Intentional: How to Finish What You Start

by Chris Bailey

From author of Hyperfocus and productivity expert Chris Bailey, a new approach to finishing what you start.

Most of us have no problem setting goals. We know what we want, and we have a pretty good sense of what it takes to get it. But consistently making progress until we’ve reached that goal? Now that’s the hard part.

In Intentional, productivity expert Chris Bailey presents a new and better way to accomplish your goals. It turns out, the secret to finishing what you start isn’t willpower or the latest productivity hack—it’s intentionality. Your deepest intentions, says Bailey, are your greatest motivating force. By structuring your goals around the things that matter most to you—whether that’s feeling secure in your job, having autonomy over your decisions, or being in community—getting things done becomes second-nature.

Drawing from the latest productivity research, Bailey offers practical strategies for doing just that, showing how
Structure goals to increase the likelihood of completionMake unappealing, boring, or frustrating tasks more attractive to do Lower the chance of procrastinating on long-term goalsCreate a system for tracking progress Know when a goal isn’t for you—and when it’s time to let it go
Ultimately, Intentional shows that finishing what you start is more possible than you think.

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help, Business, Productivity, Personal Development, Psychology, Education

272 pages, Hardcover

Published January 6, 2026

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love productivity. Love, love, love Chris Bailey. This book admittedly started out slowly for me, but, by the end, I was highlighting entire paragraphs. He documents those things that I learned the hard way, through trial and error, and could never find a way to synthesize as clearly as he does. If you're passionate about goal setting or you want to be, check this out. You won't be disappointed. Great content and simple and direct writing from a totally cool, gracious, good-hearted human.

[Sydney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know about you but I plan and have huge ideas on what I’d like to accomplish but the execution doesn’t always happen 🙈

This book laid out clear ways to create goals that align with our values, how to track goals and how to keep our goals relevant and up to date as life changes. There were gentle reminders that goals are not always linear and often bounce around steps so keep your eye on the larger picture as well as all the details.

I found I walked away with lots of suggestions and ways to follow through on my intentions! This book is perfect for the new year and creating attainable goals.

Thank you to Random House Canada for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book at the beginning of January – kind of a perfect way to start the year. This book is simply a support to help you, as the title says, finish what you start, but it so much more than that.

It starts simple:

“An intention is simply a mental plan to do something.”

Then the author starts to dive in – speaking to our intentions and getting you thinking about your values, moving to goal setting and editing – and working on goals that both excite and bore us. It took me a while to get through this book – not due to lack of interest. I wanted to read a chapter, let it sink in, work on my own plan before moving to the next. The order of the chapters moves smoothly and helps build on your plan; let you adapt and adjust as you move through it. I have so much fun in books like this, reading and rereading, highlighting what stood out to me. I learned so much about myself, the way I think and what is important to me.
 
I wanted to share just a few things (not giving too much away) that really stood out to me:

The discussion around SMART goals – this gets thrown around all the time and I found this research fascinating.

Focus hours – how much time you have in the day to focus on complex things

Procrastination – a built-in impulse (this made me feel better as a pro procrastinator)

Task pairing – such a simple thing but something I already do in some ways

I could go on and on but really what I am saying is read this book! Everything might not be for you, but I think you would be hard pressed to not find something that you relate to (hello Friends reference 😊). I also loved that at the end; there is a recap to redirect to you to the pages where you learned about all these fun things. Highly recommend to anyone just looking to reset on their intentions and goals for pretty much anything.

Huge thank you to Random House Canada

[MK · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intentionality has been a buzzword in spiritual circles for a while now, so I was very interested when I had the ability to get this review copy of a book that's about task management and goal setting. This has been something that's been a challenge for me so I like the idea of tying them into my spiritual practice. That isn't quite how it ended up working out in the book, although the author's meditation practice grounds the premise.

The key concept is the intention stack, which is a way of looking at where your goals sit in terms of your priorities and values. By tying these to goal, as well as planning in advance what to do when you avoid tasks or they don't feel as important as when you set them. (The Desire Curve.) In particular, looking at your core values then mapping goals and tasks to them made a ton of sense. I also found switching goals from outcomes to processes to be really helpful for me. I found the ideas easy to follow and the book is engaging, with the author putting in examples from his life to illustrate how it works. The final chapter summarizes the book in a system that you can use on the daily.

