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?

FOCUS IN ON WHAT FEELS MEANINGFUL

You have to start thinking specifically about the aspects of work you care about. It might be a project whose outcome means a lot to you. It might be the mission of the organization that speaks to your values. It might be the inherent joy associated with specific tasks that are part of your job. Focus on those desirable characteristics and use them to generate energy for the work you’re doing. Think about how to engage with those activities more and to celebrate the ways your work fits with your core values.

PRIORITIZE RELATIONSHIPS

Next, focus on the people you care about at work. Perhaps they are colleagues you see and collaborate with regularly, or clients you enjoy engaging with. Those relationships can also be energizing. Think about specific opportunities to engage with those people to make your work more socially fulfilling. (This may be a more challenging problem to solve if you’re working remotely, but it’s not impossible.)

RECONSIDER YOUR SCHEDULE

Finally, take a look at the schedule you’re keeping. Sometimes your lack of energy for work reflects that you’re not taking enough time to achieve your personal goals. Your career is a marathon, not a sprint. If you are working long hours and long weeks and not engaging with your family, friends, loved ones, hobbies, pets, or other important things in your life, then it will be hard to stay engaged at work. When this is the case, then—paradoxically—you may find that the best way to be more productive in the new year is to do less.