The Guide to a More Time Intentional Life

Updated: 06/10/2026

My grandmother, Janet, always wanted to go on a cruise. As she approached her 63rd birthday, she'd finally started planning the trip she had put off for the first 62+ years of her life. She never got to go. She passed away suddenly before she had the chance. My grandfather and Janet’s husband, Dale, passed away suddenly 10 weeks after her. The heartbreak of sudden loss rippled through my world back-to-back.

Several years later, my papa (grandfather) John retired. He'd spent decades working toward that finish line, looking forward to the family time waiting on the other side of it. When I sent him a text on his last day as an employee to congratulate him on his impending retirement, I asked him what he would do with all his newfound free time. He responded, “Thank you - it will be Family time” with a capital “F.” He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer shortly after and passed away at 64.

My grandparents didn't run out of time because they were careless with it. They ran out of time because time runs out — sometimes without warning, sometimes right when you thought you'd finally earned the chance to enjoy it.

I started TIME INTENTIONAL because of them. And because I spent years believing the same thing most of us believe: that the good part comes “later.” After achieving the right job title, after marriage, after buying a house, after the kids are older, after retirement. We treat our lives like a waiting room, convinced we aren’t living fully until we have time autonomy.

But it doesn’t work that way. There is no promised “later.” The only time we have is now.

Living intentionally isn't about optimizing your schedule or becoming more productive. It's a philosophy and ongoing practice for creating a meaningful life.

This guide will help you do that.

Most people who look for advice on how to be more intentional end up in the trenches of productivity systems, time management “hacks,” and optimization techniques. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these things (knowing how you spend your time and using it wisely does matter), these are the wrong answers to the question. Productivity, time management, and optimization address how to spend your time more efficiently, not why you spend it the way you do or whether you are spending time on things that actually matter to you.

The former doesn’t help us answer questions like:

• Am I living in alignment with who I am and what I value?
• How can I stop "going through the motions" and be more present?
• Am I savoring passing moments or wishing time would pass more quickly (only to wish it hadn't run out so fast?)
• How can I honor my life story and experiences in a way that feels meaningful to me?
• When it's all said and done, will I feel content with my choices and the life I've built?

The pursuit of intentional living requires a broader look at your life before you get to how you spend your time. That’s where a TIME INTENTIONAL way of living comes into play. TIME INTENTIONAL is a philosophy for living fully, rooted in the belief that a meaningful life isn't something you earn in retirement, because it may not come. It's something you build, day by day, within the constraints and circumstances of the life you have here and now.

A TIME INTENTIONAL life is one in which you understand what matters most to you, and make choices, however imperfect and constrained, that reflect that understanding. It’s personal and doesn’t look the same for everyone. It isn’t an easy-to-follow five-step process with some clear path from point A to point B. It’s a practice of ongoing self-examination and exploration: noticing where your days are going, asking whether that’s where you want them to go, and making small, deliberate adjustments to inch you closer to a life well-loved. At the root lies a reminder that time is precious, unpromised, and non-refundable.

It’s also not about getting it right all the time. (There’s no “perfect” way to live, after all!) A TIME INTENTIONAL life isn’t a perfectly optimized one, but rather an examined and deliberate one that honors the one thing we can never get back: our time.

The TIME INTENTIONAL philosophy and practice begin, almost always, in the same place: with your values.

Your values are the most heart-driven signal you have about what actually matters to you. But it’s important to uncover your values, not what matters to the people around you or what you think you should care about based on what others say, but what actually matters to you in this specific season of your life.

Most people don’t examine their values enough, or even know what their values are at a deeper level. It’s not uncommon to make decisions by default, shaped by habit, expectation, and whatever feels urgent in the moment. Value work interrupts the “autopilot” way of thinking and gives you a reference point to make better-informed decisions and take aligned action.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Your values embody who you are and what’s important to you. If you struggle to identify what these things are, work backward and look for points of friction, frustration, and times in your life you’ve felt passionately about a topic.
• Values help us make deliberate choices. Knowing your values alone doesn’t automatically make your life feel more intentional; it just means you will have the information you need to make value-aligned choices when you are able.
• Your values can — and likely will — change over time. (This is normal!)

While it can be tempting and even fun to choose your values words from one of several values lists available, start with your own experience to uncover what comes naturally. Sit with these questions:

• Think of a moment in the past year when you felt most alive. What were you doing? What values were you honoring?
• When do you feel most like yourself?
• What makes you angry or gets under your skin? (Frustration can signal value misalignment)
• Who do you admire, and why? What values do they embody?
• If you had one year left to live, what would matter most?

