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I Know Exactly What I Need to Do. I’ve Known for Months.
So why is it still sitting on my to-do list?
If you’re trying to figure out how to stop procrastinating, you’ve probably used the apps, the timers, and the guilt. So have I. But none of it moved the three things staring at me right now. One at work, one at home, and one for my health.
Not one of them is hard. Not a single one. I could finish any of them tomorrow.
If you’re used to running the room at work and the routine at home, this isn’t laziness. Some people call it decision fatigue. I’d say it’s even simpler than that.
The tax isn’t the task. It’s the delay.
Welcome to Season 5: Default by Design
Welcome to Season 5 of All Green Lights CEO: Default by Design. I decide once, so I stop redeciding every day.
Last season, I audited a week hour by hour and found nearly 300 hours a year I was losing. But finding the time turned out to be only half the fix. Because if every one of those hours starts with a fresh decision, I’ve spent part of the reclaimed time before I’ve even begun.
That’s expensive. Redeciding things I already decided, every single day.
So this season, we design the defaults. The pantry, the fridge, the desk, the calendar, and one 30-minute block on Fridays that makes it all possible.
Here’s what I notice about us: executives who lead at work, lead at home, and are finally ready to bring that same intensity to ourselves. At work, nothing important goes without an owner and a date. If a project matters, someone’s name is on it, and there’s a deadline next to it. We’ve never let a strategic priority sit in a meeting note that just says someday.
But in our own lives, someday is when the most important things are scheduled for. And we call it procrastination, like it’s a character flaw.
It’s not a character flaw. It’s often a decision we simply haven’t made yet.
Work or the kitchen counter, the mechanism is the same.
If we’re just meeting, I’m Alysia Bell. Forty-five. Executive, wife, mom. Not a doctor, not a guru. I run experiments on myself, then I share the receipts.
Three things today. First, what I realized I was putting off at work, and it’s not what I would have guessed. Second, the two things I put off at home, including the one I actually solved for. And third, the thing I finally stopped putting off for my health, and the default that made it stick. At the end, the pattern that showed up across all three areas of my life.
At Work: We’re Promoted to Plan, Then Punished by the Ping
If you’ve ever wondered why you procrastinate on the work that matters most, here’s my honest take. It’s not because the work is hard. It’s because the work is quiet.
Stephen Covey drew this line decades ago in one of my favorite books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Urgent and important are not the same thing. Urgent things press on us. They ping, they ring, and they land on the calendar. Important things often don’t. They wait quietly until one day they become urgent too.
Here’s what I realized I was putting off: the big, visionary, complex projects. The deep work that needs a real block of time to think.
It’s not that I don’t want to. I love that work. It’s one of the reasons I love my job. But I’ve noticed that I’m energized by momentum, so I tend to knock out the quick wins first. And before I know it, meetings start and the day fills in around me.
For example. Every Monday, I plan to block the first hour of my workday for deep work. I have a strategy document I’ve been carrying for months. I sit down. I open my inbox first, just to clear it, which feels like a warm-up to get my mental muscles loose. Forty-five minutes later, I’ve made a real dent in my emails and I feel productive. Then someone texts me and needs a decision before lunch. Meetings start, back to back. Oftentimes a bio break or grabbing a quick lunch to bring back to my desk feels like a luxury. At 5 p.m., my son is coming home from karate, and the strategy document still isn’t open.
And I was busy all day. I never once felt like I was avoiding it.
When I audited my calendar, I found 24 hours of meetings in a single 40-hour week. Twenty-four. So that strategy block was never well protected. It was the easiest thing to bump on my calendar.
And here’s the part that stings. For a lot of us, strategic thinking is the reason we got the job. And it’s the first thing our calendar squeezes out.
We’re promoted to plan, then punished by the ping.
In all honesty, this one isn’t solved. So I’m running a test: one protected strategic block every week, on the calendar, like a meeting I can’t cancel. I’ll share the receipts in episode five, when I walk through how I time block my whole week.
At Home: A Decision We Never Made, and One I Did
Two things here, and I’ll start with the one that’s under construction.
We don’t have a trusted handyman, so the small repairs wait. Not because any one of them is particularly hard, but because the first step isn’t the repair. It’s a decision we never made. Who do we call? Until that’s answered, every loose hinge starts from zero.
This is where most advice on how to make decisions goes wrong. It walks us through the choice in front of us, then leaves us to make the identical choice again next week.
That’s not a decision. That’s a subscription.
So we’re canceling it. This month, we’re asking trusted neighbors for a referral and adding it to our saved contacts. After that, every repair starts with a phone call instead of a research project.
Now the one I did solve, and I almost didn’t notice I’d done it.
I do the small stuff at night. Lunch is packed, tomorrow’s outfit picked, dishwasher emptied, clothes folded. I’m not saving anything by doing it while I’m tired. But I’ve realized those jobs just don’t need me sharp, and I’m heading to bed soon anyway.
Putting laundry away while tired is fine. Making important decisions is not.
