How to Bridge Two Lives (WMt v1.2)
Harness The Power of a Well Managed Transition - Last updated 3 Mar 2025
This is a showcase of version 1 of a product built for the A Better Way community, and for anyone really who is serious about living a life by design, not just by default.
Think of this a something between a product manual and a product showcase.
The A Better Way project is not just a philosophy or framework. It is a live, evolving platform being built using Agile principles. The work is being treated as a product in continuous development—structured, adaptive, and responsive to the real challenges of those of us living across two lives.
We are not building in a lab. We are testing in PROD—developing real protocols, shared language, and tools in the open, with the community, iterating as we go.
The Context
In the last piece (Living Across Two Lives), I laid out the emotional and spiritual dissonance of trying to live with integrity across multiple domains: work, home, and the deep symbolic life we are called to honour. That fracture—what Severance reveals, what so many of us live—is the problem space.
You can find that whole article here:
We are not trying to find the magic solution to Work Life Balance. We are trying to establish a practice and habit of a Well-Managed Transition.
The first initiative in response to that tension is this:
A Protocol for Well Managed Transitions (WMt)—a practical method for navigating the shift between different selves and different domains of life with greater coherence, presence, and sanity.
As a reminder, here is the problem statement:
The Problem
We are required to show up in multiple contexts—home, work, and inner work.
Each one demands a different version of us.
Without a clean way to transition between them, we burn out. Too many tabs stay open. Focus is lost, and the loss of coherence costs us across all fronts we are trying to show up and actualise in.
When there is no protocol for transitioning between roles, we compromise, we drop threads, we forget who we were becoming, and we are not present for the things we care for most.
This is already not sustainable, and life seems to be getting worse.
We need an upgrade.
We need a way to manage these transitions deliberately, to shut down safely, reboot in an organised way, and arrive fully in our lives.
User Story
As a
person trying to operate across two (sometimes three) demanding areas of life,
I want/need
a way to sustain focus and momentum across both without compromising either,
So that
I can direct my energy and attention toward outcomes that serve the whole me.
Debunking Myths
Work-life balance is a myth. It implies a static equation.
Life is emergent. What works is adaptive structure and pattern awareness.
You are not trying to balance work and life. You are running three core projects at once:
Self (your own growth and wellbeing)
Container (your relationships, home, and family life)
Work (your calling, career, and contributions)
Each of these domains has different but related goals, stakeholders, and rhythms.
Trying to blend them into one mental backlog creates confusion and overload.
These three exert constant, changing and unpredictable tensions on each other.
Balance is a myth—what we really want is coherence. You do that by levelling up how you operate, and by building structure and cadence, observing how things flow across cycles.
By treating them as separate but interrelated project fronts, we gain clarity about what each one needs, how it is tracking, and what attention or action is appropriate in the current cycle.
Note: Even within each of these, sub-projects and finer discrete threads exist.
This is the shift: from managing parts to managing the emergent whole. This is how we begin to product manage our own becoming, but this takes a higher order of governance than just being determined.
For that, we look to other wisdom traditions.
Borrowing from Other Wisdom Traditions
Believe it or not, corporate business has its own wisdom traditions.
One of them is how it handles complexity and competing interests across a single platform, through governance models like Repository Management (or Repo Management for short).
This is how things like version control, branching, and changelogs are coordinated, so that multiple contributors, even with conflicting priorities, can make changes without compromising the whole.
It is not elegant, but it works. It keeps continuity intact and makes transitions manageable.
Most of us are trying to do the same in life, switching between personal growth, family life, and work, without any equivalent structure.
We shift between completely different roles and priorities on the fly, with no closure and no way to hold the thread. The result is fatigue, fragmentation, and a creeping sense that nothing is being done well.
The Well Managed Transition protocol was built to address that.
WMT Version 1
This is our first working version of the protocol. It is structured, lightweight, and easy to apply. It is not meant to be perfect. It is meant to be usable—and testable—in real life.
Recognise the triggering event. This might be time-driven, like the end of a work block or by context, like being interrupted by your spouse.
STEP 1: Tactical Pause
Don’t react immediately. Give yourself a moment to reflect on your attention and your energy levels. Was it the interruption, or is it something else? Is there something you didn’t want to forget, or are you just stressed?
This is the moment where you invite your best self back into the room.
STEP 2: Shut Down Safely
You know what it feels like to crash your browser or your laptop. You want to close things on your own terms, “save your work”, literally and metaphorically and put things down in a way that makes it easier to pick them up again later.
Inventory your open browser tabs (literally and metaphorically), and specifically, Why?
Sentencing.
What can I safely close?
What should be written down to long-term memory, or offline memory?
Write your Change Log.
Is there a train of thought I want to retain?
What is wise to close out?
Do I need to leave myself notes, breadcrumbs to lead me back to where I left off?
Report to “the Bridge”.
This is like giving a shift report to the Bridge of your ship, notes to your higher self, the product owner of your becoming. What are your blockers and key updates?
