Aligning Your Daily Actions (The Journey)
The Final Part (4) in "Charting Your Path: A Guide to a Meaningful Life"
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard
You’ve done the hard thinking. You’ve found your North Star - the unique purpose that gives your life meaning. You’ve defined the values that guide your decisions and set the priorities that deserve your focus.
Now comes the most important part: what do you actually do each day?
This is the journey - where intention becomes action.
In this essay, we’ll explore how to align your daily actions with your purpose, values, and priorities through three powerful tools: initiatives, habits, and tasks.
The Three Types of Daily Actions
In my experience, every meaningful action we take falls into one of three categories:
1. Initiatives
These are high-impact projects - needle-movers - that are typically time-bound and goal-oriented. Examples might include training for a 5K, hitting your quarterly quota, or finding a new house for your family.
Initiatives often require significant focus and should be tied to a specific priority area. You don’t need many - in fact, you shouldn’t have more than 1–3 active at a time.
2. Habits
Habits are the small, recurring behaviors that compound over time. They don’t necessarily require a ton of energy, but they do require consistency.
Habits support your priorities quietly but powerfully. If “health” is a top priority, your habit might be 30 minutes of movement each morning. If “marriage” is a top priority, it might be a weekly date night.
3. Tasks
Tasks are the miscellaneous items - one-off actions, logistics, and admin. These might include replying to an email, scheduling an appointment, or paying a bill.
Tasks are necessary but not transformational. The goal is to manage them efficiently without letting them crowd out your higher priorities.
Aligning Daily Actions With Your Priorities
Every initiative and habit should connect directly to your top priorities. If something doesn’t align, ask yourself why it’s on your to-do list at all.
Some good questions to reflect on regularly:
“What initiatives support my top priority right now?”
“What habits ensure I show up for the people and goals that matter most?”
“Where do tasks fit in, and how do I contain them?”
Alignment isn’t about good intentions. It’s about designing your days to reflect what you value most.
Otherwise, if left unmanaged, low-impact tasks will consume your daily schedule - and ultimately your life.
Tools, Systems, and Support Structures
So how do you actually make this work? Here’s the system I use, broken down simply.
🛠 The Setup: Tools and Approach
Three types of daily actions: Initiatives, Habits, Tasks
Two main tools: Task manager (I use Todoist), Calendar (Outlook or Google)
One main approach: Time blocking
Everything I do gets assigned to a time block on my calendar. This ensures that I have dedicated time to complete important tasks, gives clear visibility into how I’m spending my time, and forces me to recognize my constraints.
This is valuable for everyone, but it is especially valuable if you are juggling a lot of balls or if you tend to overestimate how much you can get done.
For small tasks, I batch these into a “Task Time” block and knock them out all at once to avoid fragmenting my day. If any task takes longer than 15 minutes, it usually deserves its own calendar slot.
🔄 Managing Each Type of Action
Initiatives
→ Managed as projects in Todoist.
→ Broken into sub-tasks.
→ Key actions are scheduled on the calendar.
→ Example: “Write Book” lives as a project; “Write Chapter 3” is a sub-task and is put on the calendar Thursday from 9–11am.Habits
→ Stored as recurring tasks in Todoist.
→ Also scheduled as recurring calendar events (Todoist/Calendar integration can help here!)
→ I keep a simple doc with all habits listed and tagged to their corresponding priority.
→ Example: “30 min run” tagged to Health, “Thursday date night” tagged to Marriage.Tasks
→ Captured in Todoist.
→ Either batched or, if longer than 15 minutes, scheduled directly.
→ Ideally, keep your task list to under 10 active items.
Important: Tag all Initiatives and Habits in your task manager or calendar by the priority they serve. This forces you to ask, “Does this reflect what I say matters most?”
🤝 Accountability: The Secret Weapon
Even with all this structure, none of us are immune to slippage. That’s where accountability comes in.
For any major initiative or new habit, I try to assign a specific accountability partner. I tell them my goal (clearly and measurably) and agree to a rhythm of check-ins.
This can be as simple as:
“I’m running three times a week. Text me every Sunday and ask how it went.”
Sometimes, if it’s really important or I’m struggling to keep up, I’ll put money on it:
“If I miss two weeks, I owe you $100 - and you donate it to a cause I can’t stand.”
It’s all about creating systems to reinforce the person you want to become with structure that helps you stay on track.
In Summary
To live a life in alignment with your purpose, values, and priorities, follow these simple steps:
Classify everything you do into one of three buckets: Initiative, Habit, or Task
Tag each Initiative or Habit with the Priority it corresponds to
Periodically, look to see where your time is being spent.
Am I spending more of my time on low-value tasks than high-impact initiatives? Are the actions I’m taking aligned with the priorities I’ve set?
That’s it. There are endless tools, systems, and frameworks that can be used to help get you there. I’ve named a few.
But at the end of the day, it’s pretty simple. Understand the person you want to be and ensure your actions align with it.
Simple, but not easy.
This Is the Journey
Thank you all for joining me on this journey. I hope that it has prompted some ideas within you and perhaps offered a bit of inspiration on how to live your life in an intentional way.
Purpose isn’t found in grand moments. It already exists within each of us, and it is uncovered slowly and deliberately through the thousands of small actions we take.
The life you want isn’t somewhere out there - it’s right here, in what you choose to do today.
Reconnect with your North Star. Live into your values. Honor your priorities. Align your actions.
This is the journey. And it starts right now.
“…Each person is not only himself, he is also the unique, the very special point, important and noteworthy in every instance, where the phenomena of the world meet, once only and never again in the same way." - Demian by Herman Hesse