So I’m moving the decision to the hour when it’s cheap. At 9 p.m., deciding what clothes I wear tomorrow costs me nothing. At 7 a.m., it’s cutting the line in front of decisions that actually matter. Research shows that late decisions aren’t the same as early ones.
So I knock out decisions at night to protect the early hours of my morning.
My Health: The Habit I Stopped Scheduling
For years, the thing I kept putting off was breath work.
I’ve attempted to add it back to my routine more times than I can count. And it always helped. For me, it cleared my head and left me feeling settled. But I’m energized by momentum, and sitting still in a dedicated meditation block rarely survived contact with my calendar.
So I stopped looking for a block. I attached it to things I already do.
In the morning, I breathe while I do morning stretches, a habit that’s already entrenched. At night, I now do a little breath work while my son listens to his sleep story. Again, already part of our routine.
If you’ve read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, you already know this is habit stacking. The fix isn’t finding more motivation. It’s finding the right cue. I simply added my desired habit to a routine already running on autopilot, and it costs me zero minutes of calendar time.
The Pattern Across All Three
Now, the pattern I promised at the top. The procrastinating I’ve been able to solve has a clear theme, and it isn’t discipline.
Breath work got attached to a stretch that was already happening. Picking an outfit got moved to an hour when deciding was cheap. Neither one had to win a fight with the rest of my day.
The things I haven’t solved are still fighting with other priorities.
Here’s what I realized about why we procrastinate after looking at my own list.
We don’t procrastinate based on the size of the project. We procrastinate based on the state of the setup.
Every task I avoided was small. But every choice was pending.
So the question I’m sitting with for the rest of this season: how do we tie the deep work to a default, so it stops drowning in the daily demands?
The Bottom Line: We Procrastinate on What’s Undecided
Here’s the bottom line. We don’t procrastinate on what’s hard. We procrastinate on what’s undecided.
If we want to stop procrastinating, we don’t need to start with motivation. We can start with the decision we’ve been avoiding. When, where, who, and what comes right before it.
If we decide it once, the default will do the work.
Boring + Consistency = Results.
Two Things You Might Be Thinking
“Isn’t this just time management?”
Partly. Time management tells us when. But a calendar block alone didn’t do it for me. I’ve had breath work blocks on my calendar before, and they didn’t stick. What changed things for me was the cue. Time management finds the hour. A default decides what happens.
“What if I don’t have a routine to stack onto?”
You do. Perhaps you just don’t call it a routine. Brewing coffee. Brushing your teeth. Logging into your first call of the day. Catching up on the news. Maybe it isn’t a new habit you need. It’s a new passenger on a car that’s already moving. I’d pick something that happens every day without a decision and attach one small thing to it. Start smaller than feels useful. Small is what survives.
Your Next Move
Don’t try to redesign every default tomorrow. Be kind to yourself. Pick one.
If something has been on your list for months, the move is to ask what decision is actually pending underneath it. Usually it isn’t the task that’s stuck. It’s the who do we call or the when does this happen.
If you keep making the same choice over and over, the move is to make it once and save the answer somewhere. A contact, a standing order, a recurring block.
If there’s a habit that never survives your calendar, the move is to stop scheduling it and start attaching it to something already running on autopilot.
And if your mornings feel crowded before they start, the move is to shift the cheap decisions to the night before, so the early hours belong to the expensive ones.
If you’re wondering which part of your own life has been sitting on the someday list the longest, the free one-page ASSETS Audit is linked below. It’s a one-pager I built to spot which of the six executive health pillars (Activity, Strength, Sleep, Equilibrium, Total Energy, and Sustenance) is running in the red. Find the one green light move you can make, and start there.
Because you can’t lead from empty.
When you're optimized, everyone wins.
Grab the free ASSETS Audit
Watch the full video: “How to Stop Procrastinating (The Real Reason You Put Things Off)”
Up next in Default by Design: we start where a lot of my daily decisions start — the pantry. Not a pretty pantry. No matching containers, no labels. Just shelves that answer the question before anyone asks it. And a second life for the Amazon boxes that keep showing up at my door. Because if a space still demands a decision, it isn’t structured. It’s just staged.
Alysia Bell is the founder of All Green Lights CEO. She's tracked her nutrition for ~4,000 consecutive days, wears an OURA ring 24/7, and does N-of-1 experiments with a continuous glucose monitor, and is now running Season 5 of the show, Default by Design, about deciding once so you stop redeciding every day.
Topics referenced in this episode:
Topics referenced in this episode: the distinction between urgent and important from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; habit stacking from James Clear’s Atomic Habits; research on how decisions made later in the day differ from those made earlier; and the ASSETS framework of six executive health pillars developed by www.allgreenlightsceo.com.
The N-of-1 Disclaimer:
I am an executive and a mom, not a doctor or medical professional of any sort. The content shared here — including biometric data, protocols, and "Vitals" — is for informational and experimental purposes only. It is a documentation of my personal journey and should not be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health, diet, or supplement routine.
