On this last single-digit date in January it’s worth giving the topic of resolutions one last spin before leaving it behind, perhaps alongside a short-lived decision to switch to mushroom coffee. (Email me; we’ll talk.) 

Want to be tactical about setting goals? There’s no shortage of advice-givers. Most stress the need for self-knowledge.

Mel Robbins, who speaks about change and motivation, counsels linking new goals to whatever you value most. Valerie Tiberius, a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota, suggests preserving a commitment to the values that guide your actions.

“Think about the qualities you’d want to preserve if your consciousness were going to be transported into another body,” she writes in a Wall Street Journal excerpt from her new book, “What Do You Want Out of Life?” What traits would you prioritize? (For Ms. Tiberius: integrity – and a sense of humor.) 

On a practical level, resolutions can call for figuring out what to suspend and what to adopt. For a society trying to turn the page on the pandemic, that means sizing up adopted practices and deciding if they’re better than what came before. 

One of our newest staff writers, Jackie Valley, has begun exploring what digital technology has in store for education. To decide what to adopt, educators will need to weigh the trade-offs that digital transformation brings.

Workplaces, too, now weigh the value of human connection against the efficiency of demonstrably effective remote teams. What offers the greatest gain? How will values guide these decisions in 2023 and beyond?

“Once we have an idea of what really matters to us, we can try to live up to or realize those values in our actions,” Ms. Tiberius writes, “to do the things that matter to us and be the people we want to be.”