Lights Spreadsheet, Week 5
So, I keep this Lights Spreadsheet to keep track of the actions I most want to be doing each day.
It works as a control — it gets me to do more of these actions.
It also works as a warning sign — if I see I’ve had mediocre sleep or no exercise for 4 days in a row, it prompts me to fix that before things start getting out of hand.
Finally, it works as a surprisingly excellent diagnostic tool. There’s days when everything seems to fall apart. On those days, almost by definition, we’re not thinking particularly clearly nor emotionally steadfast, nor reflective, nor high will. It can be hard to figure out what’s going on. But those types of days are very often the culmination of running ourselves into the ground from previous days. There’s nothing the Lights Spreadsheet has made more clear than the fact that neglecting sleep or exercise for even a few days in a row will start adversely affecting everything in a chain reaction.
Ok, so what’s going on in Week 5? Let’s take a comparison between Week 5 and Week 4. Here was last week, Week 4, for comparison —
Let's start by looking at basics like eating well, being offline, doing morning routine, and tracking time.
Week 4 had the following scores —
Morning routine: 5/7
Plan for eating healthy: 5/7
Execute at eating healthy: 7/7
Significant offline time: 5/7
Track time: 4/7
Week 5 saw almost all of those level-up to near perfect —
Morning routine: 7/7
Plan for eating healthy: 7/7
Execute at eating healthy: 6/7
Significant offline time: 7/7
Track time: 7/7
The only one missed in Week 5 on that was a “Half” on eating healthy, and it wasn’t even so bad. I ate way too many nuts on the 19th while working late.
Days where I get all green lights in these top categories tend to go much, much better.
“Plan for eating healthy” is a noteworthy one — it means I’ve generally figured out where I’m going to get my calories from the next day to a very high degree of certainty. If that one is yellow or red, it means I might have to spend one to two hours looking for food to not compromise my diet — a huge hassle and a huge headache. This is one of those surprising things that you don’t realize until you start measuring it. Knowing precisely where the food is coming from is surprisingly valuable — the ideal is having a stocked kitchen full of healthy stuff that’s desirable and easy to prepare, but knowing that the close-by supermarket sells roasted chicken at a good price works too.
I’m just going to write that down again, because it was really unintuitive for me — Knowing precisely what I’m going to be eating and where I’m going to get that food is surprisingly valuable. Days in transit or days when I haven’t figured out a city yet for food go much worse, and it burns a lot of cognitive bandwidth. Much moreso than expected.
Let's look at exercise, doing enjoyable things, napping, and sleeping well.
Week 4 —
Exercise: 1/7
Walk: 4/7
Nap: 2/7
Something I enjoy: 4/7
Sleep well: 3/7
Week 5 —
Exercise: 4/7
Walk: 4/7
Nap: 4/7
Something I enjoy: 7/7
Sleep well: 5/7
Increases in exercise, napping, doing at least one enjoyable daily activity, and sleeping well. Is it any surprise that this week was healthier, more enjoyable, and more productive?
A lot of the Week 4 failures weren’t a result of laziness or indolence or any such — things just were legitimately tougher. When I first got to Morocco, I had a hard time sleeping here. It was incredibly hot and dry. I had to learn how to adjust my bedroom to sleep well: noteworthy, North African architecture has vents to release heat at the top of the house, but you have to open them at night time for the hot air to get out. I got a fan for my bedroom, and I adjusted my sleepwear. I probably also acclimated a bit to the heat as time passed.
That helped a lot. Of course, more exercise makes it easier to sleep better, and thus wake up earlier, which makes it easier to nap, etc, etc, etc. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Progress on Biggest Thing
Week 4, Progress on biggest thing: 4/7
Week 5, Progress on biggest thing: 7/7
That’s completely unsurprising, isn’t it? By lining up all the factors mentioned above, it’s easier to make progress on the largest project you’ve got going on.
This is why sometimes the “Shut up and do it” advice is right, and sometimes it’s wrong. If I had been not exercising, not sleeping well, not napping, not carving out at least a little time to do something I enjoy each day, having a hassle of a time trying to find food to keep eating healthy (or alternatively, letting diet degenerate), not getting the morning routine in, having long stretches of unbroken internet time — of course then, there would be less likelihood and less success at marching my current largest project along. “Shut up and do it” would be less correct; “Fix your upstream problems” would be the right answer there. I did, and good work followed. That’s obvious, but a lot of times people miss it. Again, the Lights Spreadsheet shows this all pretty clearly.
Admin.
Week 4 —
Declare/Complete: 2/7
TIZ (email): 0/7
FV cycle (complete general admin): 2/7
Week 5 —
Declare/Complete: 2/7
TIZ (email): 2/7
FV cycle (complete general admin): 1/7
“Declare/Complete” is a powerful technique to push out one mid-length task rapidly. I’ll write more about it later, but I didn’t do much of it last week or this week.
My general admin and my email are both in bad shape — I’m getting large amounts of excellent high-concept hours in, but my inbox is over-full and I’ve got a backlog of admin and chores to do.
This doesn’t bother me, per se. Things are going well overall. But I do find that chipping away at these each day is a smart call instead of doing the occasional marathon session. (The marathon session tends to get put off repeatedly, and then you wind up in a situation like I am now, where there’s a reasonably lot of admin to be done that keeps getting put off because it’ll need a heroic effort to get it back into balance.)
In any event, I’m on the back end of a lot of intensive traveling and intensive campaigns/projects, so it’s understandable why all this stacked up. It’s still something to keep an eye on, but I’m not super bothered that it’s a bit behind schedule as general health, productivity, operations, and progress on large things are happening. It is something to get back into harmony sooner-or-later though.
And, that’s Week 5. Questions, comments are welcome.