How I Learned to Work (and Live) More Intentionally

You know those people that rarely speak, but when they do, the whole room goes quiet for them? It’s usually because you know that person has thought about what they're going to say, and their statement carries value. 

I always aspired to be one of those people. I always admired intentionality.

Struggling with mild social anxiety and generally being a little awkward growing up, I was very good at doing the opposite. I would often buy things I didn’t really need, talk way too much so there wasn’t empty space in a conversation, and so on.

While I am far from the anxious little girl I once was, I spent the last 6 months or so, changing the way I lived and worked to be more intentional. Here was my process: 

1. Declutter my mind. 

I deleted almost every app on my phone. If the app did not make me better as a person (i.e. alerted me of news or improved my mental health), I got rid of it. We often don’t notice how many notifications we get a day from apps and accounts that don’t actually improve the way we live. I found that I had grown complacent in letting these useless things take up valuable mental space. I was much more productive in my work and at home. 

2) Declutter my physical space. 

This one took a lot longer. From my bedroom to my office cubicle, I basically “Marie Kondo”-ed everything. But instead of doing it in one weekend, I visited the exercise once a week for multiple weeks. I was amazed at what I would throw out or give to a coworker week after week, realizing that I really didn’t need/want most of the items I kept in my workspace. 

A couple of months ago, I thought I needed all these trinkets on my desk, but why? I never looked at them or touched them. So many of the things I kept in my workspace I put there to match those like the desks around me. I’m all for fitting into a corporate culture, but as long as your workspace isn’t distracting, you should be intentional about how you surround yourself.

3) Push myself to reach out to connections I thought were “unreachable”.

Sometimes, we reach out to people on Linkedin or even in-person for the sake of “having a network”. It feels good knowing you’re connected to people. But what good is that unless you actually find value in those that you surround yourself with? 

For example, I felt like I really understood how to connect with students, but was a little scared to reach out to people in the tech industry. Students were always receptive to my messages, but tech always had this reputation of being hard to reach and calculated in their relationships. So what did I do? I held a whole event in San Francisco around mental health and business. Most of the attendees? Tech and social impact professionals. Part of living intentionally, I was finding, was facing some of my biggest fears. 

4) Forgive myself. 

When I first started out trying to live more intentionally, I didn’t anticipate having to go through this step. I found that many of the reasons why I avoided certain actions or tried to fill certain empty spaces were because I wasn’t willing to either face my past failures or fail once more. 

Say a project didn’t go your way, a team member yelled at you mid-event, or you totally bombed an interview (all of which I’ve gone through). I found that those memories often kept me from revisiting those activities, and I would tell myself that I would go back to it “eventually”. But that just meant that in the meantime, I would fill up my time with often meaningless tasks that I convinced myself would help me later on. The only thing stopping me from taking risks was my inability to address what went wrong, how I was going to improve, and what project I truly wanted to take on next. 

I’m a work in progress. But I hope that sharing what I’ve gone through in the past 6 months or so may be of value for anyone trying to take on new risks, to make a major life decision, or for those that just feel stuck in their search for what’s next. This process led me to move cities, change jobs, and I’m a lot happier now. Comment below if you have any tips on how to live and work more intentionally!