Back when I was just out of college and working for the Arizona Game and Fish Department as a field tech collecting data, my outdoor pursuits all had some real, tangible purpose. Every day out had a series of objectives and a lot of planning and care went into these days.
I would start out looking at what data needed to be recorded; sometimes it was rating miles of cattle fenceline stretching across the chaparral and desert grasslands, sometimes it was measuring ground flora species and height at a series of randomly-generated GPS waypoints. It almost always required hours of driving into remote locations and miles of cross country hiking and bushwhacking. The lead-up to each day in the field involved a lot of looking at maps and layers in ArcGIS, plotting routes and guestimating terrain.
It wasn’t until SOTA did I regain that purpose for adventuring out into the unknown.