How to Use Beyond Time for Values-Goal Alignment: A Walkthrough

There’s a gap between the values you identify in a journal exercise and the values that actually govern your calendar.

Most people know this intellectually. They’ve done the values work — they can name what they care about — but when they look at their actual week, the time distribution doesn’t match the priority structure they’d describe.

This walkthrough shows you how to use Beyond Time (beyondtime.ai) to make that gap visible and, over time, close it. The tool doesn’t set values for you. But it shows you whether your schedule is currently expressing them.

Before You Start: What You Need

One thing, done in advance: your operating values expressed as short phrases, not single words.

Not “creativity” — but “original thinking work that I can’t automate or delegate.” Not “relationships” — but “deep one-on-one time with people I’m genuinely building something with.” Not “growth” — but “skill-building that expands what I’m capable of, not just what I know.”

If you haven’t run the Values Triangulation yet, do that first. The walkthrough will be substantially less useful with generic vocabulary.

Aim for three to five operating values. Fewer is better — you want clean distinctions between categories, not a taxonomy with fifteen entries.

Step 1: Enter Your Values as Tags

In Beyond Time, navigate to your goals and values settings. Create a tag for each of your operating values, using the short phrase format you developed above.

Keep the labels concise enough to apply quickly during planning — you’ll be tagging events and tasks daily, so friction here compounds. “Deep craft work” is better than “Original thinking work that I can’t automate or delegate” as a tag label, even if the fuller phrase is what you mean.

Add a note to each tag with the full description. This matters when you’re reviewing monthly data and want to remember what you meant — especially six months from now when the tag labels have become automatic.

Step 2: Run Your First Planning Session

In your next morning planning session, work through your day as you normally would — pulling in tasks, placing meetings, identifying priorities.

Then, before you close the planning session, tag each scheduled block with its associated value. Ask yourself: what operating value does this time express?

Some blocks will be easy: a focused writing session clearly expresses your deep craft work value. A 1:1 with a direct report expresses your people development value.

Others will be harder. A 90-minute internal meeting about a compliance process might not express any of your values cleanly. That’s an important signal — not that the meeting should be cancelled, but that it’s maintenance work rather than values-expression work.

Tag maintenance work explicitly. Create a tag called “maintenance/operational” to capture time that’s necessary but not values-expressive. This lets you measure the ratio without pretending that all time should be values-tagged.

Step 3: Review the Weekly Distribution

After five to seven days of tagged planning, look at your values-time distribution report.

The questions to ask:

Are any values completely absent from my schedule? If a value you identified as high-priority has zero tagged hours in the past week, that’s the most important signal in the report. It doesn’t always mean you need to make dramatic changes — sometimes a week is genuinely dominated by maintenance — but consistent absence across multiple weeks is diagnostic of a structural problem.

What’s the ratio of values-expressive time to maintenance time? There’s no universal right answer. But most people find that when values-expressive time falls below 40% of their working hours, their motivation and satisfaction start dropping. If you’re at 20%, the distribution needs examination.

Which values have the most time? Compare this to your internal sense of your values priority structure. If your highest-priority value has the least time in your schedule, the discrepancy is almost certainly producing some form of friction you’ve been attributing to other causes.

Step 4: Use the AI Planning Assistant to Realign

Beyond Time’s AI assistant can work with your values data to help redesign your upcoming week.

The most useful prompt:

Here is my values-time distribution from last week: [paste data]
Here are my operating values in priority order: [list]

My highest-priority value had [X] hours. My lowest had [Y] hours.

Help me plan next week so that the distribution moves closer to my stated priorities.
Given my fixed commitments (which I'll paste below), suggest where I might add or protect time for my top two values.

Fixed commitments: [list]

The AI can’t restructure your organization or eliminate mandatory meetings. But it can identify white space you haven’t protected, suggest time-swaps, and flag overcommitments that are systematically blocking your highest-priority values.

Step 5: Run a Monthly Values Coherence Check

Once a month, run a longer review prompt:

Here is my values-time distribution over the past four weeks: [paste data]

Here are my operating values: [list]

Questions I want you to help me answer:
1. Is the time distribution drifting toward or away from my stated values over these four weeks?
2. Are there specific recurring time costs that are consistently blocking my top values?
3. Is there a mismatch between the goals I say are my priorities and the time I'm actually spending on them?
4. What one structural change would do the most to improve values-time alignment next month?

The month-over-month view catches drift that a weekly review misses. A single week can look like an anomaly. Four weeks of the same pattern is a signal about your default operating mode, not a temporary deviation.

What This Walkthrough Doesn’t Cover

This is a planning and review workflow, not a values discovery tool. Beyond Time helps you execute and maintain values alignment once you know your values. It doesn’t help you surface them in the first place.

If you’re still uncertain about your operating values — if the tags you’d create feel arbitrary or borrowed — do the diagnostic work first. The Values Triangulation process in the complete guide takes about an hour. Run that first, then return here.

The tool is most powerful when the input is specific and honest. Generic tags produce generic data. The more precisely you’ve articulated what you actually care about, the more useful the distribution report becomes.

Action: Before your next planning session, write down your three highest-priority operating values and create tags for them. Even one week of tagged data will show you something useful.

Related:

• Complete Guide: Personal Values and AI Goal Setting
• The Values-Based Goal Framework with AI
• Values-Driven Founder Case Study
• How to Align Goals with Values Using AI
• Intentional Living Frameworks with AI

Tags: Beyond Time, values alignment, daily planning, time tracking, intentional scheduling