Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

ISSN: 1061-0405 (Print) 1558-0415 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo20

The Personal Organization of a Life Span

K. A. Abul'khanova-Slavskaia

To cite this article: K. A. Abul'khanova-Slavskaia (1993) The Personal Organization of a Life

Span, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 31:4, 78-102

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405310478

Published online: 08 Dec 2014.

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K.A. AEW'KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

The Personal Organization

of a Life Span

Within the mainstream of the ideas of Soviet psychologist S.L.

Rubinshtein [1,2],representatives of his school have continued to
develop the concept of the nature of the mind as a specifically
determined process and have begun to study the nature of the
personal and mental organization of time. This investigation,
which began in the seventies, some of whose results are summa-
rized here, aimed to determine the dynamic-temporal characteris-
tics of mental processes, states, etc., taking into account classic
studies on the perception of time [3,4], how it is experienced
subjectively and how it is reflected, in the broad sense of that
term [5,6]. This investigation was based on a concept of the
personality that saw it as a dynamic, developing, and changing
system and, moreover, viewed the life span of the individual
person as a totally specific process. Theoretical and empirical stud-
ies have produced a key concept that may now be regarded as the
specific hallmark of this line of research, one that makes it possible
to incorporate a great many diverse aspects of the study of time in
psychology: the concept of personal organization of time.
In contrast to many approaches that have stressed the subjec-
tivity of psychological time [7-91, the concept of the personal
organization of time presupposes objective organization of time
by the individual, this taking place either in activity (also a spe-
cific temporal structure) or in life as a whole. In this regard it fits
in with a number of other studies [lo-131. This broad context for
situating the problem of the personal organization of time (en-
78
 ORGANIZATION OF A LIFE SPAN 79

compassing the temporal characteristics of the mind, of the per-

sonality itself, arid of a life span and its temporal structures) and
the progressive nature of theoretical-empirical research enable us
now (1)to prove the thesis, long disputed by physicists and other
representatives of the exact sciences, that human time in general
has a specificity that distinguishes it from the time of physical
processes [1,5,11,14-161; (2) to develop an objective approach to
study of this time,; and (3) to consider the possibility of differenti-
ating the diverse levels and mechanisms of the organization of
time at the various levels of the mind [17-211 and to construe the
individual person as a subject who organizes the time of his own
life and his own activity in a specific and unique way. The cate-
gory of personal time is elucidated through the concept of active-
ness: i.e., a person’s practical organization of his life span, his
use of time, its proliferation, its acceleration, the periodization of
life, etc. Thus, objective and subjective human time are linked in
a definite way, whereas in other approaches and studies they are
dealt with as separate from each other.
On the whole, psychological time may be represented as a
specific continuum that becomes steadily more constricted to-
ward one pole of time (because natural processes, i.e., nervous
processes, memory, life itself, are limited), while toward the
other pole it expands. This expansion is related to how, specific-
ally, the person potentiates and proliferates his time (as a result
of the development of the personality), and to its optimal use,
acceleration, and timeliness. The irreversibility of time is re-
flected in its own specific structure in humans-past, present,
and future; and it has its own unique form of compensation:
memory as the ideal way of preserving the past. The personality
may also be represented as a special kind of memory of a life
span since past experience is stored in it, special life capacities
are developed, and relevant modes of life (taking place in the
here-and-now) crystallize into certain metatemporal forms of
personal capacities.
Another type of compensation for the irreversibility of time is
the capacity for prognostication, for anticipating the future, i.e.,
80 K. A. ABUL’KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

representation of the future in ideal form. The personality repre-

sents a structure of a higher rank than memory and prognostica-
tion since it possesses the capability of consciousness, especially
the ability to integrate past, present, and future. V.I. Kovalev
proposed as part of our model the term transpective, which he
construes as a temporal structure inherent in consciousness and
consisting of the ability to unite the prospective (future) and ret-
rospective (past) in the present. The transpective is a concretiza-
tion of Rubinshtein’s notion of consciousness as a process [22].
According to Rubinshtein, consciousness represents to the indi-
vidual in present time everything that has taken place in any
other time and space (in another culture, in history, etc.). In other
words, consciousness is a higher human capacity that not only
surmounts and compensates for the irreversibility of time but also
unites social and individual time, thus transcending the limited-
ness of the individual life span. Consciousness, figuratively
speaking, signals the tendency of the individual toward
atemporality, eternity (although, in truth, the question is merely
that of a transition to another time scale, the scale of history and
culture) [14,23,24].
If one can in this way theoretically compare these three capac-
ities of the human mind-memory, prognostication, and con-
sciousness (quite provisionally separating them from each other,
inasmuch as memory and prognostication are, strictly speaking,
specific functional organs of consciousness)-then one can arrive
at a certain rough notion of temporal “functions” of the personal-
ity as a special temporal organization. When the personality is
regarded at the existential level of existence, it is not a point in
present time, but an epicenter that relates (as needed) the data of
the past, present, and future, correlating and organizing them in a
definite manner. The personality itself is, at the same time, corre-
lated at the existential level with other persons, and is a part of
special temporal-spatial continua of activity. At this point its
ability to reflect objective time, in which activity, communica-
tion, and life itself all take place, and its ability to coordinate
its-let us call it “epicentric” rather than subjective-time swing
 ORGANIZATION OF A LIFE SPAN 81

