Most people hear "live intentionally" and picture a mood. A candle-lit morning routine, a slower Sunday, a nicer notebook. That's not wrong, exactly — it's just incomplete. Living intentionally isn't a feeling you either have or don't. It's the sum of hundreds of small decisions, repeated often enough that your life actually looks different a year from now than it does today.
Which means the real work isn't the mood. It's the check-in.
The check-in most people skip
Here's the thing about small decisions: made on their own, none of them feel like much. You skip a workout, you say yes to a project you don't care about, you let a goal quietly slide off your list — any one of those is nothing. It's only when you zoom out that the pattern shows up.
That's what a check-in is for. Not a vague "how am I doing" — an actual pause where you look at where you are against where you said you wanted to be, and decide if you need to adjust.
I ran this exercise for myself heading into September this year. Four months left in the year is a strange, useful amount of time — long enough to actually finish something, short enough that it forces you to be honest about what's realistic. So I asked myself a blunt question: is there anything I could actually accomplish by December 31st?
That question sent me back through the whole year. Not just "what are my goals" in the abstract, but specifically: what did I say I wanted at the start of the year, or somewhere in the middle, that I haven't touched since? What quietly got pushed to the back burner? What have I maybe even forgotten I said I wanted? And separately — what's already sitting top of mind, waiting for me to just start?
Out of that list, I landed on two things that were genuinely feasible to finish before the year ends. Not ten. Two.
The point isn't to find things to feel guilty about. It's to separate what you actually still want from what you were just carrying out of habit.
How to run your own year-end check-in
- Anchor to a real date, not "someday." Vague timelines protect you from ever having to actually check in. Pick something concrete — the end of the year, the end of the quarter, your birthday — and use it as the deadline you're measuring against.
- Look back before you look forward. Before adding anything new, go through what you already said you wanted. Goals from January, things you mentioned mid-year, plans that came up in passing and never got revisited. You're not judging yourself here, you're just collecting the full list.
- Sort what you find into three piles. Some of it got pushed to the back burner and needs to be pulled forward again. Some of it you'll realize you'd genuinely forgotten about entirely. And some of it is already top of mind — you don't need to rediscover it, you just need to start.
- Choose two, not ten. This is the step people skip, and it's the one that actually matters. A list of ten goals with four months left isn't a plan, it's a way to guarantee you finish none of them. Pick what's realistically finishable in the time you actually have.
- Close the loop when the deadline hits. The check-in isn't finished when you pick your two things — it's finished when you come back at the end of the window and look honestly at what happened. Did it work? Did it not? That's the part that turns this into a rhythm instead of a one-time burst of motivation.
That loop — decide, follow through, see the result, reflect, decide again — is the actual mechanism behind "living intentionally." Not a mood. A repeatable habit of paying attention to your own life on purpose.
If you want a slower, more reflective read on rethinking how you spend your time: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman makes the case that because our time is genuinely finite, the goal was never to fit everything in, it's to choose well.
The reminder
You don't need a new personality to live intentionally. You need a date on the calendar and the willingness to actually look back before you plan forward. Pick two things. Follow through. Check back in. Repeat.
Here's to the next four months. — Tomi
Until next time,
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