It’s Called a Premortem—and It’s the Most Productive Thing You’ll Do All Year

Forget about making a New Year’s resolution. Have you tried imagining your deathbed?

Entrepreneur and investor Ron Shaich writes a ‘premortem’ around the start of each year. James Jackman for WSJ

By Ben Cohen Jan. 3, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Ron Shaich likes to do the same thing around this time every year. The billionaire entrepreneur and investor goes somewhere warm for the holidays. He celebrates his birthday on Dec. 30. He recharges for the next year. He reflects on the past year.

And then he’s ready for his favorite annual ritual.

“What can I do in the next three to five years,” he asks himself, “that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?”

Most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions after a few weeks. Shaich, 71, has been looking back from his deathbed for a few decades.

And he doesn’t call it a New Year’s resolution. He calls it writing a “premortem.”

By now, it’s a tradition. He escapes on vacation, clears his mind and takes a break from doing nothing to do the most important thing he does all year.

“I imagine my body old and fragile, my breathing shallow, my life energy almost extinguished,” he wrote in “Know What Matters,” his 2023 book. “I try to evoke the feelings I want to have in that moment—a sense of peace, completion and, most importantly, self-respect. Then I ask myself: What am I going to do now to ensure that when I reach that ultimate destination, I’ve done what I need to do?”

By any metric of business success, Shaich has done a whole lot. In his 20s, he opened a cookie shop in Boston, took over a nearly bankrupt group of local bakeries called Au Bon Pain and made it a national brand. Then he became a pioneer of fast-casual dining when he founded Panera Bread, which he led as its chief executive until the company sold in 2017 for more than $7 billion.

But turning one cookie shop into an empire built on soups, salads and sandwiches wasn’t nearly the end of his career.

Shaich is the chairman and largest individual shareholder of Cava, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain. It went public in 2023. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

After years of criticizing what he calls “pervasive short-termism in the capital markets,” Shaich put his money where his mouth was and started Act III Holdings to invest in companies that he believes will endure over the long term—like Cava. He’s the board chairman and largest individual shareholder of the Mediterranean chain that went public in 2023 and performed so well in 2024 that his stake made him a billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

And he thinks about his own long term every time he writes one of his premortems.

One year, he vowed to study Judaism and learn Hebrew to deepen his spirituality. Another year, he set a target of exercising six days a week and drinking 125 ounces of water a day to maximize his longevity. This year, he challenged himself to develop new skills. Like sailing. And running a 10k. And finally learning how to play chess.

It’s a habit that began as a response to the death of his parents in the 1990s. His mother was at peace with herself when she died, he says. But his father was “racked with regret and remorse” about decisions he made and the opportunities he missed. What he took away from their experiences was the last lesson that his parents would teach him—and the most profound of them all.

Don’t wait until the end to decide if you are proud of your life. Do it before it’s too late. Do it while you can still do something about it.

“I realized that the time to be having that review was not in the ninth inning with two outs,” he told me. “It was in the seventh inning, the fifth inning and third inning.”

So what do these premortems actually look like?

I asked Shaich to dig through his archives and find some that he felt comfortable sharing. He sent me the one he wrote in 2012—the day after his 59th birthday.

I started reading and the first line stopped me cold.

“1,500 to 7,500 days left,” he wrote to himself.

With that reminder that time is our scarcest commodity, he wrote out several pages of bullet points that covered everything from health to wealth.

They included both the smallest details of his diet (snack on almonds and celery) and the much bigger picture (“spend time on things that create enjoyment and lasting impact, not on files and papers and more money, as it’s not coming with me”).

Shaich, shown here in 2006, built Au Bon Pain and Panera Bread into national brands. Photo: Michael L Abramson/Getty Images

At its core, the premortem is really about living with intention. Every year, Shaich divides his life into areas of concern. He thinks about his relationships with his body, his work, his family, friends and God. He determines what he’s trying to accomplish in those areas. He comes up with specific projects to achieve those key initiatives. Then he reviews them every quarter to monitor his progress.

The most fascinating parts of Shaich’s premortems were the sections about his work. In 2006, he toyed with a bunch of ideas—start a new business, join corporate boards, “play venture manager / investor.” In 2012, his priorities at Panera included determining his successor and reviewing the organizational chart to reduce his number of direct reports.

The premortem has become such a crucial part of his life that he made it an organizational framework at his companies. He asks them to picture where they want to be in three to five years—and how they will get there. He calls this “future-back” planning and sees it as “a powerful tool for accomplishing everything that we want in life and business.”

“It’s been the key to all of our success,” he says.

In business, the concept of the premortem was coined by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein, and the late Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called it “a brilliant idea.” The goal is to identify all the potential sources of failure on a project to improve the chances of success—to imagine how and why things might go wrong instead of explaining after they have gone wrong. “So that the project can be improved,” as Klein once put it, “rather than autopsied.”

In other words, you subject yourself to the exercise of writing a premortem to make sure you won’t have to write a postmortem.

Shaich’s twist on the premortem is about making sure that he’s getting things right.

To him, there is nothing macabre or even remotely depressing about ruminating on death. In fact, he finds it to be oddly inspiring.

So every year, in that glorious week when time melts away and you get so few emails that you begin to suspect your phone is broken, he turns his attention to what really matters.

He usually does his annual mental simulation on vacation in the Caribbean after a walk on the beach. This year, he was at home in Miami while recovering from a minor medical procedure—which Shaich took as yet another reminder of his own mortality.

It was all he needed to pull out a yellow legal pad and start working on his latest premortem.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

Shaich says his habit of writing an annual ‘premortem’ began in the 1990s as a response to the death of his parents. Photo: James Jackman for WSJ

Appeared in the January 4, 2025, print edition as 'Happy New Year! It’s Time to Think About Your Death'.