Summary
A Lights Spreadsheet is a powerful tool for building consistency and thriving. To create your own,
1. Think and brainstorm out what you want to be doing every single day. A good starting place is asking what you’ve done during the peak periods of your life. This step might take 1-2 hours; it can be nice to go do it in a cafe with a coffee.
2. Choose 10-15 items max out of your list of what you could do every day.
3. Put them on your own spreadsheet in roughly the order you’ll do them each day. Write them binary (yes/no). So “Woke up before 6AM” (yes/no), not “Wake time”. You’re of course welcome to use our Lights Spreadsheet Generator – ultra.work/lights-generator or your own version in Excel, Numbers, whatever, etc.
4. Build the habit of looking at your Lights first thing in the day, and periodically throughout the day. If you already have an “ops keystone” in your life, this will be easy for you. If you don’t, it might be hard – but it’s super important and valuable to have something to look at every day that keeps you track with everything. If you don’t have a keystone right now, it might take 2-4 weeks of diligently focused effort before it becomes habitual and normal.
5. Review your Lights at the end of every week. Aim for a 70% success rate across the week. If you succeed 90%+ multiple weeks in a row, consider making your Lights harder by either adding more or making the activities more challenging. If you succeed considerably below 70% multiple weeks in a row, make them easier. The last point can be hard for high-achieving people since we can naturally tend to be persistently stubborn, but calibrating the difficulty for 70% and making your Lights easier or harder works out the best in the long run.
And… that’s the basics of it. That should be more than enough to get started and get some huge gains. We look forward to hearing how you do with it – feel free to shoot us a note to [email protected] if you want to let us know how it went, give feedback, or ask questions.
Also, got any friends who love getting great tools installed in their life? Point them to ultraworking.com/lights – they’ll thank you.
Highest regards,
Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau
Ultraworking