Intentionality and goal setting

Act intentionally day to day for long enough and you end up living intentionally. That's easy to say and harder to picture, so it's worth borrowing from people who've thought about it more carefully than I have.

Cal Newport talks a lot about "life centric planning" in creating what he calls a "deep life", that is one which contains meaning for the person living it and isn't rushed, allowing them to concentrate on the important things at more than just surface level.

There's a clear crossover between setting a daily intention and wanting to lead a life of your own design, rather than climbing the traditional 9-5 career ladder.

In 2016, two Stanford professors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, published a book called "Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life" which became a New York Times bestseller. In it they give examples of how design thinking can help you design the life that you really want, which may be radically different from what is considered the norm.

Getting to that designed life takes intentionality: remembering the design exists, and choosing against the default often enough that it holds. Setting an intention each day that points at those goals is one way of doing the remembering.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash