Squared Away Life

A tactical approach to stewardship

Handle well what you have been given.

Stewardship is caring for what belongs to someone else, according to the owner’s purposes rather than your own. Your mind, your days, your work, your money, your body, and the people in your life were all given to you to tend, and one day you will hand them back with whatever increase they gained. This site supplies the tactical side of that work: the systems, rhythms and reviews that keep each one aimed, so what you meant to do survives a busy week.

Start here

Nothing you manage belongs to you

You are a steward, entrusted with a great deal and owning none of it. That leaves you real authority, and it settles the governing question: what return does the owner get? Everything else here stands on that ground.

Plays in the corner, and it keeps going while you read.Watch on YouTube ↗

The foundation, stated plainly →

What has been entrusted

All the domains of life rest on one foundation

Your thinking, your time, your money, your body, your work, and the people in your life belong finally to God, who entrusted each of them to you for a time. He will ask what you did with them, and the faithful steward is glad to answer.

Nobody brings the same energy every day. Systems and the right conditions are how a creature with limits keeps each of these aimed where it was meant to go.

Why these six, and to whom they belong →

The horizon

You cannot schedule an afternoon to settle your legacy. It accumulates out of a million ordinary moments, handled well or not, and what it amounts to is what you hand back.

What outlasts you →

A place to start · The daily review

A few deliberate minutes a day keep the work aimed.

This is the discipline that keeps me fixed on the process rather than on how a given day feels, and it keeps my work aimed at what I have been entrusted to do. It is short and repeatable: capture what matters, resurface what you wrote a week, a month, and a year ago, and reconnect today’s work to what you actually value.

It does two things that resolve alone does not do well. It spares you the work of remembering, which nobody sustains for long, and it puts you back in front of what you said mattered on a day when you may have forgotten. Over years it also leaves something behind: work, decisions, and commitments other people can pick up and carry, rather than a name.

This is the system I run, every morning.

The podcast

Latest episodes

All episodes →
17:50

Nothing You Manage Belongs to You

What is stewardship, and what changes when you actually believe it? A steward runs a household that isn’t his. He has real authority. He spends money that isn’t his and makes decisions nobody reviews one by one. The one thing he doesn’t have is ownership. Almost every piece of advice about your time, your money, and your health assumes you are the owner, and once you assume that, only one question

07:22

The Go Bag Principle: Be Ready Without Thinking About It

I just got back from a hunting trip with my family, and I leave on a business trip this afternoon. Both run on the same idea, borrowed from the survival world: the go bag. One bag holds everything, so when it is time to move you remember one thing instead of a hundred. In this short episode I show how that works in two places. In the garage, labeled crates packed by job rather than by trip. On the

55:28

When Your Side Business Passes Your Salary — Kip Bucey, MPI-K9

Most people who build something on the side never find out whether it could replace their job. My brother did. For thirteen years Kip Bucey worked at Collins Aerospace: an intern bugging people about overdue training, then a buyer of parts for human spaceflight, including the Orion capsule on Artemis I, and finally a site lead responsible for a business unit of about 200 people. During this time, h

The newsletter

Every week I send one thing worth keeping.

It goes to people handling what was entrusted to them: their thinking, their time, their money, their body, their work, and the people in their care.

Subscribers also get the pre-publication edition of The Compounding Mind, free while the book is still in draft.

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