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Intentionality Is King
Although it is totally necessary at times to go through prescribed motions or instructions to get results- especially as a beginner- it is all the more satisfying to craft your own unique routine. The key to structuring your own routines is finding an intention- that is, a concrete goal or motivation- which you intend to fulfill. Being intentional helps us structure our actions towards our personal goals and values while helping us to avoid mindlessly sacrificing our time with nothing to show for it.
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Intentions Begin With Values
Before you can set intentions, you must have values. Values tend to be less concrete than intentions, and they represent concepts closer to your core identity. For example, if you choose to value fitness or health, then you will have the drive or motivation to set intentions that provide or fulfill this value. Maybe, when going to work, you will set the intention to only use stairs instead of elevators. Alternatively, if you value learning, you may set an intention to read a book at night or read 3 deepstash articles each morning.
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Intentions Necessitate Strategy
Now that you have values, you may create intentions that maximize your ‘value fulfillment’ throughout your daily routines. These intentions always have an element of strategy that contains some sort of recipe towards fulfilling some specific intention.
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Good Strategists Work On Various Timescales
Good strategy requires you to break down a routine into its components and then, using your intention, rearrange, modify, or augment the routine to better your outcome. Often, this takes form in identifying the tools of your craft. This could be breaking down an essay into an outline and asking yourself questions such as ‘what do I want to communicate?’ or ‘who is my target audience?’. The tools here are the questions. Or, it could be planning activities into your day, week, or year that help fulfill your value. The point is, good strategy necessitates planning at different levels of detail.
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Intentionality Is Ultimately A Creative Endeavor
To fulfill your intentions and come up with new intentions to fulfill your ever-evolving values, you must exercise your creativity in order to optimize your strategies for success. By trial-and-error and systematic study, you will learn the best methods to plan and accomplish increasingly complex routines. I argue that this element of creativity combined with fulfilling your own original intentions is a recipe for a satisfying daily, weekly, or yearly routine. So long as you identify and focus on the elements that are under your control, you will live in harmony with your surroundings.
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How Do We Craft Appropriate Values?
Simply going about ‘choosing values’ is a fool’s errand. Whether you are aware of them or not, you have values, and those values structure your decisions about which actions to take. If you are always eating takeout and watching TikTok, for example, you may overvalue instant gratification. Values are something we learn about ourselves and actively cultivate- they should be based on some a priori experimental data- that is, your direct experiences, emotions, and surest knowledge.Our emotions are flagposts for the quality of our values. What activities do you find intrinsically satisfying?
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More On Values
Values are complicated. I will explore some pitfalls and better ways to explore your values as well as different strategy techniques in future posts!
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CURATOR'S NOTE
Although these ideas are somewhat rough, I find that these concepts have been extremely useful!
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