The Calendar Lock: How Ambitious Couples Plan Their Week #700

Over the weekend I was called selfish and told my marriage would end in divorce.

All because I went on a 3-hour run.

My wife knew. She supported it. Because we have a system that most couples don't, and in this episode I'm sharing exactly what it is.

It's called the Calendar Lock. One conversation, two calendars, three locks. And it's how Amy and I make sure we both chase big goals, invest in our marriage, and show up for our family, without anyone feeling like they're losing out.

You'll learn:
- Why "equal time" is the wrong goal — and what "agreed time" actually means
- The one 20-minute conversation that plans our entire week
- How to use two calendars to find time for personal goals, your marriage, and family
- The 3 locks: personal time, spousal time, family time — and how to protect all three
- Why one of you needs to lead while the other supports (and how to switch)
- How Amy and I handle seasons where one person's goals take priority
- Why you can't wait for perfect conditions to chase what matters

I also share what happened when I posted about my long run on the internet, and why the people who called me selfish didn't understand what Amy and I had already agreed on.

Ready to lock in your week and stop choosing between your goals and your marriage? Apply to join the Locked-In Life group cohort → https://wkf.ms/4foUmo1

Transcript

The Three Hour Run Backlash

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

You're not gonna believe this, but over the weekend I was told I'm super selfish and that my marriage is gonna end in divorce. All because I went on a three-hour run. My wife and I work our time very clearly. And we don't look at things as like equal time. You get four hours here, so therefore you owe me four hours. We look at it as agreed time. We work our calendars and we understand that there are sometimes seasons where you need to leave and lead and seasons where you need to support. Okay, but when I posted this and put this thing up on the internet, which I'll share in a moment, people didn't get it. But my wife and I have a very easy process that allows us to prioritize our personal goals that we both have. It allows us to invest in our marriage, which is hugely important to us, and most importantly, it allows us to invest in creating a great life for our family and our new young beautiful boy Freddie. And so I want to give you that process called the calendar lock, and it looks like this it's one conversation, two calendars, and three locks. So walking away from this video, you'll have a simple process that you can use with your partner and or spouse, or if you've got both, then maybe we need to talk, but no, that is going to allow you to understand what is most important because the people who are hating on me on the internet didn't seek to understand. And look, that's

Why Agreed Time Beats Equal Time

Lachlan Stuart 1:28

their issue. I'm gonna give you the keys to creating a great life. So I went out for that long run. I'm training towards a Sydney Marathon, which is six weeks out. And for anyone who has done a marathon block, you know that the dreaded long run, or sometimes it's dreaded, it's dreaded when you've got a lot of things going on in your life. That's what I think. But the dreaded long run start to get quite long. And this weekend I had 34k, so I knew it was gonna take anywhere from two and a half to three hours. And I wanted to get it done without making sure that uh making my wife be left alone with Freddie for too long. So, what that naturally meant is I was gonna get up early and knock it out as quickly as I could and hope, fingers crossed, hope that he was gonna sleep till seven because he wakes up anywhere between 5:30 a.m. and seven, and most of this week he'd actually been waking up at seven, so I was like, surely we're gonna get get a win in here, I'll be home by the time he even wakes up. Uh, unfortunately for me, I didn't. And my wife texts me and she just texts me loosely, not seriously, just saying, hey, he's awake. And so I FaceTime them and had a good yarn to him, and I was joking with him. I'm like, I'm gonna be home soon, buddy. He's super excited. And I just said, Dar, you know, how'd you sleep? And she said, Oh, he was up a bit, and I got up once to change his nappy, and she's still breastfeeding, so he was up, I think, twice throughout the night. But he was a bit restless. I said, No worries, we'll when I get home, you can go have a shower and do whatever you want to do. I'll take him for a walk. And that's normally what we do. And what I want to dive into here in this calendar lock is what's most important is like how do we come up with this agreed time? Because people thought I was selfish because when I put the post up, I said my wife said, Oh, he's awake, and she'd been tossing and turning with Freddie all night, and here I am out selfishly on a three-hour run when they were saying I should have been home looking after the kid, I should have been giving Amy some time. I bet you don't give Amy any time to chase her goals. And for those of you who listen to my content enough or just know me personally, you know my wife is a internationally acclaimed multi-platinum best-selling musician who has toured the world and we tour the world. She has been on Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, toured with Justin Bieber, Keith Urban, all of those people, right? Chase's big fucking goals. And I support her on that. And how we make that happen with agreed time is we know that there are seasons in our life as a couple, if we want to make our marriage work and make our marriage amazing, that one of us needs to lead and the other needs to thrive. Needs to thrive, of course, needs to support. And for the last almost decade, we've been touring around and I've been supporting her a lot with her career. As I've slowly built my, I guess, business and my brand and the events that I've been building, she's also supporting me a lot, which is fantastic. And when we look at the agreed time throughout a year, we go, well, okay, well, Lockie, what's your one big thing that you want to achieve for the year? And for me, it was oh, I had two, but they're sort of one and the same. But this year was releasing a book and the documentary. They were really important to me off the back of last year's 58. I thought if we could get those done, tour them, that would be awesome. Get those that story out, inspiring people. And I asked my wife, I said, What about you? And she said, This year, I just really want to focus on being a mum. And I was like, I want to be a dad as well, don't get me wrong. And I'm gonna do that to the best of my ability. But Amy said, Look, I'm not worried worried or as focused on touring this year because I just want to be there with Freddie. I said, Fed Ancom, we'll we will make that as possible

