Future-Oriented Perspective: You Organize Your Present Around Your Goals

What you do today looks ahead

Almost nothing you do today lacks a reason that points further down the road.

The future-oriented perspective describes people whose present is organized around goals, consequences and medium- to long-term plans.

Zimbardo and Boyd’s framework

Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd (1999) proposed that each person divides their psychological attention among past, present and future in a fairly stable way, and that this split shapes their decisions. To measure it, they created the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI), a 56-item instrument with five factors:

• Past-negative: memories centered on what went wrong.
• Past-positive: a warm, nostalgic view of what you’ve lived through.
• Present-hedonistic: seeking immediate pleasure and stimulation.
• Present-fatalistic: a sense that what happens doesn’t depend on you.
• Future: an orientation toward goals, planning and consequences.

The quiz on this site takes four of those orientations in a short version. The future factor is the one behind this profile, and its statements capture it well: planning ahead, giving something up now if it brings you closer to a goal, thinking about where you want to be in a few years.

What research says about looking ahead

Future orientation is probably the best-studied time dimension. A meta-analysis of 212 studies (Kooij, Kanfer, Betts and Rudolph, 2018) linked it to five types of outcome:

• Achievement, academic and professional.
• Well-being.
• Health behaviors, such as exercise or prevention.
• Fewer risk behaviors.
• Retirement planning.

The most interesting finding is that future time perspective predicted those outcomes over and above the Big Five personality traits, and partly explained how traits such as conscientiousness exert their influence. Looking ahead isn’t just being an organized person: it adds something of its own.

How it shows up day to day

• You often think about where you want to be in several years, not just about the next step.
• You save time, money or effort with the future in mind, even if it means giving something up now.
• You weigh the consequences of your decisions beyond the short term, almost automatically.
• You organize your present around concrete goals, more than around how you feel in the moment.

An example: a future-oriented person gets a year-end bonus in December. Before thinking about a treat, they’ve already set aside part of it for the language course they want to take in the spring, because it fits the job they’re aiming for in two years.

The cost of a future that takes up everything

Zimbardo and Boyd don’t present any single orientation as ideal on its own. Ilona Boniwell and Zimbardo (2004) describe the profile most associated with well-being as a balanced time perspective: high past-positive, moderately high present-hedonistic and future, and low scores on past-negative and present-fatalistic. A study with four samples and 1,739 people (Zhang, Howell and Stolarski, 2013) confirmed that the closer someone comes to that profile, the higher their life satisfaction and positive affect.

With a very strong future orientation, the risk is that the present loses value of its own: every decision is judged by its later usefulness, and little room is left for rest, improvisation or relationships that don’t “serve” any purpose. Telling apart planning, which drives progress, from controlling, which creates anxiety when things don’t go exactly as expected, separates the strength from the excess. The outlook of someone with a present-focused perspective is a reminder that not everything needs to be justified by what comes next.

Creating the future twice

Stephen Covey, in his popular book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), devotes the second habit, “Begin with the end in mind,” to an idea that describes this profile well: all things are created twice, first in the mind and then in reality. A project, a career or a stage of life exists first as a reference image for present-day decisions.

Covey himself insists that this image is reviewed and updated. That’s the difference between a flexible future orientation and a rigid one.

This result describes a self-reported tendency, not a diagnosis. Want to see how your time perspective is split between past, present and future? Take the quiz on your relationship with time.

Sources

• Zimbardo, P. G., and Boyd, J. N. (1999). Putting time in perspective: A valid, reliable individual-differences metric. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1271-1288.
• Kooij, D. T. A. M., Kanfer, R., Betts, M., and Rudolph, C. W. (2018). Future time perspective: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(8), 867-893. doi:10.1037/apl0000306
• Boniwell, I., and Zimbardo, P. G. (2004). Balancing time perspective in pursuit of optimal functioning. In P. A. Linley and S. Joseph (Eds.), Positive Psychology in Practice (pp. 165-178). Wiley.
• Zhang, J. W., Howell, R. T., and Stolarski, M. (2013). Comparing three methods to measure a balanced time perspective: The relationship between a balanced time perspective and subjective well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(1), 169-184. doi:10.1007/s10902-012-9322-x
• Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.