In the quest for personal change, the method matters.
Early in 2023, my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce chatted with the writer Oliver Burkeman about New Year’s resolutions. Burkeman is an expert on productivity, but he’s arguably also an expert on getting real about the time human beings have on Earth. Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an average American’s life span). In it, he writes: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”
With this in mind, Caroline asked Burkeman: “Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?”
Burkeman has hope for the concept of the resolution.
