The Five Scored Categories of the Pentathlon

The Ultraworking Pentathlon will be scored on five points –

• Sleep/Wake Schedule
• Most Important Work (scored for both Consistency and Depth)
• Physical Fitness
• Nutrition
• Planning

Across all attendees, there are different mixes of experience and skill in these areas. Please remember that, while this is a competition, you’re competing more against yourself than other participants.

The main point of the competition is to provide a backdrop that allows you to thrive as much as possible during the Pentathlon and to develop life-long skills.

Guidance on Choosing Your Targets

At the end of the day, you will choose your own targets, but if we think you’re making an error, we’ll point it out to you.

Here are descriptions of what’s chosen for each category, with some basic guidance:

Sleep/Wake Schedule

This will be scored binary; either you got it, or did not get it. If your wake time is 5AM and you’re up at 5:03AM, you didn’t get it. It keeps it clean and simple that way.

Commentary: Believe it or not, we actually find time which you go to bed more predictive of success than wake-up time. If you sleep early enough, you’ll tend to wake up early enough. Whereas keeping your wake-up time, but only on a few hours of sleep, is not a good recipe.

Guidance: Consistency is more important than ambition here. If you’ve been waking up at 8AM every day and rushing off to work, setting your wake time at 6AM and holding it every single day will be better than ambitiously aiming for 4AM and often missing it. Likewise, for bedtime, setting a cut-off that is realistically achievable every day – which might be 10PM or Midnight – will be better than setting 8PM and usually missing it.

If you know you really want to wake up very early (say, 4AM), you might still set your official target at 6AM, and consider it a bonus if you wake early. But then, come hell or high water, make sure you hit that 6AM target.

Most Important Work

This is the only category that will be scored twice, both for Consistency and Depth.

Consistency means putting at least 10 minutes into your most important work each day. This is binary. If you do 10 minutes – it’s just 10 minutes! – you get full points for consistency.

Obviously, more time on your most important work is better. Thus, we also score for Depth. We track this simply enough: it’s the number of minutes you spent on most important work that day, up to a maximum of 100 minutes. (A little over 1.5 hours)

Put in 100 minutes on your most important work, get a score of 100. Higher amounts of time do not carry over to the next day. We know everyone has a different mix of obligations, but 100 minutes of most important work should be doable for everyone basically every day. After all, it’s your most important work – if you don’t have time for it, what do you have time for?

Guidance: You might already know exactly what your most important work is, or you might have 2-3 things you could reasonably choose. Again, we want you to start with just one thing and stick with it. As you fill out your targets, if you’re not sure what to choose, list your 2-3 options and we’ll dialog with you. If you know 100% for sure what you want to do, though, you can mark that down and skip other options. You won’t be “stuck” with what you mark down now – there is still time to discuss and adjust – but once the competition starts, then you will be doing the same “most important thing” (or class of thing) for the duration of the competition. If you have some odd circumstance where your most important work genuinely shifts – EX, you’re taking the bar exam as an attorney, and then looking for jobs once the bar exam finishes – let us know.

Physical Fitness

You’ll be scored binary – did it or didn’t do it – daily. Yes, you will be expected to do physical fitness daily. The minimum time for a physical activity should be 10 minutes.

Warning: If your primary physical fitness activity is intense – doing powerlifting at the gym 3x per week – then please do not pick something else to go “super hardcore” in a stupid way. Active recovery, light stretching, using a foam roller, taking a walk, or light swimming would be decent compliments on your non-lifting days. The more intense your basic training plan is, the easier and more “ain’t no big deal” the other days should be. With that said, we do find value in getting some physical movement 7 days per week, and you will be scored for that.

We’re not doctors, not qualified to do anything medical-ish, and not responsible for your health. Please talk to your doctor or physical therapist, etc, especially if you’ve had past medical issues or injuries. Please don’t do anything stupid. We’re anti-hardcore in this area. Please be smart and don’t be stupid, talk to relevant professionals, don’t get injured, etc.

Guidance: If you already know the training plan you’ll do, mark it down. If your training plan is intense and shouldn’t be done daily, make your non-intense days as easy as possible. Think: 10 minutes of foam roller and light stretching, walking, etc. If you’re not sure what you’re going to do, you can mark down multiple options and get some commentary and dialog going. Again – to emphasize it – consistency is more important than “being hardcore.” Don’t try to be hardcore in a stupid way and get injured. Set reasonable training standards for yourself. You can also increase intensity and difficulty later, once you’ve nailed the consistency.

Nutrition

Nutrition is the trickiest one for us to score. You’ll be marking down whether you followed your nutrition targets on a daily basis, and that’s binary. But additionally, some aspects of nutrition – like running a reasonable caloric deficit – can be undone by a single bad day of huge backsliding binge. If you do go on a backsliding binge, there will be a penalty score for that that eliminates much of the binary progress for the week, but which isn’t fatal.

Commentary: We’re hopeful that this will map well to actually success in eating better: first, stay consistent and run your plans each day. Second, if you do slip, don’t go all the way to a total binge wipeout; limit the damage.

Guidance: If you know what you’re going to be doing here, mark it down. If you’re not sure, list three options. If you don’t know the exact particulars of how you’ll implement it, there’s actually a decent amount of time to get some guidance and refinement – write with the broad strokes, and let us know what you don’t know.

Planning

Planning is binary – you planned the day, or you didn’t.

Guidance: Decide whether you’re going to be planning the next day the night before, or planning each day the morning of. If you’re doing evening planning, you need to at least look at your plan in the morning for it to count.

Commentary: Evening planning or morning planning could both work. Evening planning tends to be a little more robust, because the morning can come fast at us, but Kai Zau plans each day in the morning. Either way can work.