Review

I’ve followed Chris Bailey for a long time. Within this book, there’s a bunch of great advice about how to structure your intentions and make your daily actions more meaningful. I’ve iterated on different approaches personally, and his approach matches my experience.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

The key to finishing what you start is becoming more intentional. Intention always precedes progress: every action begins as a mental plan. By understanding how intentions work and setting stronger ones, you dramatically increase your odds of follow-through.

The Intention Stack

Intentions vary in duration, from momentary impulses to lifelong values. They nest inside each other: your present actions feed into plans, which serve goals, which align with priorities, which express values. The more connected these layers are, the more naturally you'll follow through. An intention has a source, a duration, a strength (desire minus aversion) and depth (connection to what we value). Your self-reflective capacity; the ability to notice your default patterns and consciously choose differently, is what makes deliberate intention possible.

Values as Foundation

Values are your longest-term intentions, constructed from accumulated defaults. Schwartz's twelve fundamental values (self-direction, achievement, benevolence, security, etc.) arrange on two axes: self vs. others, and change vs. conservation. Goals connected to your values are more motivating and meaningful. Rather than chasing conventional success, define it as living true to your values: paradoxically, you'll often achieve more because motivation becomes natural.

Structuring Goals

Goal structure: Each goal needs three components:

• An outcome (the predicted result that motivates you)
• A process (the concrete actions that drive progress)
• A rate of progress (accounting for resource constraints).

Outcome goals provide meaning and excitement; process goals ensure a clear action plan. Both matter. When tackling something new, aim for 80% action and 20% planning… more planning than most people do, but the payoff is substantial because you're considering how goals fit across all levels of the Intention Stack.

Process goals should be compelling to do, and efficient (the most progress for the least amount of time, attention and energy).

Editing goals: Review weekly using three steps: review your inventory, update what needs changing, plan the coming week's actions. Adjust when goals are sepia-toned fantasies (you romanticise the outcome but hate the daily reality: like wanting to be a 5AM person while being a night owl), misaligned with your values (reframe to connect with what actually motivates you), or consuming resources better allocated elsewhere.

Key tactics: Use mental contrasting: visualise success, then systematically identify obstacles between now and achievement. Track desire curves, recognising that motivation fluctuates predictably across a goal's timeline. When aversion is high, shorten timeframes to make goals more tangible and less overwhelming. Drop goals that genuinely don't fit; this isn't defeat but opportunity, freeing resources for goals worth pursuing.

Managing Aversion

Procrastination is emotion-regulation, not time-management. Tasks become aversive when boring (make them more challenging), unpleasant (try aversion journaling or task pairing), frustrating (reframe as learning goals), far off (track progress, set milestones), unstructured (habit stack, add systems), or meaningless (perform values edits). Identifying which triggers apply tells you which countermeasures to deploy.

Amplifying Desire

Five antecedents generate desire: social norms (surround yourself with people pursuing similar goals), habit (repetition makes desire effortless), perceived control (feeling you can execute your plan), attitudes (values alignment makes goals feel natural), and expected emotions (how you anticipate feeling upon success or failure). Meditation and journaling help distinguish reactive thoughts from genuine signals about how you feel.

Deepening Goals

Add the value each goal serves to your inventory; this reminds you why goals matter and prompts refinement. Accept values that clash with cultural norms (pleasure, conformity, power); research validates these as legitimate motivations. Practice intentional indulgence, take values days after draining periods, and set trip wires to catch impulsive expressions of values that undermine longer-term goals.

Intention Rituals

Create "islands of intention": protected time to step back and chart your course. Use sequential productivity (always know your current and next task) or time blocking (chunk your day into predetermined blocks). Apply the rule of three: at any timeframe, define the three things you want to have accomplished. Let intentions nest; weekly informs daily, monthly informs weekly.

