How to live an Intentional Life

My tools and frameworks for Doing Life On Purpose

Ok friends, it’s time we zoom out and look at the big picture. What is Doing Life On Purpose all about?

This blog mailing list Substack is a place where I gather and share my thoughts on life; take ideas and conversations that I’ve been having for years, and try to distil them into a clear concrete version of the thing. There’s a lot of room to hide in a conversation or a presentation, but the act of writing things out requires provides a kind of clarity, a commitment to being coherent, there’s less room to waffle (though rest assured I will still do plenty of that in footnotes and parentheses).

At the core¹ there are two components to living an intentional life: Deciding Who You Want To Be², and Actually Being That Person.

Within those two components are a whole range of frameworks³ and tools⁴ that can be used. Below are some⁵ of mine.

I’ll link to posts about these as they get written and published. If there’s something you’re particularly keen to hear about then let me know in the comments and I might bump it up the priority queue.

My Pillars of an Intentional life:

Deciding who to Be

• Direction Setting

• Annual Reflection

• Monthly Reflection

• Being Present⁶

• Purpose First decision making

• Setting high-level priorities for where⁷ to spend time, attention, and money⁸

• Identifying what Air to breathe⁹

Actually Being

• Task Management Systems¹⁰

• Knowledge Management Systems¹¹

• Spaced Repetition¹²

• Mnestics¹³

• Journaling

  • Habit tracking

  • Daily gratitude and reflection

  • Weekly overview

• Weekly reflection

• Time Tracking

• Financial Tracking

• Meditation

• Intentionally using technology¹⁴

• Interpersonal Relationships¹⁵

• Morning and Evening Routines

• Practicing Openness

• Reading (fiction, non-fiction)

1. Ok, so really there’s 100 ways to frame this, and this one is the one that landed best for me

2. What’s important to you, how you want to spend your time, etc

3. Ways of thinking about things

4. Ways of doing things

5. Most. All the ones I can think of and clearly articulate at the time of writing

6. Self awareness, noticing how you respond in different contexts

7. Relationships, careers, hobbies, etc

8. Including looking at tracking data to better understand where you already spend these things

9. i.e. What external inputs to allow into your life, what vibes to spend time around, what to allow to passively or actively influence you (people, media, etc)

10. The places where things happen

11. The places where information is stored

12. Getting information into your brain

13. Remembering what’s important

14. Feed blockers, tech free time, etc

15. Relationship Anarchy, boundaries, communication