Be Intentional: The Trifecta of Living Your Best Life

I can’t and I won’t tell you what the best life looks like for you. 

Only you can decide and create that life.

But I can give you the trifecta of living a more intentional life, through productivity, mindfulness and purpose.  

Before you continue…

A disclaimer and disclosure in the name of transparency.

DISCLAIMER I’m not a financial coach or a financial service provider. What I will share in this article is a combination of knowledge I learned from personal life experiences, from people in my life, and books I’ve read. What worked for my family doesn’t guarantee that the same will work for you too. Consider reaching out to financial advisors if you need professional help with your financial situation.

DISCLOSURE: This post contains Affiliate links which means I earn commissions at no cost to you, if you use these links to make purchases. See Full Disclaimer here 

What does being intentional means? 

Being intentional means directing your thoughts, actions and decisions towards a specific result, purpose or outcome. 

Intentional living is a lifestyle where mindfulness, awareness, and conscious efforts are used, to align your behaviours with your personal core values and purpose. 

Instead of being on autopilot, you make deliberate choices and take a proactive approach in taking the most of your precious resources such as time, money and energy. 

it also means prioritising only the essentials and letting go of the rest. 

The trifecta approach 

When I started blogging, I only wanted to be better with productivity and be consistent with making intentional actions. 

It didn’t take me long to realise that I can be more with less. 

So I decided to focus only on 3 important areas in my life. 

This is the trifecta of being intentional. The powerful trio that covers everything I need to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. 

So if you want to experience the beauty of living on purpose, you’ve got to use this trifecta. 

You just need to be intentional with 3 things (not really things but you know what I mean). 

1. Money 
2. Time 
3. Lifestyle

The work-life balance 

I hate to break it to you, but the perfect work-life balance isn’t real.

It’s doable but not sustainable.

You cannot be a perfect parent, a perfect employee and entrepreneur at the same time. Something has to give and you’ve got to make compromises sometimes. 

I’m a mum, a wife, an employee and a blogger. 

Even though I know that I cannot be the best at everything at the same time, I’m passionate about showing up and living the best version of myself in those roles. 

I also love taking care of my mental health and making time for my passion. (blogging). 

If you’re living in the same similar situation, then you know how important it is to maintain a reasonable (not perfect) work-life balance.

You can do this through intentional decisions and intentional habits. 

Remind yourself that a perfect work-life balance doesn’t exist, so be happy with a healthy compromise instead. 

Through the trifecta of money, time and purpose, you’ll find fulfilment and meaning in your everyday life.

We can do it together.

Life ebbs and flows

By all means, aim for intentional days but also appreciate the fact that there’s no perfect life. So no matter how hard you try, there will be days when you won’t be intentional at all.

Be ok with that. You are a human after all.

At the end of the day, you’re still winning. You get to experience intentional living with its ebbs and flows. An experience that will help you grow a little each day.

You get to be great with money, be intentionally productive and live on purpose. 

1. Money Mindfulness 

Money mindfulness goes beyond your bank account balance.

It’s about being conscious of what you think, how you feel, and what you do with your money. 

And the easiest way to do this is by paying attention to your personal finances. 

​Be intentional and make time to manage your personal finance.

The blog collection about Money Mindfulness will help you: 

• keep a positive money mindset
• improve money management skills, and
• become a mindful consumer

Practise money consciousness 

Develop a healthy relationship with your money. 

Make time each day to review, and identify areas where you can be more intentional with your money. 

A great place to start this practice is to use this Guide to Money Consciousness for Creating Abundance. 

Build intentional money habits 

Since your actions heavily influence your results, you need to build intentional money habits, if you want to be intentional with your finances. 

For example, you can include setting intentions, when you do your morning routine. This can set the tone in your day for intentional choices related to money. 

Review your budget regularly.

Set better goals about money.

When I say better goals, I mean meaningful goals. These are goals that are aligned with your values. Not goals for other people and certainly not the goals based on what society expects you. 

​Practise intentional spending

If you want to manage your budget better, try intentional spending. This will help you spend less than what you earn. 

You’ll not only achieve your financial goals a bit faster, but you’ll also help the economy and the environment. 

​That’s amazing, isn’t it? 

You’re doing something for the world by just being a mindful consumer.

Try a no-spend month

​The best way to reset your spending habits is to try a no-spend month challenge. During no spend month, you commit to avoiding non-essential purchases and focusing on your financial goals. 

This project is so good, that it will not only boost your savings, but it’ll also help you find the creativity, and resourcefulness you didn’t know you had. 

It’s one of the simple ways to develop an intentional approach to spending. 

2. Intentional Productivity 

​Intentional productivity plays a crucial role in making the most of your time and efforts. 

It’s part of the management strategy that promotes doing the important thing and letting go of a few less important activities.  

By practising the principles of intentional productivity, you can truly be intentional with your time, energy and resources. 

It’s an effective way of focusing on what’s important and letting go of the less important.

It’s not the only way, but it’s definitely a great way to complete your tasks, manage your projects and achieve your goals. 

In short, practising intentional productivity is doing the right things, at the right time for the right reason. 

Practise intentional planning

You can’t control time. 

Whether you do something or you do nothing, the clock will continue ticking. 

You can’t even add hours in a day. 

It will always be a 24-hour period every single day. 

But you can control what you do with your time. 

And the easiest way to do that is to practise intentional planning. 

Be intentional with your time

Time is like money. The wiser you are with it, the better it works for you. 

Do you often think that you don’t have much time? That was me too, until I became intentional. The reality is you can have enough time if you make time.

It has a lot to do with your mindset about time. If you think you have limited time, then your actions bend towards that thought. So keep your thoughts in check.