One Conversation To Plan The Week

Lachlan Stuart 4:58

as as humanly possible for you to enjoy and for me to be there for that as well. And as I spoke about last week with Amy's rule and a lot of things, we speak a lot. And this is where I want to dive into that calendar lock with the agreed time. So the first thing Amy and I do, we can talk about it from a macro level. You can see this big calendar up here for those who are watching on YouTube. But that's where we'll plan out our year. What other things that we have coming up? If there's any workshops coming in or travel, the green dots are when we want to have weekends or long weekends together, as you can see, there's quite a few. But we put all of that in, but then we allow it to be a 20-minute conversation, and we don't really sit down. You know, for those of you who have kids, you know you can't really find time to just sit down and talk about it. But we'll talk loosely on the fly. Like Amy and I were went for a walk with Freddie before, and I just said, Hey, what have you got coming up this week? And she's mentioned the things that she had. I mentioned the things that I had, and these are our personal things, and you know, she wants to get she went for a run before, she wants to get back into her training, she has a couple of meetings, so we got all of those on a calendar, and then I shared the things that I had, and so my training, meetings, keynoting this week, and we put it all down, and what that enables us to do is look at what free time we have off the back of that, off our personal things, and then the next step is we build us as a couple. So we're our date nights. Amy and I went on a wicked date night on Friday night to a place called not Pecafino's here, it's called Tartufo. If anyone hasn't been to Tartufo and you live in Brisbane, go check it out. Amazing. But we did a date night, we took Freddie, then we did a date day yesterday. So we're making sure we still schedule time for our marriage because that's super important as well. If Freddie, for us to give Freddie the best life, the marriage has to be the best. And for us to have the greatest marriage, we also need to make sure that we're working on ourselves, both chasing dreams, but also just having experiences with our friends so that you know we really appreciate what we're building. That's just our philosophy, and you may or may not agree with that, but that's what our one conversation really helps us get clear on is what does that look like? Now,