This book has already made a massive difference in my life. One of the things the author suggests to do when you're finding it challenging to get to your tasks is to rearrange your space. I did and it massively changed my overall mood. So thanks!

[Alexandra Tower Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely reframed how I think about goal-setting—especially the connection between my values and the goals I build around them.

Through thorough research and compelling (often humorous) examples, Bailey delivers a practical, approachable guide to building, achieving, and sustaining both small and ambitious goals. There were so many thoughtful tips woven throughout that I genuinely became more productive while reading it. Thank you Random House Canada for the ARC— truly a great read!

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to this as an audiobook. I did learn some things from this book. Many of these types of books just say the same things. What I learned: 1. align your actions with your values rather than relying solely on willpower. 2. define the goal, which is different from the outcome that you will measure. 3. define the process that will get you to the outcome and therefore the goal.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent installment from "Canada's productivity expert"! If you've read his other volumes, this one might seem a cumulative offering. To read Chris Bailey is to be given immediately valuable and salient information. It is a master class in cutting the literary crap out without sacrificing value for readers. As with his other books, he writes about how he actually uses the tools he writes about. I've been fortunate enough to interview bestselling Canadian authors, be taught by prominent activists, work along senior leaders in national corporations, as well as with municipal and regional politicians in my hometown. It taught me that not everyone prioritizes this in their praxis. At the risk of vulgarity, opinions and advice are like a**holes in that everyone has one. Few prioritize taking their own advice (even I struggle with this at times), so knowing that Bailey's life is a lab for the advice he shares with readers is an important marker of expertise for me. What people derive authority from, absent of this important facet of expertise is a big deal, and way I hold information up to the light of critical thinking/consuming. He walks readers through the nuances of how he applies his own work to himself, and what worked, or didn't. We don't just get a glimpse of a few ideas to help us work better. Bailey gives readers a system, inclusive of a way of thinking about the work they do: it matters greatly and you deserve to be happy on the journey (or as he calls it, the process goals). It's not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but it is refreshing. If you're feeling pressed for time or are in a season where everything is a little bit TL;DR, the back of the book sums up the system (a contiguous feature of his work) so you don't miss out on the best parts of the material.

Most of my notes on the book were spurred by the depth of the first fifty pages. Whether it's my ADHD or something else, I'm unsure. What I do know though, is that when it comes to abstract, and big picture thinking, I revel in new ways of thinking. Bailey definitely had me considering my own systems under the light of the idea of intentionality, where it wasn't just a want to do something, but a trigger for action. It showed me that not only are intentions contextual, but they are different from goals ever so slightly. Seeing them in a different way, as Bailey delineates, was a helpful way to consider my own goals but moreso my intentions. For example, this year I have fairly ambitious plans to learn more Hindi, exercise as much as possible to run at least a 35km run (between two major surgeries for my transition), learn some songs on a thrift store guitar for storytimes at work, as well as make sure I'm doing my mantras in the morning and evening to keep my soul and compassion elastic to face the demands of the day, as well as spending as little as possible this year ("no spend 2026"). I made some decent progress for the first week, but am reconsidering my strategies and approaches after assessing how I felt trying to accomplish those through the first two weeks of 2026. Reviewing those goals under the auspices of intention, Bailey is giving me so much to reflect on. To be clear, goals can make us seem a little self-obsessed (or a lot in some cases), for those who do not equally understand the need to express ourselves through them. Bailey reminds readers that: “This is the power of noticing your default way of being. The sum of our default intentions provides us with a default way of living” (p. 21). It cuts right to the heart of it: you don't know what you don't know. This is our best learning curve and our fiercest challenger when it comes to setting positive intentions. Bailey's book reminded me of the stark difference between self-awareness (which critics may eschew as self-obsession), and self-indulgence (neglecting values, humanity, compassion, empathy and more) in goal setting, productivity, and achievement. Intentional helps readers learn more about their habits that they are otherwise unaware of so they can better accomplish the outcomes they hope for. If not the outcomes, then at least they smooth out the goal processes so that rather than the goals making them better via accumulation of achievement, iterative processes transform them into better people along the way.

One of the more mic drop resonant parts of the book for me, was its focus on values and goals. It reframes goals so that they are values, but in motion instead of static indicators. Intentions are the triggers that remind us of our values, which facilitate the action required to turn all of that into goals. Nearly ten years ago now, I made a "Lamp post" goal book that was based on my attempts to run up to 5km. I would be running on city trails and remind myself when I felt like my soul was ascending and I might meet with my maker "just make it to the next lamp post" which turned into a way I began viewing goals altogether. In this book I also demanded of myself to write why I wanted to achieve whatever goal I set my sights on, and why I thought it would be achievable (aka: what or whom was around me, and what power did I have to make this possible even if only through sheer acts of determined grit and will?). Bailey says it so much more eloquently than this and with far more insight I wish I had in 2014:

“Simply put, values are our true nature. In this definition, the word “goals” is also worth touching on. Goals and values are commonly viewed as different things, when in truth our values and goals are much the same. Values are goals, but ones that take place across a very long time frame. If you squint your eyes and turn your head a bit, every value is eerily similar to a goal in that it is something we desire to accomplish–only more broadly and over the course of our lives. Values are our ultimate goals and serve as an articulation of what we are really after in our lives” (p. 27).

Values are your why and much like the intentions above, they make our default what it is. Absent of this insight, goals and productivity can be about as useful as Formula One race car tires in the middle of a Southern Ontario winter (which is to say, we won't get very far). I enjoyed the pause to consider competing values, and whether or not any goals I have are deleterious or cause friction with one another such that they frustrate my accomplishment energies. Thankfully that is not the case for my personal goals, but when I pull back and look at the lifetime vista of values where goals are specks on the horizon, Bailey gave me a moment to appreciate the view of the things yet to be. If nothing else, this was a great takeaway from the book. Gratitude isn't just a little thank you, pithily stuck in the midst of something; It's a value that elevates your vista. Maybe I'm too particular about it, but the gratitude expressed to feign intimacy or give ourselves a dopamine boost feels cheap in comparison to the value woven through a lifetime and as a way of being because it covers a whole bunch of other "traits" that are a natural offshoot: humility, listening more deeply, easygoing nature, inquisitiveness, flexibility, an inclination to wonder and awe, and more. In other words, if you look at James Clear's advice in Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, you might feel like you want to rush to become the kind of person who in order to be worthy of your goal. Bailey's nuance is a beautiful layer to this where the enduring principle of values guide you to become that without the effort that sounds like a pair of shoes in the dryer.

Who might I recommend this book to? Anyone who cares enough about their goals, values, and subsequent intentions as Bailey writes them to find inspiration. If someone's looking for the quick wins I don't think I would recommend this to them, simply because they will be frustrated by its big picture view. The world we live in may be changing our neurology to be excellent at the short term view, but there's something truly incredible about the steadiness of a well contemplated and carefully considered long view that is like rocket fuel to the short term. For many people, talking about goals can be about as exciting as Melba Toast and I would recommend this book to them, because of how it's less results oriented and far more process focused (the results are reflective of the process). It promotes a way of thinking about goals which is entirely different from seeing them as existing somewhere beyond the quotidian. After reading Intentional, I can confidently say that he didn't get the title of Canada's productivity expert for nothing!

[Selena Soo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Practical Guide to Finishing What You Start

I’ve always been drawn to books like Essentialism that help us focus on what truly matters. Intentional builds on that spirit—but instead of just doing less, it helps you actually follow through.

My favorite insight is Bailey’s idea that every goal contains both desire and aversion. We want the result, but we resist parts of the process. He offers practical ways to work with that tension—like journaling about what’s creating resistance and finding ways to make the task more engaging or rewarding.

If you care about meaningful productivity and finishing what you start, you'll love this book.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 1/6, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.

[Ananya Saravanan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook

[Bridgette · Rating 5 out of 5]

*well-written, easy to read
*informative and very educational
*highly recommend