The System

Four non-linear steps: Shape (define outcome and process goals, nest under values), Act (block time, use rule of three, anticipate obstacles), Edit (address aversion triggers, amplify desire), and Maintain/Celebrate/Reflect (lock in achievements, note improvements). Build a goal inventory reviewed weekly, determine your top values, and connect with default intentions through mindfulness.

The Deeper Point

For everything you want to change, there's far more you don't. Your values (the foundation of who you are) were constructed from accumulated defaults. Intentionality isn't about overriding your nature. It's about stepping back, choosing where to go, then appreciating both who you're becoming and the wonder of who you already are.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 0: Elusive Goals

We all have goal graveyard. Following through on our goals long enough to make decent progress is challenging. How can we follow through on our intentions?

The key to finishing what you start is becoming more intentional.

Intention always comes first - it always precedes us making progress on our goals. You can practice intentionality - and set stronger intentions that lead to a much better chance of follow through.

We’re productive when we do what we set out to do.

Chapter 1: The Intention Stack

An intention is a mental plan to do something. Intentions can arise automatically from environmental cues, or through conscious thought.

Habits outsource the act of setting intentions to automatic processes within our brain.

Five Habit Cues: Time, Place, Preceding Event, Emotional State or Presence of Certain People.

Default intentions / habits aren’t enough to achieve most of our goals - we must set deliberate intentions.

Deliberate intentions are the ones we construct ourselves. Deliberate intentions keep us in control - and work on what we find important.

Our self-reflective capacity is our ability to look within ourselves so we can set different intentions from the ones we naturally feel inclined to set by default—while taking responsibility for and ownership of our actions.

Definitions:

• Productivity: doing what we intend to do
• Goals: what our intentions have the potential to lead us to
• Project: a goal with an endpoint.

An intention has a source, a duration, a strength (desire minus aversion) and depth (connection to what we value).

The intention stack:

Intentions exist relative to other intentions - and can be nested inside one another → an important aspect of follow through..

Intention durations: Values → Priorities → Goals → Plans → Present Intentions

In a perfect world, all our intentions would be routed in our own personal values. Not always the case, but there are 12 generic values that drive our actions: conformity, security, tradition, self-direction, stimulation, power, achievement, benevolence, universalism, pleasure, humility and face.

Be more mindful. Pay attention to the small actions you do by default. Notice default intentions are often fleeting. Slow things down enough and you’ll notice your default intentions as they appear. You can then become more deliberate about things.

Going for a walk can help you reconnect with intention - it can help with your self-reflective capacity.

If you want to work on autopilot less, become more intentional, and reflect on your future and plan for your goals more often, you need to activate your self-reflective capacity.

Chapter 2: Values

Values are your longest-term goals: broad, ever-present motivations that underlie everything you do. They're constructed from your accumulated default intentions and represent your truest nature.

The twelve fundamental values (Schwartz model): Self-direction, Stimulation, Pleasure, Achievement, Power, Face, Security, Tradition, Conformity, Humility, Universalism, Benevolence. These arrange into a circular structure where similar values sit adjacent and opposing values sit across from each other.

Two key polarities shape your values:

1. Do you prefer things stay the same or improve?
2. Do you prefer enriching others or yourself?

Your position on these axes predicts which specific values dominate for you.

Where values come from: Parents and caregivers are primary sources, transmitting values both directly and through modelling. Your social environment, socioeconomic context, and accumulated experiences also shape them. Values are remarkably stable over time but can shift when you enter substantially new environments.

The practical application: Goals connected to your values are more motivating and meaningful. The author argues for redefining success as living true to your values rather than chasing conventional achievement: you'll feel more successful pursuing what genuinely matters to you, and paradoxically often achieve more because your motivation becomes natural rather than forced. The most meaningful actions satisfy multiple values simultaneously.

Determining your values: Rank them by instinct or examine how you actually spend your time. A more rigorous option is the PVQ-RR questionnaire.

