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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. “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,” he told Caroline. But how we go about making these changes matter, he noted; there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do so. In today’s reading list, our writers walk you through the history of the New Year’s resolution, how brands take advantage of it, and how to use it for your own growth.

On Resolutions

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

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

“The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.”

It’s the Most Inadequate Time of the Year

By Amanda Mull

New Year’s resolutions are the perfect opportunity for consumer brands to remind you about all the ways you could be better.

New Year’s Resolutions That Will Actually Lead to Happiness

By Arthur C. Brooks

Set goals to improve your well-being—not your wallet or your waistline.

Still Curious?

The best time-management advice is depressing but liberating: You can make time for things that matter, or you can make time for more email. Make a to-don’t list: When you’re feeling stuck, focusing on the things you hate can help.

Other Diversions

81 things that blew our minds in 2023 How to be happy growing older Taylor Swift at Harvard

P.S.

Here’s one resolution you can make tomorrow: Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. It’s not worth it, my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2018.

— Isabel

The Atlantic is today launching the fifth season of its popular How To podcast series with How to Keep Time, an exploration of our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. For the new season, The Atlantic’s Becca Rashid returns as co-host (and producer), now joined by Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost. How to Keep Time follows the show’s past seasons, which have explored such related topics as how to build a happy life (with Arthur C. Brooks), how to talk to people (with Julie Beck), and how to start over (with Olga Khazan).

Over the course of six episodes, in How to Keep Time, Becca and Ian will look into fundamental questions around our relationship with time, including why we can feel like there’s never enough time in a day; what cultural myths get in the way of using time to build connections; why so many of us are compelled to record time and document our lives; and even how an understanding of theoretical physics can inform our relationship with time, the universe, and ourselves.

The first episode, which is now available, discusses the time-maximizing myths of the modern era––notably, the idea that some perfect future exists in which we are “on top of everything” and our time is fully in our control. The author Oliver Burkeman argues that this romantic thinking is exactly what makes it challenging to avoid future-focused thinking and just lean into the moment. The episode further explores how to rethink time wasted as time well spent.

With an aim to make self-reflection and introspection a vital component of daily life, the How To series provides insights from social scientists, writers, and a range of experts on how to think about our lives, how to think about ourselves, and how to live well with others. The fifth season arrives as the culmination of an ambitious year of audio offerings at The Atlantic. In May, The Atlantic relaunched its flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, with Hanna Rosin as the new host. Earlier in the year was the launch of the narrative podcast Holy Week, hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, about the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and how those seven days––one of the most fiery, disruptive, and contentious weeks in American history––diverted the course of a social revolution.

Episodes of How to Keep Time will be released each Monday, and listeners can subscribe here or wherever they listen to podcasts.

Press Contact:
Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com