Two Calendars And The Three Locks

Lachlan Stuart 7:08

the second thing there is you want to have two calendars. As I mentioned, Amy's listing off all the things that are in her week. She has her uh meeting with her siblings and the band on a Monday, then she has a meeting at three o'clock today talking more about her keynotes and various other things, right? And then I bring my calendar and we can sort of cross-reference to go, okay, well, who's looking after Freddie? At what point do we need to call the mother-in-law to help out or what's going on? When's Freddie's swimming lessons? And we can factor out the perfect week for us as individuals. We can then factor and make sure it works for us as a couple, and then make sure that we're also getting family time in as well. And this is what brings us to the three locks. So the three locks are the things to consider before the remaining space gets swallowed by work. As you've heard me talk about a lot, if you don't put it in the calendar, it's more than likely not going to get done. People have asked me time and time again, and I ask people that I know, like, how do you get so many things done? The truth is, this calendar, and then putting in my phone so you can see what a day looks like. So, for example, like I had Freddie for I want to give you my day from today, right? So I have personal time today, I have spousal time today, and I had family time. So I woke up this morning, took Freddie straight out. Freddie and I literally went for a one hour and 45 minute walk around the park, got a coffee. It was awesome. We hung out. Then when we got back, Amy fed him again. Then Amy went and did her run. Well, I had about an hour of work in there. Amy then went and did her run, so I spent more time with Freddie. Then I'm back here doing my work prepping for a keynote, and then I dropped Amy at our mother-in-law's. So I've come back here to be able to film this video without, I guess, the young fellas on the floor here, you know, making noises and talking to me. And it's also given Amy an hour to just go for a walk or do, do whatever she feels like doing before her meeting this afternoon. But then tonight, so once we've finished, I'm gonna go train after this. Once I've trained, I'll pick her up and we come home for family time, and that'll be about five o'clock, right? So we tick all those boxes and they're locked in, they're in both of our calendars. If you've ever thought to yourself, oh man, that's too much scheduling. What about the spontaneity in life? Well, you still have time to do random things, and you gotta remember that this that this is just a plan, it's not set in stone. If you want something to something to change or something needs to change, you're an adult, you can change it, and that's the cool thing about this. But if you don't have it locked in the calendar, it's really hard to make things work. And so bringing this full circle back to the hate that I was getting, man, I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. Like, what's wrong with people? Just ask a few more questions, or if it upsets you, just walk on. But Amy knows that I'm in a marathon block right now, and I also know that Freddie is keeping her up from time to time, and me for that matter, I'm not just making Amy get up and do that, but we're we're working through it, but we also have goals, which means when you have something you want to achieve, you can't just wait for the perfect conditions to get it done. We can't wait for Freddie to sleep through the night. We can't wait for Freddy to wake up when we want him to wake up, otherwise, we'd never get anything done. And so Amy's carrying the load for me, and then there'll be times where I carry the load for her. But as we're six weeks out from Sydney, she is trying to help me sleep more so that I can recover better, so that I can perform well in the marathon, because

Seasons Of Support And The Wrap Up

Lachlan Stuart 10:38

the marathon is a goal we're working towards together. Any of my goals are Amy's goals, and vice versa. I'm not saying I always choose the goals or vice versa, but this is what we're collectively working towards as a family. Amy, Freddie, and I are gonna all be down there and it's gonna be awesome, and we're gonna celebrate it, and then we will more than likely be back on the road touring and supporting Amy, and Freddie and I will be there setting up, packing down, or doing all the things, right? And that's how, firstly, I believe the sacrifices you have to make for success. You can't wait for the perfect time. Secondly, you need to put it in your calendar, and how we make that work, super simple. Calendar lock, one conversation, find time to do it. Doesn't need to be more than 20 minutes. Bring your calendars, so your calendar and your partner's calendar. And thirdly, just make the three locks. So, in that it's like personal time, spousal time, family time. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that. That is how my wife and I get agreed time, not equal time, agreed time throughout the weeks to achieve the things that we both want to achieve. And I know that as you're watching this, you're an ambitious bloke, and it's possible for you to do it. You're literally just one conversation away from making it happen. So if you've enjoyed this one, or if there's something that's jumped out at you, or if you think I'm selfish, actually don't don't comment if you think that. But if you've taken something away or you have questions, drop it in the comments below and make sure you follow the next video for more. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Cheers.