into action. The personality serves as the coordinator of different

times. But if we also add that the number of such times is very
great, since the velocity, pace, and rhythm of neural, physical,
and mental processes, their rate of development, and their hetero-
geneity (anticipation, lag in the rates of development of different
cognitive, communicative, etc., processes) come into play, the
task of this coordination becomes extremely complicated.
On the one hand, the personality serves as the epicenter of the
past, present, and future, i.e., it has the property of relating these
times to itself and of constructing specific compositions from
them. On the other hand, physical, biological, and mental pro-
cesses have no epicentric, but orthogonal time [25], which is
independent of the personality, i.e., it is an objective given, even
“pre-given,” with which the personality must reckon no less than
with the time of activity, communication, etc., objectively per-
taining to it. The many discrepancies among these different
clocks, proceeding at different speeds, at different paces,
rhythms, and amplitudes, must be coordinated by the personality
to get into step with objective time, so to speak, especially with
the time of activity as the basic form and mode of the
personality’s social life. This personal capacity or function is
what we call timeliness, which in its particular form acts as sensi-
tivity, i.e., optimal coincidence of the stages of development with
the conditions of development. Timeliness is the capacity of the
personality to resolve the contradictions among biological, men-
tal, personal, and social (individual and public) times, among
different temporal existences, and among modes of existence
with different temporal characteristics.
The strategies by which the personality resolves these contra-
dictions are quite diverse; hence, timeliness is a capacity that
individually differentiates people from each other. One of the
factors in this capacity is acceleration-willful and nonwillful
regulation of tht: speeds of different processes: a person is capa-
ble, within certain limits, of accelerating his movements, actions,
intellectual processes, etc. However, it must also be pointed out
that there are certain objective limitations on this capacity. An-
82 K. A. ABUL‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

other factor in this capacity is development, in the broad sense of

the term, and in a more special sense, the potentiation, of time.
Development is a proliferation or a potentiation, the creation of
reserve time. Any form of development, for example, intellectual
development, is an acceleration of the general pace of intellectual
progress, on the one hand, and optimal use of emerging intellec-
tual reserves on the other. The capacity to coordinate objective
time (social time) and to “have time” [to do something] is
achieved by dint of the existence in the person of reserves for
choice, since any development is a spectrum of possibilities, of
accumulated mental time. Any capacity has this time potential,
which enables a person to be timely, on time, or even ahead of
time.
A third factor in this capacity may be called “actualization.”
The concept of actualization is close to Ukhtomskii’s concept of
the dominant. However, in studying actualization as a form of
reproduction of the past in the present (in terms of the tasks of ac-
tualizing knowledge to resolve current intellectual tasks), we have
established that actualization is a selective procedure for recon-
structing not the whole mass of the past, but rather fragments of it
as they are relevant to the needs of the present. Actualizdon re-
shufflesthe past, as has been discovered in an experiment with the
actualization of knowledge.
Empirical studies carried out within the context of this para-
digm were first aimed at uncovering certain temporal structures
of personality as a temporal formation. The first theoretical result
was the typological nature of these structures discovered by V.I.
Kovalev [22]. The principal discovery was the existence of a
factor characterized by either the prolonged or the situational
nature of people’s activeness, in terms of which people may be
differentiated from one another. In other words, the concept of
the activeness of the personality was used as the basis for con-
structing a typology; this activeness, studies showed, had differ-
ent temporal characteristics and different temporal activities. At
the same time, activeness was differentiated in terms of the factor
active-passive, which in its several combinations formed four
 ORGAhXL4TION OF A LIFE SPAN 83

