Making a New Year's Resolution? Don't Go to War With Yourself

New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection—a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely.

Oliver Burkeman is a writer who focuses on this nexus of mortality and productivity. He is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is about the length of the average American’s life span). I caught up with him to discuss New Year’s–resolution making and breaking, and why you should consider not setting your resolutions until mid-January.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?

Oliver Burkeman: [Laughs.] I don’t think the fact that we’re all going to die means that setting intentions for personal changes is automatically a bad thing. Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes. It helps you get a lot of clarity about which kinds of resolutions are really worth using your precious time on and which are not.