It is really sad that people still start the discussion about algorithms by telling it as a sequence of actions or operations to accomplish a task. How to go to airport is not an algorithm, how to cook food is not an algorithm.
While I agree "following instructions" !== "algorithm", it does serve as a decent bit of context to people who are COMPLETELY unfamiliar with computing let alone programming.
It provides them incorrect context, if you really want to provide context then start with long addition which everyone understands and tell them that it was the first algorithm they learned. Physical activities are not algorithms, algorithms are sequence of calculations on data and there are many many examples that people know about that they learned in elementary mathematics and that can serve as the proper context.