Grease the Wheels for the Next Shift.
What can you do, ritualise or a stitch in time to make picking this all up again later easier on your future self?
Close the Space with Grace.
The way you end things is how the body remembers them. Close the space with composure, presence and intentionality and that vibe has a better chance of persisting, waiting for you when you get back.
THE LIMINAL STEP
All transitions, from the Caterpillar to the Butterfly, or from Adolescence to Adulthood, even between the different lives we live within a single day, there are liminal spaces. This is not the void of death we think it is. This is not like the unconscious absence of existence, like the phenomenon of anaesthesia.
Most people skip this step. They rush from one context to the next without realising what they are leaving behind or what they are stepping into. That is where disorientation begins.
The WMT protocol creates room for this step. It formalises the space between ‘worlds’,
Nothing could be more necessary. This is an idea we explore playfully, but also quite seriously with The Corporate Book of the Dead.
If we do not ritualise our own disruptions and transitions, we do not really optimise our transformation and transcendence, which is just another way of talking about Actualisation, or Becoming.
STEP 3: Skilful Bootup Sequence
There are better and worse ways to initiate things. We know what it feels like to dive into something carrying the anxiety of our last experience into this one, and burning cycles trying to settle and pick up where we left off.
This could be starting our work day, or transitioning back into our family lives, or smaller slices of our life that we have to make significant adjustments for.
Clear Your Cache.
If we fail to reset our state of presence, we allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in our day to overshadow this one and rob it of its gifts.
Open The Space with Intentionality.
Gather your mindset, your whole body presence, connect with your intention, not just the productivity you want to have, but the way you want to feel when you end this shift.
Boot Up
Check Your Last Log entry, follow the breadcrumbs.
Begin with a Shift Briefing, like a daily standup. What did I want to work on today? What do I need to get done?
Initiate the Shift.
Initiate means “to begin”, but also “to become acquainted with reality”. A new version of you arrived that is not the same as the one that last left. Everyone else around you is a new version of themselves, also. The world has moved on. The question is “How do you want to invest your energy and attention now? What does Love look like right now?”
STEP 4: Engage!
Think of Star Trek, and how everyone has different roles and they all need to report to the bridge and to Captain Picard. Let this ‘higher self’ version of you be the one that gives the cue to engage, the one that gets the ‘bigger picture’, not your lower, stressed or distracted self. This is how to bring your Warp Core online!
Even during lunch breaks or natural transition points, a lite version of 1 through 3 can and should be practised as you get better at this.
Tactical pauses should be something you do regularly.
Unless you are in a state of real Flow, where your mind is clear, you feel present and your discernment and intentionality are fully online, there is rarely a moment when a tactical pause isn’t going to be Beneficial.
Spiritual Insight
We all have an inner life—whether we leave it unattended or choose to cultivate it, it shapes how we experience everything. When we use the word ‘Spiritual’, this is all that we mean.
The Spiritual insight to consider with the WMT, or any practice that we employ to product manage our own becoming, or any project in life, for that matter, is the complementary principles of Form and Flow. This is what people mean when they talk about Yin and Yang or Masculine and Feminine.
Think of a River. The Flow is the water rushing down. The river banks and channel provide the Form, without which all that creative movement can become destructive and chaotic.
Flow requires cadence, and Form requires structure.
This is why we regard Agile as the master practice—and why we organise our lives around distinct project fronts in one sense, and a cadence of cycles and iterations in another.
Structure gives each domain its own space. Cadence gives us rhythm and momentum across time.
Together, they create the conditions for steady, meaningful growth, without collapse or burnout.
Agile as the Master Practice
Agile is the Master Practice applied in The Sacred Game and the whole of the A Better Way project.
Agile is often misunderstood as a tool just for software teams or product managers. But at its core, Agile is an inherently dynamic approach to living and working with complexity and uncertainty.
Agile helps us organise effort, respond to change, and maintain progress iteratively over cycles, without burning out or losing direction, adapting to reality as it unfolds.
This is why we treat Agile as the master practice within A Better Way.
It gives us a practical framework for navigating our lives as ongoing Work-in-Progress, with room for iteration, feedback, and realignment.
When we break life into three primary project fronts, Agile becomes especially useful:
Self – your inner world, health, identity, and personal growth.
Container – your relationships, family, home life, and shared responsibilities.
Work – your vocation, business, creativity, and contribution to the world.
Each of these domains has different but related goals, stakeholders, and rhythms.
Trying to blend them into one mental backlog creates confusion and overload.
By treating them as separate but interrelated project fronts, we gain clarity about what each one needs, how it is tracking, and what attention or action is appropriate in the current cycle.
We are not managing balance—we are managing coherence.
And coherence is something you build over time, one cycle at a time.
Doing Your Part
Be part of the solution!
You can help by testing this product, providing us feedback on its use and making recommendations for its improvement. Let us know in the comments section.