In most cultures, the calendar builds in some time for reflection. There’s a certain point in the course of a year when it’s natural to look back over the past, evaluate how things are going, and then think about what you might want to change in the future.

In Western cultures, this time happens around the new year, when we’re encouraged to look back over the past 12 months, assess how we’re feeling about life, and develop resolutions for the year ahead.

Of course, the “New Year, New You” concept is often ridiculed, because people typically hang on to those New Year’s resolutions for a mere three to six weeks, after which they return to whatever they were doing beforehand. I’ve written a whole book on how to be more effective at achieving goals that require complex change, but here I want to focus on how you might revitalize your relationship to work in 2024.

It can be hard to see your flagging motivation from one day to the next. Every workweek has its ups and downs, and you can usually point to days when you came to work excited for what was in store and other days when you crawled through the fog just to get by.

 

THINK ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE

The advantage of looking back over a whole year is that it causes you to think more generally about how things went. Lots of research suggests that the more distant you are from anything in space or time, the more abstractly you think about it. That enables you to average across all those ups and downs and discern the general trend.

If you realize that you’re just not that excited about work overall, what can you do (assuming that quitting is not an option)?

That is where the abstractness created by taking the long time horizon will fail you. You can commit to being more energetically engaged at work, but how exactly do you do that?

 

Read more here.