One consideration for me is, if the activities that come along with a purpose do not feel like obligations, but instead excite and energize me, it is a worthwhile endeavor.
One example: I was chatting with folks in an organization I volunteer for, about supporting a school in a remote location in Africa. My career work including running remote workshops, involving packaging equipment - servers and laptops to client location or a hotel and self up a self-contained environment to run the workshop. However, one big issue was that location might only get power for 12 hours a day.
Long story short, a few of us ended up doing some research and came across a solution which packaged chrome books, a server, and wireless router running off a battery in a single case. Open source software (Internet-In-A-Box, which has copies of many educational internet sites along with various courses and lesson plans) was loaded on the server. Since I had the most tech skills among the group, I had the tasks of conference calls with the folks providing the solution, receiving the equipment case, testing it out locally, loading a custom class the organization wanted to add, and shipping it to another location for loading onto a shipping containers. To many this might sound like work, but in truth it energized me. The few problems that popped up were interesting to to resolve, and knowing the bigger picture that this was something that would ultimately benefit a school location made none of the work feel like an obligation - but, that is just me.