Go through the 8 ideas on how to be intentional with your time and implement one idea at a time. 

Use Notion Weekly Planner 

If a digital planner is your style, try this Free Notion Weekly Planner. It’s accessible anywhere you are on different devices. This Planner is thoughtfully designed by an intentional person (ahem, that’s me) for another intentional person (hey it’s you).  

Use this to create an action plan so you can create an intentional and productive week. A simple Planner that will help you organise your tasks, goals and priorities. 

Create a planning routine for your productivity

What you do in your own time is up to you, but it’s always a good idea to establish some kind of self-accountability and structure.

Create a planning routine for your productivity. 

And this is not only for your one-time projects but for everything that you do. 

Establish a systematic approach to organise and manage your tasks so you can be efficient and effective. 

​Plan your week to be productive 

I mean plan your week to be intentionally productive.

Make it a habit to plan your week to have a clear picture of what your week looks like so you can adjust accordingly. 

This will help you get the right things done, make space for fun or creativity and achieve your goals.

Here’s the 7-Steps Weekly Planning Process to a Productive Week

If you’re not into weekly planning, you can try the Quarterly Planning Process. I love this because I get to reset four times a year. 

​Planning for three months is too much for you? 

You can do monthly planning instead. Here’s how to set monthly goals with 33 monthly goals examples.

Make things happen through weekly reviews

GTD or the Getting things done method is created by David Allen. This is one of the books that hooked me into getting stuff done. 

By applying the GTD method, and infusing intentionality into my own system, I’m able to enjoy free time without guilt and work harder only if I want to. 

The true essence of intentional productivity is spending time on the right things for the right reasons. It means you work when you work and you rest when it’s time to rest. 

A lot of people (including me) find it hard to do, but doing weekly reviews can help. 

Self-reflection will let you know if you’re creating a healthy balance between work and rest.

If weekly review is a bit too much for you, why not do a 2-minute reflection when you do your evening routine?

3. Living on Purpose 

I want to be honest with you. 

Living on purpose is hard. Choosing an intentional lifestyle can sometimes test your boundaries, it can even challenge your core values. 

But I promise it’s so worth it. 

By living on purpose, you : 

• become self-accountable 
• can make time for important relationships
• take ownership of your journey and treat your life like a serious (and fun) business
• make the most of your daily life
• don’t only work for the sake of getting to the end goal but also for the sake of enjoying the process and experiencing the journey
• also focus on personal growth and self-development 

Embrace a successful mindset

Embracing a successful mindset promotes a proactive approach to life challenges and opportunities. 

​Believe that you can and you will. 

Achieve those goals, big and small. 

Maintain the optimism and the excitement. 

​Make a habit of creating a daily intention that will help you align what you do with your personal values. 

​Here is a collection of tips that will help you achieve success in life.

Live on purpose 

Living on purpose is empowering and encapsulates everything and all the things that make a meaningful life. 

​I gathered 9 ways to live on purpose.

Go through each idea, pick one or two that jump at you the quickest, and implement. 

Live your life one week at a time

You won’t believe it, but I’ve been planning and reviewing my week for 8.6 years now. 

I always put this marker: #450weeksofgratitude near the mini calendar in my planner. This is a part of my weekly pages in my Bullet Journal. 

The number 450 indicates the week number I am on so it changes every week.  

I’ve had amazing weeks and not-so-good weeks. I even had blank weeks. 

Living life one week at a time is my way of dealing with a busy life.

By prioritising events, appointments, and weekly tasks one week at a time, I find it less overwhelming to manage life and business.

It’s an intentional commitment that made a difference in my life. But I’ll admit, I’ve only been genuinely intentional in the last 4 years. The other 4 years were a blur of stress and self-sabotage. So not intentional.

Here is a collection of weekly goals and ideas to live an intentional life.

Build good habits 

Create and build helpful habits for a happy, rich and productive life. 

Because honestly, you can have the best plan you can ever come up with, but if you don’t support it with helpful habits, it’ll be hard to execute your plan successfully. 

Be organised

If you want to save money, time and resources, the first step is to be organised. Not crazy organised but organised enough according to your own standards.

You can have an organised to-do list that you can refer to daily. Create systems, workflows and maintain a check list.

There are so many good things coming from being organised. 

You can:

• ​save money, time and energy
• lessen stress and reduce overwhelm
• boost your productivity 

I’ll give you an example: 

I am an intentional Blogger. To save money, I created a list of the Blogging Tools I use, which I regularly review. I assess if I need to let go of anything. This way, I don’t pay for something I don’t use. If a tool doesn’t serve me and my purpose, it has to go. 

​Be resilient 

Life will always find a way to surprise you. 

Sometimes it’s a good surprise, and sometimes it’s a bad one.

And being intentional doesn’t exempt you from living like a normal human being. Being intentional will not take away the lows and leave you with the highs only. You’re getting both no matter what.

There are times when you’ll be lonely too. 

And sometimes you’ll feel discouraged and defeated. Ahhh this feeling is so familiar. 

Here is what you can do when What to do when feeling discouraged and defeated

Do the next thing

Hooray!!!

​I think, for now, you’ve got enough resources to apply the trifecta of intentional living. 

I’m so proud of you for investing time to learn more about intentional living. 

And you have no idea how grateful I am for you, for choosing my website to learn more about living on purpose. 

Did you know that you just took the first step on the clear path of living with intention? 

You’ve read the blog.

That’s the first step.

So the next step is to grab your freebies from the Freebies for you Page. 

Then you can check out more resources from ieSHOP.  It’s a collection of digital products thoughtfully created with love for another intentional person (yes it’s you). 

I’ll leave you with a very important question.

What would you like to focus on right now?

If you’re not sure, it’s ok. I got you. You can Start here.