Trish and I have both been struggling lately with a bit of angst around a sense of purpose.  When you are working, a sense of purpose is not difficult.  Nor is a sense of futility, but that’s another essay.  Anyway, when you are working you have a job description and a business goal and all kinds of things banging at you requiring your attention.  While a TRUE sense of purpose might get buried under feelings of urgency, you rarely find yourself at a loss for what to do.  On the contrary, you probably find yourself ruminating on a list of things you’d RATHER be doing if all these other demands on your time and attention would just go away.

When you retire, those work-related demands do indeed go away.  All at once.  And sometimes you might find yourself at a loss for a sense of purpose.  I wrote about that a bit in my three-part series on transitioning to retirement (here are links to parts one, two, and three).  I have a friend who was so busy with other purpose-driven commitments that he retired because he didn’t really have time to work anymore.  Neither Trish nor I had that issue.  I was fired (thankfully) and just decided to retire.  She retired for her sanity.  After my detox period, I did a year’s worth of contract consulting and then settled into this blog.  It gives me a pretty decent sense of purpose but I’ve still felt nudgy.  Trish had to detox quite a while and now “purpose” is really nagging at her.

I had an “Aha!” moment a couple of weeks ago during a walk, listening to a podcast.  It was Brené Brown’s “Dare to Lead” podcast (naturally) and she was interviewing Charles Duhigg.  He is a journalist and author who has written a couple of bestsellers on habits and productivity.  They were talking about choosing to work on only what is important to you and about how to figure out what actually IS important to you.  OK, that makes sense.  Then Brené asked the question that I wanted to ask: “I get all that, but HOW?  HOW do you actually get yourself ignore all the noise and work on what’s important to you?”

Before I answer that question, I must take you back in time a bit and explain the title of this essay.  We all have probably read Stephan Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  It’s a classic and has been read by something like 3 billion people (maybe a slight exaggeration).  Lots of good stuff in there but there was one concept that really hit me and stayed with me.  He showed a two-by-two matrix, that old standby of corporate America.  One axis was labeled Urgent; the other labeled Important (This is the picture that accompanies this essay).  There were four quadrants in the grid.  The first was things that are both urgent and important—things that can and should be done and usually do.  The second was things that are not urgent but are indeed important—things that should be done but often aren’t.  The third quadrant was things that are urgent but not important—things that shouldn’t be done but often take up a lot of your time.  Finally, the fourth quadrant was things that were neither urgent nor important—things that shouldn’t be done and rarely are.  The challenge, of course, was to resist Third Quadrant activities and prioritize Second Quadrant activities.  Simple in concept.  Horrifically difficult in practice.

There are tricks galore out there to help you focus on Second Quadrant activities.  I had a mentor/boss who, whenever I would come in for a discussion with my list of topics, would invariably ask, “What’s the last item on your list?  Let’s start there.”  He knew that instinct usually encourages us to put the item we consider most difficult or unsavory at the bottom of the list, unconsciously hoping that time will run out before we get to it.  This habit of doing first the task you most dread is a staple of productivity training.  That worked for me only occasionally—usually when I was well rested and had gobs of energy.  It rarely worked when I needed it to work.  My tired brain, my sapped coping energy, my frayed nerves all found themselves soothed, more often, by tackling Third Quadrant work (email, anyone?) as a way to build up energy for the Second Quadrant work.  More often than not, time ran out that day before said energy was sufficiently mustered.

Which brings us back to the podcast.  Charles answered Brené’s “how” question with a discussion that almost stopped me in my tracks.  The method (not trick) to getting yourself to work on what you know is important instead of what is just urgent is….intentionality.  Seems obvious, no?  But it’s not the knowledge of the concept that is so earthshattering.  It’s putting it into practice.  “Intentionality” means, to me, making conscious and active choices instead of reacting.  It means be wholly present most of the time and being very purposeful in the choices you make—and owning the consequences of those choices.  Often it’s around your own Second Quadrant activities vs. Third Quadrant and that battle is difficult enough.  Other times, other people are involved.  You see, sometimes a need is important to someone else and not to you.  Whether or not you choose to do that thing requires thoughtful assessment of a number of factors, such as “Is there some benefit to me if I do this?” or “Is there some repercussion to NOT doing this that I want to avoid?” or “This person is important to me, so I’m going to do this to help them out.”  That takes energy when just DOING the thing often seems easier.  And if you choose to NOT do the thing?  Then there is the energy-sapping activity of confronting this person making demands on you.  Again, it is often easier to just do the thing.  But.  If you consistently spend your time on things that may be important to someone else and not to you, guess what?  You never get to YOUR OWN important things.  If you CHOOSE to do that—if you act with intention and purpose—so be it.  You’ve also chosen the consequences.

So, I’ve been noodling a lot on intentionality and how it relates to a sense of purpose.  Everyone knows someone, or has been that someone, who searches endlessly for a sense of purpose or happiness.  Maybe it’s the right job or the right partner or the right house or town.  The list of requirements is usually undefined; the person only knows when something is NOT what they are looking for.  It took a long time for me to understand that you don’t need to search for purpose or happiness EVERYWHERE; you can find it ANYWHERE—if you choose to live intentionally.  It is around how you choose to spend your time and energy each day.  It begins, of course, with the authenticity to embrace what is important to you and what might be keeping you from spending time on those things.  We’ve discussed before the steps required to make a change in priorities and a real commitment.  And now I understand the final piece: once you’ve truly aligned your priorities with what’s important to you and made that commitment, action and purpose come from intentionality.  Every day.

How is that working for me?  Well, I’ve started spending a few minutes most mornings capturing a few lines in my journal about what my intentions are for the day.  It’s usually a combination of tasks and mindset.  Reminding myself what’s important.  Sometimes I need a little reset, like today when our cat Beau inoculated the living room with breakfast trying to get out a hairball.  But I did indeed reset.  I took a deep breath and said, “What’s important to me today?”  At the top of the list was getting these thoughts out on a first draft.  Your sense of purpose does not have to have a big societal impact, although that’s wonderful if it does.  Your purpose can be to live honestly; to be kind and compassionate to everyone who crosses your path, stranger or friend; to be the kind of person people can depend upon; to spend the majority of your time on things that are important to you, even if some days that means reading an issue of the New Yorker cover to cover or helping good friends split wood from felled trees.  It’s about living consciously, not mindlessly.  My goal is to live that, with intention, every day.