Chapter 3: Goal Editing

Goals are predictions, not guarantees. You control your inputs (actions and effort), not outcomes. Life's complexity means things rarely unfold as expected: your spouse gets ill, the water heater bursts, priorities shift. This isn't failure; it's reality. The trick is preventing predictions from hardening into expectations that breed frustration.

SMART goals debunked: Despite their popularity, SMART goals aren't research-backed. The framework originated from a 1981 business magazine article citing no research. Worse, emphasising "achievable" and "realistic" contradicts evidence that challenging goals produce better results. The criteria are also redundant: measurable goals are already specific; achievable and realistic mean the same thing.

Goal structure: Each goal needs three components:

• An outcome (the predicted result that motivates you)
• A process (the concrete actions that drive progress)
• A rate of progress (accounting for resource constraints).

Outcome goals provide meaning and excitement; process goals ensure a clear action plan. Both matter. When tackling something new, aim for 80% action and 20% planning… more planning than most people do, but the payoff is substantial because you're considering how goals fit across all levels of the Intention Stack.

Process goals should be compelling to do, and efficient (the most progress for the least amount of time, attention and energy).

Editing goals: Review weekly using three steps: review your inventory, update what needs changing, plan the coming week's actions. Adjust when goals are sepia-toned fantasies (you romanticise the outcome but hate the daily reality: like wanting to be a 5:30am person while being a night owl), misaligned with your values (reframe to connect with what actually motivates you), or consuming resources better allocated elsewhere.

Key tactics: Use mental contrasting: visualise success, then systematically identify obstacles between now and achievement. Track desire curves, recognising that motivation fluctuates predictably across a goal's timeline. When aversion is high, shorten timeframes to make goals more tangible and less overwhelming. Drop goals that genuinely don't fit—this isn't defeat but opportunity, freeing resources for goals worth pursuing.

Chapter 4: Ugly Goals: Lowering Aversion

Procrastination isn't a time-management problem—it's an emotion-regulation problem. It's a neurological battle between logic (hippocampus/caudate nucleus processing rewards) and emotion (amygdala/insula generating aversion). The more impulsive you are, the more you'll procrastinate; the more conscientious and achievement-oriented, the less.

Six triggers of aversion: Tasks become aversive when they're boring, unpleasant, frustrating, far off in the future, unstructured, or meaningless. Additional situational factors include resentment, lack of control, and tight timelines. Identifying which triggers apply to a specific goal tells you which countermeasures to deploy.

Countermeasures by trigger:

Boring → Make it more challenging. Research shows difficult goals are more motivating and lead to better outcomes than easy ones. Gamify tedious tasks, set artificial deadlines, compete against yourself.

Unpleasant → Increase enjoyment through aversion journaling (writing about why you're resisting, which is less aversive than the task itself), making goals others-focused, task pairing (podcast while exercising), or giving yourself a choice between two aversive tasks.

Frustrating → Reframe as a learning goal rather than a performance goal. Learning goals adopt a growth mindset where challenges become opportunities rather than threats, reducing anxiety and fear of failure.

Far off → Bring goals closer in time. Track progress against a pace line (target vs. actual on a chart), set near-term milestones with rewards, add accountability. Research shows we expect more future motivation than we'll actually have—our aversion level stays roughly constant.

Unstructured → Build systems that give you no choice but to follow through. Connect goals to existing habits (habit stacking), add rewards and penalties, use "habit points" where positive behaviours unlock indulgences. Set implementation intentions specifying when, where, and how you'll act—this creates automatic responses requiring no further conscious decision.

Meaningless → Perform values edits until the goal connects with who you actually are. Even dreaded obligations can be reframed to serve your core values.

Aversion is an invitation to diagnose and fix what's wrong with how a goal is structured. A little upfront effort designing around aversion saves significant energy over the goal's lifetime.

Chapter 5: Attractive Goals: Increasing Desire

Desire is the flip side of aversion: while aversion repels us from goals, desire attracts us toward them. Our net motivation equals desire minus aversion. Understanding what generates desire lets us amplify it deliberately.