With those reflections in mind, identify the 10–12 values that feel most true to you right now. Here, it might be helpful to research values lists and exercises if you need help finding the right words to add to your values list.

Once you have your list, sit with it. Ask yourself why each value made the cut and what it means to you specifically. Words like “achievement,” “community,” “curiosity,” “faith,” “integrity,” “legacy,” “leisure,” and “security” are great examples of values words, but they mean something different to everyone. You should outline and define these words and how they feel and appear in your life (or how you want them to feel and appear in your life). The more specific you can be, the better. 

Then, narrow down your list and identify your top 3-5 values in this season of your life. I encourage creating longer lists of 10-12 because some of our values are traits (e.g., integrity, curiosity, kindness) that stick with us throughout our lifetimes. In contrast, others might feel more season-specific and require more of our time (e.g., maybe friendship is high on your values list in your early 20s and falls slightly lower on your list for family in your early 30s as you redirect your time to starting a family). 

Now it’s time for some even deeper self-reflection. Don’t skip this step! For your top 3–5 values, ask yourself honestly:

• On a scale of 1–10, how well am I currently living this value?
• What's getting in the way — external barriers, internal resistance, competing priorities?
• What's one thing I could do to prioritize this value in the near term?

The goal is merely awareness, so don’t worry if your scores feel low. Knowing where the gaps lie is the first step toward closing them, so be honest with yourself, without judgment.

One part we don’t talk enough about: the values you identified today are not permanent. Your values will shift as your life does, and that’s completely okay. (That’s also why we must revisit and review our values and how we are spending our time.)

Loss, career changes, health diagnoses, becoming a parent, milestone birthdays, moving somewhere new — any of these can reorganize what matters most to you. And it doesn’t necessarily take a major life change to cause a change in values, either. What was a 10 at 25 might be a 6 at 45, and something you barely thought about might move to the center.

This is why values work isn't one-and-done.

With a clearer picture of what you value and where you're living out of alignment, you have a filter for your decisions that helps you practice a more TIME INTENTIONAL way of living.

In practice, that looks like asking questions like: Does this reflect what I actually value right now? Which option aligns most with who I want to be? What tradeoffs am I making, and am I okay with them?

This doesn’t automatically make every decision easy. But it will make more of your decisions intentional — which is the whole point.

Download the free TIME INTENTIONAL Values Workbook to work through all five steps with dedicated space for reflection, a full values word bank, and prompts to help you identify misalignment and plan your next steps.

Below are some additional values resources I love:

• The New Happy Values Wheel (free download) from my friend Stephanie Harrison
• The Values Bridge, scientifically validated values assessment, from Suzy Welch
• Brené Brown's Dare to Lead List of Values (free download)
• There are several digital card sort exercises available, like this one from think2perform or this one from TruU Psychology

Values clarity is the foundation, but it's not a quick fix. The gap between knowing what you value and actually living your values puts most of us in a messy liminal space. That gap doesn't close all at once. It closes incrementally through small, imperfect choices made over time.

A few things that tend to matter more than people expect:

• Paying attention to how you actually spend your time — not how you think you do. We believe we prioritize what we value, but an honest look at a typical week can tell a completely different story. Try a simple audit: for one week, track how you spend your time in rough blocks. Then hold it up against your values list. Where do they match? Where don't they?
• Acknowledging the trade-offs. Every choice about how you spend your time is also a choice about how you don't spend it. A TIME INTENTIONAL life can raise your awareness of this tension. But when you're clear on what you value, you can make trade-offs consciously rather than by default, and live with them more honestly.
• Allowing your definition to evolve. A TIME INTENTIONAL life looks different at 22, 50, and 87. The philosophy stays constant — build a meaningful life now, don't defer it — but the specific shape of that life will shift as you do. Stay curious and open to change along the way.
• Resisting any sense of perfection. An examined life is not a flawless one. You will spend time on things that don't matter. You will say “yes” when you should have said “no.” You will reach the end of a week wondering where it went. That's not evidence you're doing it wrong because there are no right or wrong answers here.

The best time to start living more intentionally is now. You can be more intentional with your one, precious life you already have if you’re brave enough to start.

That's what TIME INTENTIONAL is about: inspiring a practice you return to week after week, season after season, for as long as you have the time.

Which, as my grandparents taught me, is never quite as long as we think.

Subscribe to TIME INTENTIONAL — a free weekly newsletter exploring what it means to live fully, right now, through honest reflections, curated resources, and ideas worth sitting with. Written by Alyssa Towns, in honor of her grandparents, Janet, Dale, and John.