types: active-situational, passive-situational, passive-prolonged,

and active-prolonged. Since V.I. Kovalev used an open-ended
interview in an attempt to uncover completely the phenomenol-
ogy of the organization of time, we later tested his typology
under more rigorous empirical conditions, using B.V. Zeigarnik’s
method of incomplete action, S.L. Rubinshtein’s time test, and
Dembo’s self-assessment test, modified for self-evaluation on a
time basis [2].
Since lack of space prevents us from presenting the entire
course of this experiment, let us briefly summarize it by noting
that artificial interruption of an action (at f i i t intellectual, then
practical) clearly revealed the extent to which some subjects
“sustained” and continued an action over a prolonged period (or
maintained total readiness to continue it for any amount of time)
whereas others “ended” it in accordance with their situational
orientation, submitting to external termination of the situation
that provided the context of the action. An orientation toward
prolongation or a situational orientation depended, in turn,on the
extent to which an action was immanent to the individual’s own
personality, i.et, to what extent the person performed the act ac-
tively, self-sufficiently, and with initiative. However, because
there are four, not two, types, passive-situational and active-pro-
longed are essential, i.e., there is a passive way to “sustain” and
prolong an action, and activeness may also be situational. The
passive-prolonging type, a kind of contemplative person who
sees the complexity of the world but is incapable of resolving
that complexity through his own efforts, has been described to
some extent by Carl Jung.
Since Kovalev’s task was to examine the personality within
the context of life, his typology was described as follows:
1. The spontaneous-everyday type, characterized by depen-
dence of the individual personality on the events and circum-
stances of life. The person never has enough time: he cannot
organize a sequence of events, he cannot anticipate when they
will occur and prevent their being realized. This manner of or-
ganizing life is distinguished by a situational orientation of be-
84 K . A. ABUL'KHMOVA-SLAVSKAIA

havior and an absence of personal initiative.

2. The functional-efficacious type, in which the person ac-
tively organizes the course of events, directs them, and enters
into them at the right time, thus achieving effectiveness. Initia-
tive has a role only at certain periods in the course of events, and
does not include their subjective or objective consequences.
There is no prolonged regulation of life.
3. The contemplative type, manifested in passivity and an in-
ability to organize time practically. Prolonging tendencies are
revealed in spiritual, intellectual, and creative life.
4. The creative-transformationaltype, which characteristically
prolongs the organization of time in connection with life's mean-
ing and with trends in society.
This typology was a starting point for further study, especially
because it implicitly contained certain unresolved contradictions
in addition to the explicit orientations it prescribed. From the
vantage point of many years of experience in endeavoring to
interpret these contradictions, we may state the following: The
study of time in psychology has revealed a contradiction in psy-
chological knowledge and in the science of psychology in gen-
eral between a normative-humanistic and an objective-scientistic
characterization of the mind and personality and methods of in-
vestigating them [26-281. The problem has arisen of how to
study objectively (i.e., how also to measure) the structures in
which time is organized if time becomes a value of the personal-
ity-if it is sufficient for motivation to put in its appearance and
all rhythms and speeds vary of themselves, if, so to speak, the
subjective experience of the present wrests that experience from
the flow of time, surrendering it to eternity, etc. In other words,
that aspect of the personality and the mind that is normative, i.e.,
value bound, and that aspect that is bound to objective time have
been portrayed either as mutually destructive of one another or as
orthogonal, never intersecting and irreducible to a single system
of coordinates.
Another contradiction (or problem) has been that, without lon-
gitudinal studies, it would be quite arbitrary to judge how the
 ORGANIZATION OF A U F E SPAN 85

individual person regulates and organizes his life span solely on

the basis of those characteristics of his activeness that exist in the
present moment and can be determined by reflection. Hence,
three model investigations were chosen that would make it possi-
ble to fill the complex gaps represented by the passage from the
structure of the personality to how a person organized his life.
The fist study, done by L.Iu. Kublitskene, aimed to investi-
gate the relationship between the temporal structures of the per-
sonality and how a person organized activity [29]. The second
was designed to ascertain individual peculiarities in how a person
planned time (including the planning of activity and of life). The
third attempted to ascertain how an individual personally brought
past, present, and future together in an interrelated whole-this
was studied in terms of the degree to which this was done satis-
factorily or unsatisfactorily.
In defining the tasks of the fist investigation, we took into
account that most psychological studies were aimed at ascertain-
ing the characteristics of subjective time, especially at the level
of the personality, and hence would make a maximum effort to
overcome the contrasting of subjective time to objective time,
and to determine how they were interrelated. The concentration
on objective aspects was achieved primarily through the way the
main task was formulated: i.e., how a person organized the time
in which activity took place, which was presumed to be objec-
tively determined time.
However, many problems were encountered in trying to ac-
complish this task experimentally. First, what objectively mea-
surable activity could be chosen as a model for study if any
professional activity was bound to its specific forms, consisted of
very specific tasks and events and, most importantly, pre-
supposed its awn “past” and history, imprinted in its own logic
and in the “logic” of its subject (its professionalism, motivation,
etc.)? How could a fragment of such activity be extracted from
this logic and history, and how could the experimental subjects’
motivation, professionalism, and attitude toward this activity be
equalized? Second, how could the average, i.e., the normative,
86 K. A. ABUL ‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

