want a good education. You want to get a good job, you want some great holidays, you want to visit Vietnam, or South America or Canada or Europe. You want a high level, higher education from a great university. What a fantastic job. You want a career to be proud of you want to bring up children, you want to write a great novel.

You want to have a fantastic Ghana, wonderful home, all of those things. You've got to do them in 24 hours. Because at the end of that 24 hours, you're dead. So for me, a mayflies emblematic of a nother kind of attitude to time that busy busy rush rush got to do as much as I can attitude to time. So I suppose my question to you is this. Are you a sloth?

Or are you a mayfly? And you'll find in the materials that go with this lecture, is a simple quiz. Now, this simple quiz is not scientific. It just gives you an indication of where you are on the slow mayfly scale. But it does have a serious point to it. And that point, links back to the research of a psychology is called Dr. Philip Zimbardo and Philip Zimbardo has been researching people's attitudes to time our time orientations.

And they're wonderfully described in a fantastic book called The time paradox, which I can heartily recommend. Now in the time paradox, Zimbardo talks about different attitudes to time. And the first attitude that he talks about is a past orientation and people who are oriented to the past always looking back. Now it's important to note that we're not uniquely past oriented or indeed uniquely future oriented, which we'll talk about in a bit. We have a mixture, but people who are dominantly, past oriented, past time oriented, can be oriented in a negative way towards the past, they're looking back are always at their failures, what they fail to do for them best failures are constant in their lives. And so it's very hard for them to motivate themselves to do things.

Because what they always see is the risk of failing yet again, what's the point? On the other hand, people with a positive past time orientation, or looking back at that rosy, wonderful past time, things were so much better in the good old days. So much better that what's the point of doing anything now, because nothing will ever be quite as good. So, people with a strong past time orientation are a bit like are slow. They don't want to do too much for whichever reason. On the other hand, there are people who have a strong future time orientation, they're always looking to the future.

They're busy, busy, rush rush. Gotta get things done in business. For the future, they are hugely productive. And consequently, the people with the strongest future time orientations often exhibit the greatest measures of external success. They rise through hierarchies. They have good jobs, they earn good money.

They live good lives. They have the material trappings of wealth, and status. they brush their teeth and they floss regularly because they know they're going to need their teeth through a long life. The problem that people have with a strong future time orientation is they're always investing. They're never reaping the rewards of their investments. That's a drill for people with a strong present time orientation.

Now we know that some people with a strong present time orientation that are always focused on the now and they're busy doing things and enjoying things and never investing for the future. They're always late for things. They are hedonistic in their seeking after enjoyment and pleasure. They're rarely productive. But there's another present time orientation. And we know people who are able to savor the moment, whatever it is they're not constantly seeking after pleasure.

They're taking their pleasures from where they can find them. What's the secret Zimbardo his conclusion, which I share? reading his research is that balance is the secret. A good healthy dose of positive past time orientation leaves you feeling rooted, having memories to look back on fondly lessons to learn to bring with you. A good healthy dose of future time orientation is valuable too. That means that you work for the future and you can invest your time well.

You're productive and contribute to society, but also a good healthy dose of present time orientation, which means that you can enjoy the fruits of your work, you can take time off and save your experiences. And you can invest some of what you've earned in pleasure for yourself, your family, and your friends. We all have a balance of past, present and future time orientations. To be successful in managing our time, we have to understand our natural attitudes to time and to start to shift them and to see what balance is going to bring us the most fulfillment. Too much future and you'll get success but no fulfillment. Too much present, and you'll get happiness, but not much material reward too much past and you may well be rooted and grounded which don't do very Much not enough past and you don't know where you've come from.

Time orientations are a great way to start thinking about how you use your time as a result of how you think about your time. But there's a nother very special version of present time orientation. And we'll look at that in the next video.