Commitment and Structure Create Space for Expansion and Creativity

If you make structure your best friend, you will get more done and spend more time doing what you love

“Commitment and structure create space for expansion and creativity”

This was the first part of a statement of intention I crafted during a weekend-

long Yoga retreat where we used meditation and shadow work to clarify what we want in life and what we are here for.

This was a meaningful realization for me for a few reasons:

1. I left the retreat with the commitment to wake up at 6am, every day, for the next 40 days.
2. I recognized that, in this case, 100% commitment was far more impactful than 99% commitment. Something magic happened in that final 1%.
3. By establishing some constants and adhering to a structure that worked for me, it freed my mind to think about other things.
4. I didn’t have a consistent structure at the time. I was employed part-time so my day-to-day would often fluctuate.
5. I recognized a need to expand, particularly in my education. I saw the trajectory that I wanted my life to go, and I saw that I needed to learn more to get there and that it would require commitment and structure to do so.
6. By having a clearly articulated and heart-centered intention, I was focused on what I wanted and able to disarm FOMO
7. Commitment and structure were upstream of the things I wanted. ie. They were the inputs that lead to my preferred outputs

Here’s what I learned then, and what I am learning now as I continue to harness the power of structure to use my time more efficiently, be more productive, and have more energy for what I care about most.

“Dude, I am amazed at how you’re able to handle so much”

This quote is paraphrased from a friend of mine. We were talking on the phone one day. This person was moving through some emotional turmoil and called me to chat about it. They were in semi-crisis. As we were talking, my son, who was in the backseat of the car at the time, let out a laugh squeal that the person was not expecting.

When my friend heard that, it triggered something I could tell, and that’s when they expressed the amazement above.

I imagine their mind went something like this:

“How is he getting all this done, holding emotional space for me at the moment, running around town with a 16-month-old son, maintaining a spiritual practice, working, writing, reading, getting to the gym 4 days a week, and holding multiple projects at once, while maintaining a marriage and raising a son?”

I couldn’t help but feel genuinely complimented and recognized in the moment. It wasn’t easy to get here. Finding the right lever to pull first was hard. Everything after that has been shockingly easy.

The easy answer to the question embedded in their amazement, “How are you able to handle so much?”, is commitment, discipline, and structure.

My Son

The birth of my first son was a thunderous earthquake in my life. He has brought more joy and transformation than any other single event in my life. He has also changed the very fabric of my universe. The first year was hard. He cried a lot (more than most it seems), didn’t sleep well, and we moved twice in the first 9 months of his life.

We were, in many ways, subject to his whims.

Because his sleep was very inconsistent at night, we would take as much of it as we could get, often lingering in bed as a family until he absolutely had to wake up. I would get up with him, and my wife would sleep another hour or two so that she could recover from the night.

The start of our day was a function of when he woke up, not when we chose to wake up.

His nap times and bedtimes were inconsistent because our life was chaotic, and vice-versa.

The Power of Commitment

It takes an act of will and commitment to break a vicious cycle.

After about a year, I made a big decision.

No matter how much sleep I get, even if I have to wake him up, my son and I are both getting out of bed no later than 5:45 every morning.

The idea was that a consistent wake-up call would be upstream of consistent nap times, meal times, and bedtime.

And it worked, like a charm. Making one little decision created a starting point for everyone’s day. It rippled into every facet of our lives.

We could finally make plans with our days, because we knew, roughly, what the structure of each day with him would be like. We knew how much time there was between naps and meals, and we could then begin to tinker with the structure and fine-tune it to best suit our whole family.

Having this structure meant that I could plan my evenings and design my mornings with him.

It meant that we were no longer reacting to an earthquake.

It meant that we were accepting the situation and working with it.

What else was I committing to?

Committing to a consistent wake-up time really means committing to a bedtime.

It meant that, for one day, I was more tired than usual, as I had to adjust my sleep rhythm. Once that was established, I had to reverse-engineer my evening to match my desired outcome in the morning.

Because his sleep was still inconsistent, I never really knew how much sleep I would get. So I took a guess and I started collecting data because sleep is very important.

That meant I had to give myself more space to sleep than the amount of sleep I wanted. If I want 8 hours, I should probably be in bed 9 hours before I have to wake up.

I got an Apple Watch exclusively for the purpose of tracking my sleep.

I wanted to answer questions like:

1. How much sleep am I getting on average?
2. How much sleep do I need?
3. How much sleep is optimal for me?

I established my bedtime at 9:15pm, and I made that my #1 top priority above literally everything else. That meant laying down in bed, ready for sleep.

Okay, but what else was I committing to?

If I need to be “ready for sleep” by 9:15pm, what does that mean? How do I get “ready for sleep?”

By committing to a 9:15 bedtime, I was also making a commitment to the hour of 8pm-9pm. I drew the line that, unless I was being paid to do so, I was not going to be out past 8pm.

I was also committing to holding that hour sacred.

Typically, my wife would rock our son to sleep around 8. Once that process began, I would tidy up the living room and hit my meditation cushion to sit and breathe for 20-25 minutes. Since I was spending my first 2 hours of the day with our sweet little energizer bunny/bulldozer, meditation wasn’t a thing in the morning like it used to be.

After that, it was usually a toss-up of reading a book, watching Netflix with my wife, and maybe stretching out a bit - I would usually try to stretch out while we watched TV or use the foam roller.

And…what else?

This meant that my social life took a massive hit. People who don’t have kids tend to meet up to hang out around 6:30-7. Evening events might start as early as 6. I had to become very comfortable with missing out on things and very adept at proactively planning for disruptions to our rhythm.

