Three weeks in. Module 1, Phase 3 — Structure. Days 19–20.
Three weeks ago Tom and I sat down at the kitchen table and started the Fully Lived Framework on ourselves.
To test it. I’ve been sitting with this material for months — writing it, living adjacent to it, believing in it. But believing in something you wrote is not the same as knowing it works. So we’re finding out.
We’re three weeks in — we’ll finish week 3 by this weekend. Running a little behind the ideal pace. That’s the real version of what doing this inside a real life actually looks like. But the focus is consistency.
The Part That Worked Right Away
The first three weeks inside are Compass work. The first phase starts by asking you to look honestly at where your time is actually going versus where you say it matters.
I expected that to feel uncomfortable. I did not expect it to feel clarifying so quickly.
There’s something about writing it down — not in a journal, not as a to-do list, but as a real accounting of the gap between what you say you value and what your calendar actually shows — that makes the drift visible in a way that’s hard to unsee.
Tom had the same experience. We did it separately and then compared notes — our goals and struggles, the places we overlap and the places we don’t. It turned into an interesting conversation. Some of it was the same. Some of it surprised us both.
The Part We Didn’t Expect to Be Hard
I thought the hard part would be the structure. Finding time, building the habit of actually sitting down with it.
It wasn’t. Tom has a mentally taxing job, and the last thing I expected him to want at the end of the day was another thing to think about. We’re doing it through a companion app we’re testing alongside the printed pages, which makes the daily habit easier than I expected. It’s three prompts and a conclusion. Ten to fifteen minutes most days. Not long. But the questions stay with you after you close it. That part surprised both of us. It’s not long. It is deep. The questions are clarifying in a way that stays with you after you close it. That part surprised both of us.
The hard part was something else: making the decision to take our observations seriously.
There’s a voice that shows up when you start this kind of work — or at least it showed up for me — that wants to minimize everything. You’re fine. Other people have real problems. This isn’t a big deal. It sounds reasonable. That’s what makes it hard to spot.
The framework doesn’t let you stay there. It just keeps asking you to be honest, which eventually makes the minimizing harder to maintain.
The framework doesn’t let you stay there. The way it approaches your life from different angles — you start to see things you’d been glossing over. By the end of week two I stopped minimizing what I was noticing and started writing it down as if it were real. Because it was.
Where We Are Now
We’re finishing week 3 this weekend. Phase 3 — Structure — is already underway.
Here’s what three weeks actually produced: we both named our default drifts. We both identified what actually matters — the commitments worth protecting. And we have specific, concrete plans for both: what to correct, and what to guard.
None of that came from inspiration. It came from the prompts asking us to be honest, and us deciding to actually be.
I should tell you that Tom is not a workbook person. He is not a journaling person. This would not typically be his thing at all. Three weeks in, he’s finding value in it. I’m finding value in it. It keeps inviting conversations between us that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. And we can both feel it working in the way we’re shaping our days.
The biggest surprise is that paying attention feels easier than we expected.
BIL #1 — We Weren’t Really Lost. But We Weren’t Quite Found Either. · BIL #2 — The Small Decisions That Make a Week Feel Like Yours · BIL #3 — How to Find Your Heading
If any of this is resonating with where you are right now, the beta opens this fall — a small founding group going through the full 90 days together. Get on the waitlist here.
Go use the life you have.