Handling Activities That Don't Happen Daily

We've gotten a great reception to Lights — it's really amazing to see thousands (!) of people using it to improve their lives.

The #1 question we've gotten is,

"How do I handle activities that don't happen every day?" Things like reconciling all your expenses for the week (happens 1x/week) or going to the gym 3x/week, things like that.

We still recommend you keep these binary, for simplicity's sake.

Binary means you can mark them yes/no, every single day, just like your other Lights.

So how do you do that if you want to lift weights every other day?

Use...

"Went to gym in last two days"

As soon as you haven't been to the gym for more than two days, it flips red.

(Or "Went to gym in last 4 days", or whatever your target schedule is.)

Here's some that Sebastian uses —

• "Meal Planning/Groceries Current"
• "Structured Data Current"
• "Weekly Review/Project Tracking Current"
• "No Emails Older Than 7 Days"
• "Sweeps Done In Last 7 Days"

As long as Sebastian orders groceries and makes his meal plans for fitness roughly once per week, it goes green. If Sebastian runs out of food or doesn't know how he should be eating, it goes red.

"Structured Data" is Sebastian's prompt for tracking all his data including personal finance. To keep it current, he updates all his personal finance every Sunday. If he misses doing it on Sunday, it starts going red. As soon as it's current, it goes green again.

"Sweeps" are an activity to clear a bunch of admin and clean up — all laundry is clean, supplies are bought, apartment is clean and tidy, notes are triaged, action items all entered correctly, and so on. Once again, that's something Marshall wants to do roughly once a week. He can do it more often — but as soon it's been more than 7 days since he's done Sweeps, it goes red.

The advantage in doing it this way is _simplicity — _it means all your Lights work exactly the same way.

Of course, you're free to do whatever you like and whatever works for you — but this is the best practice that we've found for doing activities that happen at least weekly, but not every day.