People’s views on time affect health, wealth, relationships

Our attitudes toward time shape every part of our lives, and yet few recognize how this subtle fact can sabotage careers or vault them skyward, wreck marriages and make people happy (or not), suggests a book in stores today.

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (Free Press, $27) by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, research manager at Google, is not a time-management book.

In fact, the one-size-fits-all approach of self-help books often fails because it ignores different time perspectives that really drive how people live, Zimbardo says.

After surveying more than 10,000 adults over the past 30 years, he and Boyd have identified six ways in which people view time. Nobody has only one way of viewing time, but how high or low you rank in each category is linked to your odds of being happy, mentally healthy or successful, he says. …