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Time Perspective Inventory

Assessing your orientation toward time
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How do you perceive and interact with time?

The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) is used to assess your orientation towards time. This inventory explores how you view and relate to the past, present, and future.

The ZTPI explores five different time perspectives:

  • Past-Negative: How much you focus on negative past experiences
  • Present-Hedonistic: How much you seek present pleasures with little concern for future consequences
  • Future: How much you plan for and strive to meet future goals
  • Past-Positive: How much you reflect nostalgically and positively on your past
  • Present-Fatalistic: How much you feel powerless about the future and resigned to fate

Note: This survey is not a diagnostic tool. It is designed to help understand your personal time perspective, which can influence decision-making, goal-setting, and overall well-being.

Instructions: Please read each statement carefully and indicate how characteristic or true it is of you. There are no right or wrong answers, so please be as honest as possible in your responses.

How characteristic or true is this of you?

It gives me pleasure to think about my past.*
I find myself getting swept up in the excitement of the moment.*
It is more important for me to enjoy life’s journey than to focus only on the destination.*
I do things impulsively.*
It upsets me to be late for appointments.*
I feel that it’s more important to enjoy what you’re doing than to get work done on time.*
I am able to resist temptations when I know that there is work to be done.*
I take each day as it is rather than try to plan it out.*
Fate determines much in my life.*
I often follow my heart more than my head.*
I believe that a person’s day should be planned ahead each morning.*
Even when I am enjoying the present, I am drawn back to comparisons with similar past experiences.*
I believe that getting together with one’s friends to party is one of life’s important pleasures.*
Since whatever will be will be, it doesn’t really matter what I do.*
Before making a decision, I weigh the costs against the benefits.*
I make decisions on the spur of the moment.*
When I want to achieve something, I set goals and consider specific means for reaching those goals.*
I take risks to put excitement in my life.*
I keep working at difficult, uninteresting tasks if they will help me get ahead.*
Often luck pays off better than hard work.*
You can’t really plan for the future because things change so much.*
Life today is too complicated; I would prefer the simpler life of the past.*
Things rarely work out as I expected.*
I prefer friends who are spontaneous rather than predictable.*
Familiar childhood sights, sounds, and smells often bring back a flood of wonderful memories.*
I meet my obligations to friends and authorities on time.*
I think about the good things that I have missed out on in my life.*
It doesn’t make sense to worry about the future, since there is nothing that I can do about it anyway.*
I’ve made mistakes in the past that I wish I could undo.*
Taking risks keeps my life from becoming boring.*
Life today is too complicated; I would prefer the simpler life of the past.*
I’ve taken my share of abuse and rejection in the past.*
Spending what I earn on pleasures today is better than saving for tomorrow’s security.*
I try to live my life as fully as possible, one day at a time.*
If things don’t get done on time, I don’t worry about it.*
I get nostalgic about my childhood.*
It’s hard for me to forget unpleasant images of my youth.*
I enjoy stories about how things used to be in the “good old times.”*
Ideally, I would live each day as if it were my last.*
The past has too many unpleasant memories that I prefer not to think about.*
I make lists of things to do.*
Happy memories of good times spring readily to mind.*
It is important to put excitement in my life.*
I like family rituals and traditions that are regularly repeated.*
On balance, there is much more good to recall than bad in my past.*
It takes joy out of the process and flow of my activities, if I have to think about goals, outcomes, and products.*
When listening to my favorite music, I often lose all track of time.*
I often think of what I should have done differently in my life.*
I complete projects on time by making steady progress.*
I like my close relationships to be passionate.*
There will always be time to catch up on my work.*
My life path is controlled by forces I cannot influence.*
My decisions are mostly influenced by people and things around me.*
Painful past experiences keep being replayed in my mind.*
Meeting tomorrow’s deadlines and doing other necessary work comes before tonight’s play.*
I find myself tuning out when family members talk about the way things used to be.*
Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Putting time in perspective: A valid, reliable individual-differences metric. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1271–1288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1271

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