time for this activity be calculated? How could its architectonics

be modeled if any activity that was to any degree complex-its
stages, composition, sequence of events, and tasks-was com-
pletely different? Third, how could the motivation of the subjects
be equalized; and was it, in principle, even possible to do so,
since the acceleration that motivation gives to any activity is
theoretically obvious? Could one, in principle, calculate an aver-
age speed in order thereafter to take into account the motivational
“correction,” the efficiency? Finally, how could one eliminate the
factor of chance deriving from the fact that every situation of
activity is local, i.e., circumscribed, relative to what a person
usually does? This dilemma, which is traditional for any psycho-
logical investigation, was especially complicated in this case: To
what extent was the present measure typical for a particular per-
son, and how many measures were sufficient to ascertain what
method he had evolved for his activity?
In resolving (quite relatively) some of these difficulties, we
first declared that we were studying how an activity was organ-
ized objectively, and so turned our attention to the data provided
by reflection, after abandoning the idea of modeling fragments of
activity in real space and time. By looking at the subject’s own
account of how he usually operated, we obtained a relative guar-
antee that we would be discovering a mode of action that was not
just a chance approach, but was stable and, moreover, character-
istic of the particular person. But to be sure that this reflection
was reliable and not a matter of chance, we employed a few
“intensifiers.” We obtained reports from a sample of graduate
students who were at a special period in the overall structure of
their lives, a time in which the final date for completion of their
work was preset, although its stages were quite vaguely defined
and depended on how the subject himself defined them. The
accounts were obtained in a presession period when the time
factor and the shortage of time were felt especially keenly. Fi-
nally, to preclude (as far as possible) the substitution of a desired
state of affairs for the actual state, we posed the following ques-
tions: How do you always operate? How do you usually operate?
 ORGANIz4TION OF A WFE SPAN 87

How should one operate in the ideal case? We then calculated the
pertinent coefficient of “reliability.”
Our solution to the dilemma, i.e., not proposing a real frag-
ment of activity to the subject as stimulus material, helped to
enhance the level of objectivity of the study. There have been a
number of interesting attempts to determine the time characteris-
tics and functions of the mind and of consciousness by means of
defining tasks for them to solve.
We attempted to follow this path.
We discovered that no detailed psychological professional pro-
files existed in Soviet studies in engineering psychology and in
the psychology of labor; moreover, the time requirements an
activity places on a person even in such professions as pilot,
driver of various forms of transport, operators, etc., have not
been determined, despite the fact that these professions are
clearly dependent on time and speed and are affected by a short-
age of time [lo].
We made a theoretical analysis of different professions and
found that time parameters were typical for a number of them
despite outward differences, and that a number had almost
unique time structures. We modeled some of the temporal con-
ditions (of course, not exhaustively) or time problems these
types of activity placed upon the individual. We distinguished
five conditions as follows:
(1) an optimal period of time given to a person for a specific
activity;
(2) an indefinite period of time, which the person himself
must determine: both the general amount of time necessary for
the given activity and the deadline for its completion;
(3) a time limit that requires the person to work quite strenu-
ously to accomplish the task;
(4) an excess of time, more time being deliberately given than
is necessary;
( 5 ) a shortage of time, the time allotted being clearly insuffi-
cient.
These temporal tasks or conditions were presented to the sub-
88 K, A. ABUL‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

jects, who were asked to reflect on how they would ordinarily act
in these situations.
At the same time, pursuant to our theoretical hypothesis, we
studied other components of the time structure of the personality.
We assumed that this structure included ( I ) awareness of time;
(2) subjective experience of time, and (3) its actual organization.
The last component, (3), was studied by the abovedescribed
method, and ( I ) and (2) were each studied by different methods.
A person’s awareness of time was studied by means of an open-
ended interview, and subjective experience of time was studied
using the similar but somewhat diverse procedures of R.N.
Knapp & J.T. Gurbutt [30] and of E.A. Golovakh & A.A. Kronik
[31]. In the Knapp & Gurbutt method, the subjective experience
of the extension of time was studied as continual or discrete; the
emotionality of its perception, as pleasant or unpleasant; and the
subjective experience of time, as tense or relaxed [30].
Let us begin our presentation of the results with a brief de-
scription of our findings on awareness of time. First, we can say
that some of the subjects became aware of time abstractly, almost
philosophically, and others, only in relation to the tasks involved
in the activity, i.e., very concretely; some became aware of time
as time of life and death; others, as something in short supply, as
not enough time, etc. Subjects would become aware of time in
different categories, in different measures, as relative or nonrela-
tive to the person, etc. These findings in turn provided us with a
kind of coefficient of reliability of the subject’s responses in
reflecting on the organization of his activity. The findings on aware-
ness of time were such as to allow us to devise a general typology
of the subjects. This typology was constructed on the basis of the
latter two components, the subjective experience and the practical
organization of time, the first component being excluded.

