It's the time of year when people post about resolutions and the newfound willpower that comes with the feeling of starting out the year with a clean slate. I stopped making "resolutions" based on pure willpower several years ago; instead, I try to structure any changes to my habits so that I can stick to them without a lot of willpower. I've written for Odyssey before about ImperfectProduce.com, the company that sends me a box of deeply discounted surplus fruits and vegetables left over from the grocery store; it's a lot easier to eat more fruits and vegetables if you have a box of nearly-free ones arriving every week that will go bad if you don't eat them.

Another example: about two years ago I ordered a "timed locking container" using an Amazon.com gift card I'd gotten for Christmas. You can put objects inside the container and set a timer on the door that will unlock after a fixed period of time (from a few minutes up to an upper limit of 48 hours). The device comes billed as a willpower enhancer, to help you avoid eating a snack until some fixed time in the future. (The instruction manual also suggests using it to lock away cigarettes and alcohol, although I suspect that if the best you can do is to put off the cigarettes or alcohol for two hours before you reward yourself for waiting that long, you should probably put more effort into actually quitting. Food, on the other hand, is something we actually need).

It wouldn't do me much good to lock away my favorite junk food for four hours, as long as I have access to my car and the 24-hour grocery store is three minutes away. What I usually find myself craving is a to go out to eat, partly for the food and partly just to get away from the work that I know I have to do on my computer. So, to this day, the only thing I've ever used the lockbox for is to lock away my car keys. ( The box is made of thick plastic, but it can be broken with a hammer in the case of a true emergency, such as a broken arm or jonesing for Jack-in-the-Box.)The dinners in my freezer are not as good as what I would have gotten at a restaurant, but I'll live.

The box costs $50, but it paid for itself the first three times that it kept me from going out to eat at a restaurant. (I also used to use it to stop me from going out and spending money on movies, but that's mostly moot now that I have MoviePass and can see unlimited movies in theaters for $10 per month. But that's for another article!)

As it happens, I started out this year in a slump of willpower, so the lockbox has already come in handy a few times. Most recently, I knew I wanted to go out and see a movie at a theater that served beer and pizza, and while I didn't use the lockbox to actually foil my plans, I did use it to lock my keys away for 45 minutes so that I wouldn't be able to go out and splurge at a different restaurant before going to the movie. Baby steps!