A Fortuitous Lesson

The group I work within is on the eve of a restructure. Tomorrow we commence the 'Transformation' of the application development group. For me personally this is a significant change. My immediate group is disbanded and I will move onto my next management opportunity.

Some may perceive this to be bad news. It is not, it is in fact a great time to slow down and reflect on successes and lessons learnt over the last year, and this is what I am doing. It is during this time of reflection that I quite fortuitously stumbled across the below TED talk by Philip Zimbardo.

Philip Zimbardo is the professor infamous for the Stanford Prison experiment. Since that time in 1971 he has written numerous books and contributed to documentaries etc. On this particular occasion at TED he provides an interesting perspective on time.



Would you have gotten 1 or 2 marshmallows?

A personal insight for myself is that I am future oriented. This means that I've made a few mistakes when it comes to paying attention to Family, Friends, Fun as well as sacrificing sleep and my general health. Basically a little too focused on work in the last 8 months.

My trick now is to work out how I can use this particular knowledge to avoid making some of the same workaholic mistakes into the future. I am resisting the temptation to buy his book - The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. I should finish reading my current backlog.

I've posted this as I thought others may benefit from Zimbardo's perspective on time.

Cheers

Andrew