{"id":4995,"date":"2025-05-12T20:31:34","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aomtodayprod.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=4995"},"modified":"2025-07-09T15:45:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T15:45:58","slug":"why-mental-time-travel-at-work-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/why-mental-time-travel-at-work-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Mental Time Travel at Work Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher<\/a><\/p>\r\n

While many self-help gurus advise living in the moment, most people\u2019s thoughts also tend to wander to the past or the future. That has implications for how people interact with each other and work together.<\/p>\r\n

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp<\/a> of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on that topic <\/a><\/em>with Karen Jansen<\/a> of North Carolina State University, said that when people talk about time at work, they\u2019re almost always referring to \u201cobjective time.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

\u201cTime is measured by the clock or the calendar, so when workers think, \u2018What time is a meeting scheduled?\u2019 or \u2018Am I managing my time well?\u2019 or \u2018December feels different than June,\u2019 they\u2019re always referring back to what they think are fixed elements of time\u2014the clock or the calendar,\u201d Shipp said. \u201cBut my research over the years has really been looking at people\u2019s subjective experience and interpretation of time, and when we went into the literature to really explore this more in depth, we found that this is mostly hidden.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cOne of the main elements of subjective time is that people mentally time travel<\/b>,\u201d she said. \u201cThey remember the past and they forecast the future.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cAt any given moment, 50% of your thoughts are spent in another period of time; you aren\u2019t in the present moment\u2014you\u2019re thinking about different periods of time.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Other research that Shipp has done shows that people have characteristic tendencies to mentally stay in one or more periods of time. Some people tend to think about the past more often, while others like to plan and imagine what will happen in the future.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cI’m very future-focused, whereas my husband is very much present- and past-focused,\u201d Shipp said. \u201cIf you think about it from a work perspective, if people are thinking about different things, if their minds are in different places, they can have conflicts, or they can have complementarities.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThat kind of subjectivity has important implications for team composition or, the flip side of it, team conflict,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

A sample of Shipp\u2019s AOM research findings:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n