Values-based living means using your personal values to guide how you spend your days, rather than steering by goals, output, or whatever feels most urgent. This guide covers what that means, where the idea comes from, and some small ways to start practicing it.

What values-based living means

A value is a direction you want to keep moving in, like to care for my health. A goal is something you can finish, like run a 10k. You can check off a goal, but a value is a way of showing up that continues whether or not anything gets finished. For more on the difference, along with definitions for 50+ values, see our list of personal values.

Values-based living is when those directions get a say in your everyday decisions. That includes the big ones, like where to live or whether to take a job, and the small ones too: what to do first this morning, whether tonight is for work or for family, and what can wait until next week.

The alternative is living by default. Without deciding to, most of us steer by some mix of urgency, other people’s expectations, and habit. None of those are bad on their own, but we didn’t choose them, and over time they can take us somewhere we didn’t mean to go.

Where the idea comes from

The version of values-based living described here comes mostly from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an approach to psychology developed by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson starting in the 1980s. It reached a wider audience through books like Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap. Therapists use ACT for a range of issues, including anxiety, depression, and stress, and Psychology Today’s overview of ACT is a readable introduction.

In ACT, clarifying your values and taking small actions guided by them is one of the core processes. ACT’s view is that acting in line with what you care about can make a day feel meaningful, even when the actions are small and the day is hard.

What changes when you live this way

Success looks different. A goal-driven day tends to be pass or fail: you hit the target or you didn’t. A values-driven day asks whether you moved toward what matters, given the day you actually had. On a day with a sick kid and a plan that fell apart, being patient and present counts.

You have a way to break ties. Most prioritization advice assumes you already know what’s important and need help putting it in order. Values help with the earlier question. When two tasks compete for the same hour, asking which one serves something you care about can be more useful than asking which one is more urgent.

Hard feelings don’t have to stop you. In ACT, you don’t need to feel motivated, calm, or confident before doing something that matters to you. You can feel anxious and still make the phone call, because courage is something you value. The Passengers on the Bus worksheet works through this idea, treating the thoughts and feelings that pull you off course as passengers on a bus you’re driving.

How to start living by your values

  1. Name around five values. Our guide to identifying your personal values walks through three exercises, or you can go straight to the Sort Your Compass Values worksheet. Five is enough to cover most of your life and few enough to remember.
  2. Let them shape your day. Each morning, or the night before, pick a small number of things worth doing. For each one, identify which value it serves. If nothing on the list serves any of them, that’s useful to know in itself.
  3. Reflect for a couple of minutes. At the end of the day, or the next morning, ask how the day felt and how well your actions matched what you care about. The aim is to notice, not to grade yourself.
  4. Adjust gently. If one value never gets any of your time, or your list rarely touches any of them, adjust tomorrow. The Toward and Away Moves worksheet can help you look closely at one value, and the Bull’s Eye shows which areas of your life might be drifting. It’s also worth revisiting the values themselves a few times a year.

What values-based living is not

A productivity method in disguise. The aim is alignment, and sometimes that means doing less, resting on purpose, or letting an ambitious week shrink to protect something that matters more. If a values practice keeps telling you to work harder, the values may be worth a second look.

Only about the gentle values. Excellence, courage, and challenge are values too. Sometimes living by your values means taking on something hard and ambitious, because it’s something you chose.

A demand for dramatic change. You can live more by your values in the same job, home, and schedule you have now. Most of it happens in small, everyday choices.

Practicing it in APPA

APPA is built around this same loop. Choose up to five values and plan your tasks with the values behind them. A 2-minute daily reflection asks you to think about how the day felt and how aligned your actions were with your values. Over time, you can see whether your days are pointed in the direction you want.

APPA is the productivity app that wants you to do less.

→ Try APPA today