This was easy because I had a clearly articulated intention. Do I sometimes wish I could make it to more things? Sure. I know what’s best for me and my family, though.

It became clear that 7 hours of sleep was the line for me. Below that, energy levels would be less reliable.

I know now, that if I get less than this, I should take it easy.

What did this unlock?

Now, I could begin to design the structure of my life, optimize for my preferred outcomes, and automate some processes. (Design, automate, optimize!)

My alarm goes off at the same time every day, so now I could just set that and forget it. I use the focus program on my iPhone to automate the do not disturb mode 90 minutes before bedtime, too. (They still won’t let you automate Airplane Mode, which I turn on well before bed).

And I began to ask myself, what does my ideal day look like?

My wife and I still split time working and caring for my son, so 3 days a week I could tinker and play with my optimal schedule. My first blocks looked like this:

9a-11a - Deep Work - ie. writing, researching, organizing, planning

11a-1p Workout

(I keep the afternoons open for clients to book with me.)

This worked, but I didn’t account for Lunch! Eventually, I decided to swap those two around and go to the gym first thing in the morning, eat, then commit to 2 hours of deep work before seeing any clients.

I dictate the terms.

What are you optimizing for?

Now, I have stretched this to 4 days per week, and have transitioned to a co-working space out of my home office.

In my daily schedule, I have drive time to the office, automated checklists for everything I need to bring with me, and very clear daily priorities and tasks. I am tracking how long it takes me, on average, to get my stuff ready to leave each morning.

I optimized my schedule for seeing as many clients between 1 and 5 as possible. I can see 16 clients per week during this time AND get 2 hours of deep work in AND workout every morning.

We are all already optimizing for certain outcomes, consciously or unconsciously. I thought I might as well optimize for what I really want.

Are you optimizing for free time? Money? Spaciousness? Health?

Before I implemented this structure I was unconsciously optimizing for chaos, and I didn’t even realize that I was doing that.

Because of this structure, I know exactly what I have time and space for in my life.

So, I don’t do things that:

1. Aren’t aligned with my purpose
2. Don’t fit with the life I am designing
3. Don’t help me get more clients
4. Don’t nourish me spiritually and/or emotionally
5. Compromise my capacity to execute my goals

Because of this, I can have coffee with an old friend on a Tuesday afternoon because I know what my priorities are.

Or, I can shift my schedule around with ease if, say, a morning networking event comes up and I’d like to attend it or I need to see my chiropractor during “work hours”.

I am more focused on designing the life I desire and I have increased my capacity to do the things that I love and that help me achieve my goals.

I can take a business course and easily flex it into my workflow.

Now, it feels weird to not have structure. Over the last long holiday weekend, I found myself ready to get back to work early.

And, because I have systems, I can easily drop back into it after being away.

It starts with one commitment

You don’t have to design your whole life at once. You can and should commit to one thing at a time, and then stack other commitments on top of it.

Be willing to scrap things if it’s not working or tinker. If you have a thing that consistently creates friction in your life, see if you can solve it.

Try things out, get feedback, and iterate.

By doing so, you will create more space in your life for expansion and creativity so that you can get things done and enjoy your life freely.

An Important Caveat

Remember that you’re in charge, not your structure. If your goals or intentions shift, or if you feel constrained by your structure, you can and should alter it, or plan breaks from it.

Supercharging your Structure

You can stack other life hacks on top of your structure. That’s when it really hums.

1. Clearly articulate a purpose statement for your life
2. A statement of purpose will guide your decisions for the rest of your life. If you have this, you can use it as a rule of thumb when you are making a big decision. If it doesn’t fit with your purpose, it’s a distraction. A purpose is less of a “what” and more of a “why”
3. Narrow it down with a meta-strategy or intention statement for the next 6-18 months
4. this should answer the day-to-day, “when in doubt, what do I do?” question. For 2023, my meta-strategy came down to three simple principles: be present, connect, and facilitate. I knew the skill I wanted to hone above all else this year was group facilitation, and the best way for me to get more opportunities to facilitate was to consistently connect with people, which required me to be as present as possible
5. Find out what inputs get you the outputs you desire
6. if I want more clients, what are the levers I can pull? Create content that showers people with value, and attend events regularly to meet new people. This created the goal to produce 1 blog per week and attend 2 events per week.
7. Make it a game - how efficient can you be?
8. Even though I am very happy with the results, I am always looking for opportunities to be more efficient with my time. There is a particular pocket of time - between when I get home from my morning walk with my son and when I leave for the office - that I am currently looking to optimize. Narrowing down this time period means seeing what I can get done before the walk and what I can get packed up the night before. The idea for me is to optimize for more time doing deep work before I start seeing clients.
9. Design a perfect day and week
10. I like the weekly timeframe because it accounts for how you would like to spend your weekends, where you might try to prioritize a social life, and you can begin to see where you will need to guard your space more. Since I knew I wanted to see clients in the afternoon, I started scheduling check-ins with friends during those times when I didn’t have clients. Coaching is deep connection work, so I wanted to get myself used to connecting with people 1:1 in the afternoons.
11. Automate whatever you can
12. If you can buy back your time, and you have the resources to do it, give it a try. Maybe you hire a house cleaner, lawn service, or someone to do your laundry. The less you have to think about it, the better. Using tools like Notion to generate automated recurring tasks can be really useful to send you automated reminders for things you have to do regularly.

Resources to dig in further

• Rob Dyrdek inspired me to act on this. Here are a few of his best podcast appearances
• The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler
• Deep Work by Cal Newport
• Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown