Living intentionally

I still check my phone before I make coffee. It is a terrible habit, and one I try to break every few months, but I want to be honest with you up front. For all the systems I have built to keep my life on track, the small defaults still get me. The problem with a default is that it is just a decision you made once and never bothered to update. Where you live, who you spend your weekends with, what app you open when you wake up. You think you are choosing these things every day, but mostly you are just running on momentum. It is like when I started in sales at a PR agency back in Stockholm. Everyone around me advised against taking a commission-only job, but I did it anyway. My colleague Fredrik Bage told me I would be good at sales, and I believed him. We eventually co-founded Mediapilot together. If I had listened to the default advice of seeking a safe salary, my entire life would look quite different. I have spent the last fourteen years trying to fight that passive momentum. Sometimes I win. Often I lose.

You think you are choosing your life every day, but mostly you are just running on momentum.

The year the defaults broke

In my early thirties, I stepped away from the momentum entirely. I packed a bag and travelled around the world for a stretch. This was before you could easily bring your entire office with you in your pocket, which meant I was largely disconnected. No morning inbox checks, no recurring meetings, no standing dinner plans. When you remove all your defaults at once, it feels deeply uncomfortable for about a week. You realise how much of your day is usually dictated by other people's expectations. Then it feels like a massive relief. You wake up in a new time zone and have to actively decide what to do with the next twelve hours. Are you going to walk down a specific street? Are you going to sit in a cafe? Are you going to talk to a stranger? That trip taught me that you can rewrite the script at any time, but I also learned that you cannot live in a permanent state of wandering. Eventually, you have to build a life again. You have to choose new defaults, and you have to hope they are the right ones.

The two-year plan that never ended

Take where I live right now. Back in 2018, I moved my family from Sweden to Marbella. The plan was to stay for two years. We wanted better weather, a change of scenery, and a break from the Stockholm winters I had known since I came back from university in the States. We are still in Spain today. It would be easy to say we just drifted into staying, but we stayed because we actively chose the lifestyle here. When Fredrik and I were building Mediapilot, I learned how easily work can swallow every other part of your existence if you let it. We grew that company over roughly seven years and created more than a hundred jobs. I am proud of that. But I also know what it costs to operate on that kind of automatic overdrive. Living in Marbella forces a different rhythm on me. I play tennis often, and badly. I sit down for proper food and wine with my family. The environment acts as a physical defence against my own worst workaholic defaults. If I was still sitting in a dark office in November in Sweden, I know exactly how late I would be working.

The spreadsheet that tells the truth

Since about 2010, I have kept a written life plan to force myself to look at these patterns. Every year, I sit down and rate five categories out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. It is a brutally simple exercise. If my health score drops from an eight to a five, I cannot blame the universe. I have to look at what I have been eating, how many hours I have been sleeping, and how much time I have spent sitting at my desk working on Anchor or Substrat. If my personal time is a three, it means I have let my diary fill up with other people's priorities. When I was working on the commercial side at Happeo, understanding these numbers kept me grounded. The numbers do not lie, and they do not care about my excuses. They force me to see the difference between what I say is important and where I actually spend my hours.

The truth is, I still get this wrong all the time. I build AI tools for a living, which means I spend far too much time staring at screens. I still get caught up in the stress of a product launch, my angel investments, or a difficult week, and I forget to call my friends. I realise intentional living sounds like a calm, perfectly balanced state of being, but in practice, it is mostly just catching yourself making a mistake and trying to correct it before it becomes a habit. I haven't got this figured out entirely. I do not think anyone really does. I just try to make sure that when I look at those scores out of ten at the end of the year, the mistakes I made were at least my own.