Typology:

1. A type termed optimal,who operates effectively under all

five conditions. How the subject experiences time subjectively
 ORGANIZATION OF A LJFE SPAN 89

has nothing to do with his activity. His universal effectiveness in

all five situations indicates that the subject is capable of organiz-
ing time (in contrast to the other types, who are effective in only
one or two situations and clearly ineffective in the others).
2. A hurried type, who paradoxically reduces everything to a
shortage of time, i.e., he equates all conditions, but operates suc-
cessfully under a shortage of time. The fact that time is pre-
scribed externally (a minimum duration) is characteristic of this
type. Although at first glance it would seem that such a situation,
i.e., a shortage of time, would spur the subject, his subjective
experiences of time are, paradoxically, not associated with his
activity and do not regulate that activity.
3. A calm type, who, on the contrary, experiences difficulties
working with a shortage of time or with a time limit set from
without, but operates successfully under other conditions. These
are people who prefer to know beforehand about the work they
have to do so that they can plan ahead. Their subjective experi-
ences are of two kinds: when they themselves determine time, it
is experienced as tense, which indicates a capacity for self-regu-
lation and mobilization; but when a time limit is set from with-
out, these people become disorganized.
4. An “executive” type, who operates successfully under all
conditions except when time is indeterminate, i.e., actually, in
situations in which the time limits are set from without. An emo-
tional attitude toward time predominates in this type of subject’s
experience, evidently because of the cyclical completion of the
activity and the satisfaction derived therefrom.
5. An anxious type, who successfully completes a task within
the optimal time and can work with a surplus of time, but always
avoids the extreme situation of a shortage of time, which also re-
flects on the nature of the subject’s subjectiveexperience of time.
In summing up this typology, we can discern factors that are
common to all of them:
(1) the number of time conditions in which a subject can oper-
ate, and also the condition preferred by him or contraindicated
for him;
90 K. A, ABUL'KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

(2) whether the time limit is set externally or internally, or

whether this is a neutral factor;
(3) the attitude toward a shortage of time, i.e., a clear ability or
inability to operate when time is short.
How a subject's subjective experience of time is related to
how time is organized in an activity varies in terms of intensity
as well as in the functional nature of that relationship. First, the
subjective experience is found to have different functions relative
to the organization of an activity: in some cases there was practi-
cally no connection in this regard, evidence that the subject had
another way of regulating his activity (probably cognitive, or
conscious), whereas in other cases, a conflict was observed
between the subjective experience of time and the details of
how the particular activity was organized (this also suggests
the hypothesis that consciousness plays a functional role in
this conflict-a point that should be tested further). In still
other cases, there was a conflict within the subjective experi-
ence of time itself. In a fourth group of cases, only the positive
aspect of how the activity was organized was reflected in sub-
jective experiences; and fimally, in a fifth group, only the nega-
tive aspect was reflected. In some cases the vector was from
the subjective experience to the activity; in others, it was the
opposite.
Although the fiidings on conscious perception of time did not
fit into a general typology, they did help us uncover some inter-
nal connections among the structural components of the personal
organization of time. The perception of time was reflected in
three types of judgments: situational-pragmatic, theoretical-phil-
osophical, and normative-activity-related; but it was often very
difficult to draw a sharp distinction among them. An analysis of
the connection between the perception of time and its practical
regulation showed that these connections went from conscious-
ness to activity and from activity to consciousness, although con-
sciousness fulfilled various functions, sometimes regulatory,
sometimes reflective, and sometimes having nothing to do with
the regulation of activity at all.
 ORGANlZATION OF A LJFE SPAN 91

The main conclusions from this study were:

(1) confirmation of the hypothesis that the personal organiza-
tion of time can be classified according to type, and that this
typology has a three-component structure, in which quite differ-
ent connections have been found to exist for each type;
(2) demonstration of the possibility of modeling the temporal
architectonics of an activity and testing some strategies for this
modeling: the study showed that, although a real activity, consist-
ing of actions and movements, takes place in real time, a person
is able to generalize his typical methods of action with respect to
his past, to his experience, if he is given criteria, i.e., time condi-
tions, for such generalization.
These conclusions gave us an argument for a complicated dis-
cussion with labor psychologists, who think that the time require-
ments of an activity can be studied only very concretely, not
outside the context of a particular type of activity. We proved
that, if the psychologist himself manages to abstract and general-
ize such conditions, the individual subject does not perceive them
as something artificial, but performs a kind of timed task and
indicates his preferences very definitely.’
The most important corollary of our study was that it became
possible, on its basis, to proceed directly to a study of the time
structures of the personality in a life span, since we had studied
different conditions of activity not as particular, concrete condi-
tions, but as quite broadly generalized timed tasks and situations
such as are characteristic of life as a whole. This study disclosed
a factor present in the personal organization of time that is also
essential for discovering the distinctive characteristics of the in-
dividual person as a subject of life, namely, the factor of external
or internal determination of a time limit. Among a sample of
graduate students, i.e., youths living under rather free time condi-
tions, without external regulation, the proportion who had devel-
oped the habit of “operating by the bell,” i.e., who were used to
having a time limit externally set by directive, was quite high.
One might have expected this to be encountered more frequently
in people who had worked their whole lives on an assembly line
92 K. A. ABUL'KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

