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 you will answer for how you did. What this site supplies is the tactical side of that: the systems, rhythms and reviews that keep each one aimed, so what you meant to do survives a busy week.

What has been entrusted

Six domains resting on one foundation

Your thinking, your time, your money, your body, your work, and what you leave behind are not finally yours. They belong to God, who entrusted them to you, and there is an account to give for how each was handled.

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 work on your legacy. It accumulates out of a million ordinary moments, handled well or not, and it is the account you give for what was entrusted to you.

What outlasts you →

A place to start · The daily review

A few deliberate minutes a day.

The discipline that keeps me fixed on the process rather than on how a given day feels, and 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 no amount of resolve can do on its own. It spares you the work of remembering, which nobody sustains. 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: not a name, but work, decisions, and commitments other people can pick up and carry.

This isn’t theory. It’s the system I run, every morning.

The podcast

Latest episodes

All episodes →
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

15:08

Heroic Effort Doesn’t Scale

Most organizations have one person holding them together. They remember every promise, catch what is slipping, stay late when a deadline is in trouble. If you lead anything, there is a good chance that person is you. In this episode I explain why heroic effort is so tempting, what it quietly costs, and what to build instead, so that good work keeps happening whether or not you are having a good wee

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