The five antecedents of desire (from the model of goal-directed behaviour):

Social norms: The people around us shape our default intentions through contagion. If a friend becomes obese, you're 45% more likely to gain weight; if they smoke, you're 61% more likely to smoke. This works three degrees out: even friends of friends of friends influence you. Rather than auditing relationships (cold and unrealistic), mind negative contagion by noticing which habits you've unconsciously adopted, and embrace positive contagion by joining groups pursuing similar goals.

Habit: Once something becomes automatic, desire becomes effortless. Repetition at consistent times, places, and with consistent people transforms deliberate intentions into defaults. Goals with predictable aversion spikes become manageable as the underlying behaviours habituate.

Control: What matters is perceived control: feeling you can execute your plan. Every tactic in the book (goal editing, values alignment, reframing as learning goals, adding structure) increases this sense of control. In the moment, always have an intention behind what you're doing that connects to something important.

Attitudes: Whether you think favourably or unfavourably about a goal, shaped largely by values alignment. Goals that fit your values feel natural; misaligned goals feel like obligations.

Expected emotions: How you anticipate feeling upon success or failure. These emotions drive action and avoidance. Many of our thoughts about goals are reactive chains rather than genuine signals: meditation and journaling help distinguish noise from intuition, letting you connect with how you actually feel rather than just your automatic thinking about goals.

Aversion flows upward from tasks, blocking action. Desire flows downward from values, enabling it. Goals sit in the middle as the conduit between daily actions and deepest motivations. When goals feel meaningless, they're disconnected from values at the top; when they feel distant, they're disconnected from actions at the bottom.

Chapter 6: Deeper Goals

Deep goals connect your daily actions with your highest values, making them expressions of who you are rather than mere tasks. When you observe yourself manifesting values through action, meaning isn't found: it's made.

Complete your goal inventory: Add the value(s) each goal serves. This simple addition reminds you why goals matter during weekly reviews and prompts ongoing refinement of the value-goal connection. As you discover better fits, update the value header: shifting a financial independence goal from "self-direction" to "security" reframes your entire motivation.

Accept your "wrong" values: Some values clash with cultural norms, creating needless guilt. Pleasure/hedonism, stimulation, conformity, and power can all feel transgressive in individualistic Western contexts. The research validates these as fundamental human motivations deserving investment, not suppression.

Intentional indulgence: If you value pleasure, schedule indulgence deliberately: block evening time, curate what you'll watch/eat/listen to, anticipate it throughout the week. Deliberateness crowds out guilt.

Selective stimulation: If you value stimulation, choose clean-burning sources (challenging games, running clubs) over empty digital hits that compromise focus. Multitasking feels stimulating but takes 50% longer.

Conformity and power: Both have legitimate places despite cultural messaging. Conformity includes self-discipline and honouring obligations. Power dynamics exist in every group; expressing it skillfully while respecting others' values (especially self-direction) matters.

Values days: After draining periods, block time structured entirely around your top values. Post-travel, take a full day off to invest in self-direction. These function as "meaning days" that make demanding work sustainable.

Increase time awareness: Track your time in 30-minute blocks, noting which value each activity serves. Alternatively, habit-stack a brief values reflection onto an existing routine (brushing teeth, weekly review). Look at your calendar to anchor recall and identify incremental improvements.

Trip wires for conflicting values: Values expressed impulsively (hedonism, stimulation, achievement, power) can undermine longer-term goals. Insert friction: move the plant in front of the TV, delete saved credit cards, change passwords to unmemorable strings, enable distraction blockers. These create self-reflective loops before autopilot kicks in. You can still honour the value: just through different, more deliberate channels.

Chapter 7: Intention Rituals

Intentions are slippery: they're strongest the moment they're set, then erode through internal forces (aversion, lack of desire) and external ones (emergencies, resource constraints). The solution is creating "islands of intention": protected pockets of time where you step back from activity to chart your course from quieter ground.