or in an institution with a rigorous bureaucratic time regime in

which people did not control their time themselves. Of course,
there was a group of "optimal" people in our sample who were
capable of operating with equal efficiency whether a time limit
was set from without or whether they set it themselves. But the
following question is absolutely fundamental with regard to the
personal organization of time: Can people who have become
used to operating only when a time limit (for carrying out an
activity) is set externally dispose freely of their time in life as a
whole, i.e., can they set limits for themselves? Accordingly, this
raises another question as well: Are people who are inclined to
determine the time of their activity themselves capable also of
disposing freely of the time of their own lives?
To study the ability or inability of the individual person to
determine time, a model for time planning is most appropriate.
On the one hand, this model is very similar to the well-studied (in
psychology) model of life and temporal perspectives and thus is
already a model for studying a person's life span; on the other
hand, the planning of future time-if a tendency toward a higher
form of setting time has already developed in the past-is pre-
cisely designed to show to what extent a person experiences the
need himself to determine his future time and to free himself
from having time set for him externally. Finally, the model of
time planning is such that, according to our hypothesis, the sub-
ject is given fewer alternatives (in the form of already-determined
regimes) and himself acts in the role of subject, as a person free to
choose a more rigorous and concrete method of planning (as if he
were planning concrete activity) or a more general and normative
method (as takes place when a person constructs a long-term life
perspective). In other words, we presumed that the planning of time
for one type of person takes place in accordance with the scheme or
principle operating when one plans a concrete activity, while for
another it takes place in accordance with the principle applied in
planning long-term life perspectives. To test this hypothesis, we
chose to study categories of planning time (either particular, con-
crete tasks or problems of life itself, life events, etc.).
 ORGANIZ4TION OF A LIFE SPAN 93

We know that among the numerous studies that have been

made of life perspectives and psychological perspectives, some
focus on the future relative to the past and present, others con-
centrate on their structure, and still others study their normative
content [7,9,28,32-341. Drawing on these data, we proposed a
differentiation of concepts-ps ychological perspective, personal
perspective, and life perspective. By the fist we understand a
strictly cognitive capacity to foresee the future, to forecast it, and
to imagine oneself in the future. However, as our pilot study
showed, this cognitive capacity varies typologically (not every-
one is capable of “theorizing” about the future, and those who are
capable of such theorization may not have a strictly personal
perspective). A personal perspective is the overall (including mo-
tivational) readiness of the individual person for the future, his
active attunement to the future (for example, a readiness for diffi-
culties, even for indeterminacy, which diverges sharply from a
strictly cognitive plan). This perspective may exist even in peo-
ple with a cognjtively poor, not clearly formed, notion about the
future. A life perspective is a person’s actual life potential, accu-
mulated by his past experience, his level of development, and his
existing capabilities, and thus constitutes a real driving force
guaranteeing the success of the person’s future [7].
On the basis of this differentiation, we devised a questionnaire
that included the following parameters of planning time:
(1) prolongation-reflecting the scale of a person’s planning
of time, its duration, strategic qualities, and degree of prognostic
power;
(2) substantive-directed toward determining the real spheres
and vectors of activity that are included in a plan, and their
hierarchies;
(3) personal--reflecting the relative prominence of certain
personal correlates, e.g., degree of satisfaction with the planning
of time, readiness to take into account changes of circumstances,
taking into account the plans of other people in one’s own plan-
ning, etc.;
(4) subjective-expressing the degree of dependence and in-
94 K. A. ABUL‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

dependence of a person on what is given externally and on cir-

cumstances in planning time and in realizing plans, the stability
and variability of plans, etc.
The study also employed a number of other methods: incom-
plete sentences, distribution of time, a scale of temporal orienta-
tions, measurement of motivation of achievement using the data
of H. Heckhausen on the relation between motivation and the
inclination to plan time over long periods.
At the same time, another study was carried out to determine
how past, present, and future were interrelated in a person’s life
in terms of satisfaction. This study of the relation between pres-
ent and future overlapped with a study of the planning of time
since in both cases what was determined was the extent to which
the action, goals, and activity of the present moment gave con-
crete content to the long-term perspective. The planning of time
within the context of how past, present, and future are interre-
lated is a function of the individual person as the latter learns to
determine his own time: it is the means by which that determina-
tion is effected. Satisfaction-dissatisfaction is the dominant per-
sonal contradiction; it is the readiness to maintain a fundamental
belief in oneself as future circumstances change and, at the same
time, it is the capacity to improve oneself, one’s life, and one’s
activity.
Planning time and the future is the way a person mediates
between present and future and sometimes appears automatic. A
study of older schoolchildren showed that, because of the prob-
lematic nature of their entering into the institution, a unique
“zone of indeterminacy,” psychologically difficult to overcome,
was formed between present and future and required special per-
sonal efforts-motivational, emotional, and practical efforts-to
“extend the thread” from the present into the future. Thus, plan-
ning the future sometimes has a vector from the present to the
future, and sometimes the reverse, from the future to the present,
helping a person to reflect upon this planning and, in a sense, to
anchor a position in the present for the purpose of shoring up the
future.
 ORGANIZATION OF A WFE SPAN 95

