Purpose is often mistaken for motivation. It may be more useful to think of it as a hierarchy: a way of deciding what deserves your attention before everything else begins competing for it. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a day in which you did almost everything except the thing you meant to do. By late afternoon, the day has been nibbled away rather than spent. A message that seemed impolite to leave unanswered turned into a whole thread. A “quick qu