Effective intention rituals share three qualities:

• They help you step into your future self's shoes to define what you'll have accomplished,
• They work across multiple time frames that nest into each other
• They’re simple enough not to consume time better spent on actual progress.

Interstitial techniques (moment-to-moment):

Sequential productivity: Always work with two things in mind: your current task and your next task. Keep both visible (whiteboard, text file). When you veer off course, use it as a prompt to evaluate whether your original intention really is most important. Keep a "distractions list" to capture impulses for later. Works best for maker schedules with autonomous time.

Time blocking: Chunk your day into predetermined blocks, grounded in knowledge of what's important. If traditional time blocking feels constraining (as it did for the author, who values self-direction), try "rolling time blocking"—define all blocks and durations at day's start, but only schedule the next few as you go, preserving a sense of control.

• Time blocking principles: Cap focus blocks at 90 minutes (matching natural energy cycles), schedule 20-25% of your day as breaks, consider "theming" days to reduce context-switching, and label blocks as "focus sprints" versus "casual work" to calibrate intensity.

The Rule of Three: At any time frame (day, week, month, quarter, year), ask: "By the time this period is done, what three things will I want to have accomplished?" Three is optimal: few enough to force prioritisation, memorable enough to hold in mind. Let intentions nest: weekly intentions inform daily ones, monthly inform weekly.

Getting started:

• Establish a daily intention-setting ritual, morning or evening.
• Define broader time frames for planning (weekly review, monthly reflection) and protect those islands.
• Accept that estimating task duration and available resources takes time to calibrate: hold goals loosely and adjust.

Predetermining what you'll work on creates freedom and confidence in the moment. Guilt, doubt, and worry about how you're spending time evaporate. You become your own logistics coordinator, freeing attention for presence and progress.

Chapter 8: Putting It All Together: A System for Achieving Your Goals

The four-step process (non-linear)

1. Shape: Define outcome goals (predicted results) and process goals (actions), set rates of progress, nest goals under their corresponding values. For aversive goals, make process goals shorter and more specific with if-then implementation plans. Watch for traps: sepia-toned fantasies and resource overcommitment.

2. Act: Block time or use sequential productivity. Apply the rule of three across time frames (day/week/month). Practice mental contrasting to anticipate obstacles.

3. Edit: Chart desire curves for larger goals. Address aversion triggers systematically:

• Boring → increase challenge
• Unpleasant → aversion journaling, make it others-focused
• Frustrating → reframe as learning goal
• Far away → track progress, set milestones with rewards, add accountability
• Unstructured → habit points, habit stacking, add structure

For desire: mind social contagion (limit negative, amplify positive), tap self-reflective capacity through meditation or journaling, track time across goals and values. Set trip wires for counterproductive habits.

4. Maintain, Celebrate, Reflect: Lock in achievements as maintenance goals, add to an accomplishments list, reflect on improvements for next time, celebrate in ways aligned with your values.

Building a system: Create a goal inventory reviewed regularly, establish a weekly goal review ritual, determine your top values, practice intentional indulgence and values days, and connect with your default intentions through mindfulness—appreciating who you already are before deciding what to change.

Conclusion: Enjoying Your Defaults

Learn to marvel at your defaults rather than fight them.

Meditation practice can transform when you shift from frustration to curiosity: wondering where your mind will take you, what concerns will surface, what surprising thoughts will arise. This same curiosity applied to mindfulness reveals how elegantly your default intentions guide you through walking, cooking, showering: complex behaviours executed without conscious thought.

The deeper point: for every thing you want to change, there are many more you don't. Your values: the very foundation of who you are: were constructed from accumulated defaults. Previous goals have become habits still producing dividends. You're getting far more right than you need to fix.

Intentionality isn't about overriding your nature. It's about stepping back, choosing where to go, then appreciating both who you're becoming and the wonder of who you already are.