Psychological determinacy of the future, expressed in the con-

creteness and clearness of plans, in the way the future is struc-
tured, sometimes verges on creating a rigid personality; cognitive
clarity is not necessarily accompanied by a readiness for change.
Hence, planning time and the future in a manner that is problem
related rather than planning in terms of events and activity is the
more progressive. When events are planned, then oneself in the
future, the possibility of change, and one’s own potentiality are
largely eliminated from the picture. The most essential modality
of a person’s focus on the future is the existence of a plurality of
perspectives. The fact that life is unfinished, incomplete, is disre-
garded; the person sets a sign of equality between his today and
his tomorrow.
Although the concept of “event” was introduced by C. Biihler
into the logic of studying a life span, a tradition of a sort has
evolved in Soviet psychology in which an event is used as the
basic unit of analysis of a life span; ultimately, this tradition
converges with the sociological approach to the personality and
life [35,36]. The list of events proposed as stimulus material,
such as admission to an institution, marriage, the death of loved
ones, the birth of children, etc., remains, despite the stress placed
on the personal significance of these events, a somewhat socially
normative stratification of the life of any citizen. The categoriza-
tion of life as a series of problems and tasks, on the other hand,
discloses how the subject is involved in them, the price the sub-
ject pays for their resolution and their meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, discussion with representatives of the event ap-
proach to a life span [31] did not rule out, for those advocating a
concept that construes the individual person as the subject of life,
the possibility of employing the event method to supplement
other methods, or of using a qualitative modification of the event
approach. For example, T.B. Kartseva studied a group of people
who were on the verge of a real turning point (from the stand-
point of the stnicture of the ego and the self-image) in their lives,
e.g., divorce, marriage. In another study, a subject was given the
original task of indicating which events in the past he would like
96 K. A. ABVL‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

to repeat in the present and future and which he preferred to

leave in the past, etc.; this was accompanied by an assessment of
the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Then, to study life
perspectives in the strict sense, the Newton method was used.
The results showed that the interrelations of past, present, and future
were, first, mediated in varying degrees by the personality and,
second, had a varying functional character, moved in different di-
rections (direct and inverse), and, most importantly, had a direct
connection with the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction [37].
Integrating all the different typologies will give us a more
comprehensive characterization of a person’s optimal type of or-
ganization of time. This type is characterized by activity at a high
level for a prolonged period; the person has the ability to orga-
nize time, i.e., for an activity, in all temporal regimes, and hence
has not only the cognitive capacity to foresee the future and
construct a plan but also a personal perspective that provides a
personal guarantee of that perspective. Whereas in an activity the
person can operate equally effectively regardless of whether the
time is set internally or externally, over the life span this type of
personality is the subject of life’s time since he can flexibly coordi-
nate external and internal time and thus be in control of time. His
past, present, and future are linked through his personality.
The “contemplative” type of personality, who can be active
over a prolonged period, albeit at a low level, has the ability to
operate with time at the level of consciousness and to build cog-
nitive perspectives, but in activity he is incapable of following an
internally set time. Hence, a discrepancy, even a contradiction,
between the perception of time and action in time is typical of
this type; and this also has an effect, often negative, in the area of
subjective experience. Continuity of time at the level of con-
sciousness is accompanied by an absence of a continuous, i.e.,
internally motivated, line of activity. Therefore, in such people
there is contradiction between the planning of time and the pur-
suit of those plans.
The “functional” type of personality, i.e., functional in terms
of being very active and situation oriented, adapts well to exter-
 ORGANIZITION OF A LIFE S P m 97

nally set time. He is a doer, a practical person, in that his life

span is also composed of a succession of cycles of activity. He
does not make long-term plans; but in planning over the very
short term, he knows how to coordinate such plans with his own
efforts, i.e., he functions optimally over a “short distance.” The
subjective experiences of this type of person are basically di-
rected toward the regulation of activity and tend to be positive in
nature. The present and a connection between the present and the
future predominate in his life.
The “executor” type, tied to situational structures of time, is
typically active at a low level, for a variety of possible reasons:
the person’s inability to coordinate his activeness with externally
set time limits, the destructive role of emotional experiences, and
his inability to form for himself a general image of his activity on
the basis of what is given [29]. This type’s way of planning time
is more a compensatory phenomenon than a basis for real activity
in conformity with a plan. He may gravitate toward the past out
of dissatisfaction with the present and lack of confidence in the
future.
This generalization, this presentation of the initial typology,
supplemented by the results of subsequent studies [22], has been
undertaken not to reduce the plenitude of the existing data to four
types of personalities, but to show that, thanks to the complemen-
tary nature of investigations of the different aspects of the organi-
zation of time, we have been able to probe more deeply into the
internal connections of this organization. Every phenomenon, for
example, the planning of time, takes place within different struc-
tures and in different functions, as a result of which the charac-
teristics of the way an activity is organized in time by each type
of personality, and even how each type links past, present, and
future, become clearer.
The concept of the personal organization of time developed on
the basis of the above studies is an integral definition of the
essence of this organization [4]. The basic psychological charac-
teristics of this organization are defined by the dynamic, tempo-
ral features of mental processes and by the temporal characteris-
98 K. A. ABUL‘KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

