What does it mean that alignment between commitments and values?

Commitments that serve your core values are easiest to maintain.

Example: You have two commitments that demand roughly equal time each week. One is a side project building tools for a cause you deeply believe in — open-source education for underserved communities. The other is a networking group you joined because a mentor said it would be 'strategic for your career.' Both are scheduled. Both have structural supports. Both are well-scoped. But one runs almost effortlessly — you look forward to the sessions, protect the time without being asked, and recover quickly when you miss a week. The other requires willpower every single time. You negotiate with yourself before each meeting, feel drained afterward, and have nearly quit three times. The structural architecture is equivalent. What differs is alignment. The first commitment serves a value — equity in education — that you hold at your core. The second serves an instrumental goal that someone else defined. When a commitment plugs directly into what you actually care about, the motivational infrastructure is already built. When it does not, no amount of scaffolding compensates for the missing foundation.

Try this: Create a two-column document. In the left column, list your five to seven deepest values — not goals, not aspirations, but the qualities and directions that matter to you regardless of outcome. Use Schwartz's value domains as prompts if needed: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism. In the right column, list every active commitment from your commitment review (L-0678). Now draw lines connecting each commitment to the value or values it serves. Some commitments will connect to multiple values. Some will connect to none. For every unconnected commitment, answer honestly: is this commitment serving a value you forgot to list, or is it genuinely disconnected from anything you care about? The unconnected commitments are your highest-risk items — they are the ones that will require the most willpower to maintain and will be the first to fail under pressure.