A PhD Examined: Being Intentional

How Approaching Life with a Clear Purpose Made Things So Much Better

8 min readSep 22, 2024

When I first started grad school, I would get a lot of ideas throughout the day. Ideas for research, ideas for home improvement, ideas for fun, etc… I rarely acted on any of these ideas, let alone saw them through to completion. Writing this series of articles started out as such an idea, but I acted on that one. Why? The difference is that during my PhD program I learned to better manage my tasks (more on that in a later article). I learned that even random ideas may be made into something good one day.

When I started this better management approach, patterns emerged of things I wanted to do in my life. It became easier to think of the big picture, to think of long-term goals. After I started thinking in a goal-oriented way, my level of satisfaction rose significantly. I was feeling a lot more fulfilled. When I took some time to reflect on why that may be, the answer I came up with is the feeling of doing things with a purpose, the feeling of being intentional.

My Experience

Before grad school forced me to become better organized and think deeply about how I spend my time, I stumbled around trying different approaches. What all my approaches had in common was a lack of vision: they were all meant to put out fires. My task lists contained the latest, most urgent things I needed to get done in the short term. All the long-term planning and half-baked ideas were kept in my head. The inevitable result is that I rarely gave time to long-term planning and almost never developed my ideas to full fruition.

My previous approach worked well enough for day-to-day performance but it didn’t help my feeling of fulfillment. I ended each day wondering whether I had done enough work, whether it had been a good day. In contrast, when I started planning things with more intention, with an eye on big-picture goals, I was able to end each day feeling a lot better about myself because I knew how my activities for the day served my more overarching purpose.

To give a more concrete example from my current personal life, I’ll talk about things I like to learn. I’m an avid learner and am always eager to learn something new. Before I learned to think about the big picture, I would come across a new concept that I liked and would try to learn it for a week or two. I would then drop it when it got difficult and move on to something else. These days, the topics I try to learn are tied to one or another of my life goals and I approach the learning with the explicit intention of wanting to use the new skills for a specific purpose (that purpose can be simply to grow my knowledge in a particular area I’m interested in). With this in mind, I take meticulous notes on what I am learning and stick to a regular schedule; most importantly, I see the learning through to the end.

Being intentional doesn’t only help me at the big-picture level. It can help with the structure and organization at every level. Take the example of this article series; I have several purposes in writing it. One of my purposes is to help others benefit from my experience. This led me to the decision of how to structure it. As I mentioned in the introductory article, I laid out the broad strokes for all the different aspects first so that readers who were starting a grad program can get a quick glimpse of all the different topics. After that, I would build depth by doing more focused articles on the different topics.

The Benefits of Intentionality

This is the part where I get into armchair psychology, so please bear with me. In my opinion the biggest benefit of being intentional and doing things with purpose is that it instills in one a sense of control. Approaching different areas of your life with a clear goal in mind, planning for it, and working towards it puts you in the driver seat instead of the passenger seat. And please don’t mistake me, I understand that no matter how well you plan, most of what happens is beyond your control. I don’t think that matters, because you still get a feeling of satisfaction from controlling the things you can rather than just reacting to life as it happens. As for the things beyond your control, see my thoughts on how stoic philosophy can help with that.

Ever since I became aware of the concept of the locus of control, it resonated with me. My understanding of it is that it’s your impression of where control in your life resides. If your locus of control is external, it means you believe most of the things that happen to you are due to events beyond your control. If it’s internal, you believe that what happens to you is due to your actions. The context I first heard of this idea was improving motivation by giving praise. The advice I read was to praise people’s (especially children’s) hard work rather than intelligence. It’s suggested that when you praise a child’s intelligence, they tend to develop an external locus of control (my success is due to intelligence, an accident of genetics and nurture) but when you praise hard work, the child develops an internal locus of control (my success is due to my actions). Studies suggest that an internal locus of control is associated with better emotional stability, a finding to which I can add my own personal data point.

Intentionality and Grad School

Seeing how important the feeling of intentionality is to me, I wanted to explicitly talk about how it has affected each of the four big aspects of my experience that I discussed earlier.

Social Aspects

In a previous article, I discussed how I was reluctant to start seeing a counselor and what finally got me to cross that barrier. Afterwards, re-framing the act of going to therapy as part of my greater concern for fitness and well-being (it’s just like going to the dentist!) helped me keep the habit of talking to a therapist whenever I felt the need. It also turned journaling to a regular habit with a purpose: to purge all my concerns and causes of stress so that they didn’t have to keep bouncing around in my head.

Intentional thinking also helped put me in a position where I was lucky to meet my life partner. Instead of just thinking that I wanted to meet someone, I thought with more purpose: I needed to widen my social circle and meet more people with similar interests to myself. When I started doing that, I put myself in more situations where I was likely to make more friends and meet new people and that’s how I eventually met the woman who became my wife.

Technical Aspects

Technical concerns in my grad program were what drove me towards intentional thinking to begin with. I needed to find a direction for my work so that I didn’t just stumble from day to day not knowing whether I was correctly working towards finishing my degree. Once I started to have more clarity of vision, it was much easier to organize my work around goals: write an article draft, finalize work on that research question, write my dissertation,…

Thinking intentionally also led me to create workflows and automations around the routine stuff so I could free myself more for the big-picture things that paid off in the long run. It guided me in choosing the right productivity tools that fit my needs (example: I knew I needed privacy, security and ease of use for my note-taking and knowledge management software).

Logistical Aspects

Intentionality is logistics in my opinion. I try to organize my life top-down: I start with vision and bigger goals and move towards smaller, more manageable things in the service of those goals.

As a more concrete example, it led me to my way of managing e-mail complexity. It also led me to the way I’m trying to manage my finances: zero-based budgeting is all about giving “every dollar a job” in your budget, making it intentional by construction.

Beyond Grad School

Intentionality has helped me in the job hunt because it made me set a clear timeline for when I needed to find employment and how long before that to start applying. Starting with the purpose of being respectful and professional to my interviewers made me ensure that I kept close track of each job application so that I wouldn’t waste anybody’s time, including my own.

Intentionality still helps me today in structuring my work habits and my road map towards career advancement. This lets me rise above the mundane details of my day-to-day work and keep the job interesting.

Time Planning

Even though time planning can be thought of as part of logistics, I want to give it its own section because it’s a topic that I think about a lot and have tried different ways to go about it.

A common advice I have seen in several different places is to use time blocking. This is the approach of dividing your day into blocks of time and assigning something to each block (including time off, sleep, lunch,…). Some people go so far as saying you should have a plan for every minute of your day. This is intentional thinking taken to the extreme. I naturally gravitated towards that advice. I never went as far as planning for every minute but I did try time blocking. From my experience, it doesn’t help all that much. I find that a better approach that works for managing my time is to select a small set of tasks from my to-do list and make those my goals for the day.

For big-picture time planning, I found that having some broad goals for every quarter of the year is really helpful in guiding me towards my goals. I practice this both at work and in my personal life. I’m still on the fence about whether planning things for each day of the week in advance is helpful.

All of this is to say that intentional thinking is not necessarily helpful when taken to the extreme and that the way you structure and plan your life has to be what makes sense for you and your personal situation and matches the rhythm and style of your work.

Concluding Thoughts

Going to grad school has led me to discover many things about myself, chief among them that I thrive on intentional thinking. I hope I managed to make a case for how it has had a big positive impact on each of the big four areas of my grad school experience.

I invite you to try and add more intentionality to your own life, both professionally and personally, to see if you too get more fulfillment out of your life this way.