tics of the sensory systems responsible for the perception and

reflection of objective time [3,4,17] (including the cognitive pro-
cessing of information [38]) in people with different types of
higher nervous activity [19] and temperament. But the distinctive
features of voluntary mental regulation impose themselves on
these characteristics, and these voluntary features, in turn,have
different capabilities and limitations in each different type of
personality. As our study has shown, cognitive dissonance, the
subjective experience of time, and the absence of a regulatory
function on the part of subjective experience, etc., may obstruct
voluntary cognitive regulation. This places limits on the possibilities
of accelerating time arbitrarily and on the general possibilities of
self-organization in time. The role of anxiety in processes of regda-
tion of an activity in self-organization in time are yet to be studied.
An increase in the speed of realization of mental processes and the
capacity to determine precisely the factor of activeness and to coor-
dinate it with the temporal logic of events are two basic temporal
capabilities of the personality, namely, the capacity for acceleration
and the capacity for contemporaneousness.
The next capacity is situated at the level of the personal orga-
nization of activity in time: the above-described level is an inter-
nal component of it, but it also has new personality characteris-
tics, e.g., the ability to operate optimally within an externally set
period, and the capacity for internal determination of time, i.e.,
controlling time, etc. The “activity” characteristic of this capacity
is manifested in the fact that this type is optimal in a maximum
number of regimes.
The individual person, as the subject of organization of activ-
ity in time, by means of which this organization exhibits various
advantages or defects, may next be regarded within the context of
life as a whole. It then becomes evident that a person’s unit of
time is in fact a unit of activity with which the person’s temporal
constitution, or style, is in accord; the person structures his life
span according to other cognitive conscious units, i.e., more con-
templative or abstract, more impersonal; or, finally, life as a
whole is the measure of time for the person, in which case he
 ORCANlzATION OF A WFE SPAN 99

organizes each fragment of activity within this context, linking

various fragments of past, present, and future in terms of his own
logic, not in the purely temporal logic of their succession.
Developmental studies [39] show that a child’s mastery of
concepts of time is an extremely complex process (e.g., while
knowing that his parents are older than he, he may not be sure
that they were born earlier; the hierarchy of successions in past
time, etc., is very complex for him). But if one considers that
individual typological characteristics of a child’s mind (slowness,
impulsiveness) then begin to act, followed by personality traits,
expressing themselves in conflicts with externally set deadlines
imposed upon him, and also in internal dissonances of cognitive
and emotional regulation, etc., it becomes clear that life in gen-
eral and a specific activity confront a person in different ways,
and he must resolve different temporal tasks in each case.
The typological nature of the temporal organization of the per-
sonality enables us to understand that each type has its own rele-
vant, objective structures (events, situations, activity) that are
convenient and sensitive to it. But this means that when a person
finds himself in structures that do not fit his type of personality,
he is forced to deal with other different, temporal tasks, and that
sometimes these tasks will push him to extremes without any
outwardly visible reason. Accordingly, though performing the
same professional activity, different types of people will solve
temporal tasks differently (for example, people who have be-
come accustomed to submitting to an external time regimen are
freed of the need for self-organization in time, the need to plan;
but if they find themselves in a situation in which the time is not
preset, they experience their incapacity in this respect; on the
other hand, however, they will have to develop, in their own
time, a capacity for promptness and accuracy, and will have to
learn to coordinate their activeness with critical moments in their
activity, etc.).
The results of our study enable us to sensitize people to aware-
ness of their abilities and limitations so that they can find areas of
life and activity more appropriate to their type of personality.
I00 K. A. ABUL'KHANOVA-SLAVSKAIA

Note
1. It is another matter that it is better to study an actual activity in real
time and space, which is what we did in a parallel experiment, but only with
schoolchildren (because of the abovedescribed difficulty in modeling a pro-
fessional activity). In this study, a reflective series was compared (using
Kublitskene's method) with a real activity (0.Marti'ianova). Significant data
were obtained indicating that for a number of subjects, the practical method of
action differed from the reflective indices of how the subjects usually operated.
However, this finding may be explained by age-related characteristics, e.g., by
the fact that schoolchildren lack work experience, that it is difficult for them to
say what method of action they typically employ, that reflection is still poorly
developed in them, or that the real activity they carried out did not vary in
terms of tasks, being much more impoverished than the reflective material
presented to them for evaluating their usual method of action.

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