018: Vitals - I Stopped Setting Vague Health Goals. Quarterly Rocks Fixed That.
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"Get Healthier" Is Not a Finish Line. It's a Direction.
I had a decade of health goals and almost nothing to show for them, and it took me a long time to figure out why.
It's because "get healthier" is not a finish line. It's a direction. You can walk toward it for 10 years and never once get to say done.
Vague goal setting was the problem. Not effort.
So last year I borrowed one idea from a business book called Traction: the quarterly rock. I stopped collecting endless health goals and started running 90-day goals for my biology instead.
Today I'll share how those quarterly rocks showed up at work, at home, and in my actual body — and one of my 90-day goals that's still paying dividends months later.
Welcome to The Company of One
Welcome to The Company of One — how I run myself with the same standards we use to lead teams.
Season 1 built the ASSETS framework: the balance sheet. Season 2 audited my N-of-1 data. Season 3 is the personal operating system. Today, the quarterly rock.
Here's the top line: three places I leverage rocks — at work, at home, and in my own biology — and what each one actually returned.
Last season covered the numbers from my continuous glucose monitor, my DEXA scans, my Oura ring, and a full blood panel with over a hundred biomarkers. A stack of data, which is all great — but the numbers only matter if they actually change what I do on Monday. That's the essence of this season: the Monday part. The operating system.
Why does this matter? Here's what I notice about women like us — executives who lead at work, at home, and are finally ready to bring that same intensity to ourselves. We run our organizations on 90-day cycles. Quarterly priorities, weekly check-ins, a scorecard. We would never tell our board of directors, "our goal this year is to do better." They'd laugh us out of the room. They expect specific targets.
And yet we walk out of that meeting and set a vague goal for our body that is, word for word, "do better." We engineer our organizations for traction. And then we leave our own biology to chance.
If we're just meeting, I'm Alysia Bell. I'm a 44-year-old executive and mom who has tracked her food for nearly 4,000 straight days. I wear a smart ring that grades my stress and my sleep, whether I like it or not. I'm not a physician and I'm not a guru. I'm in this with you — just running the experiments on myself first, and then showing you the receipts.
So three things today. One: what a rock actually is, and where the idea came from. Two: how I use them both at work and at home. And three: one of my favorite experiments so far — setting a quarterly rock for my metabolic health. And at the end, I'll share the data that surprised me, because one of these numbers didn't stop when the quarter stopped. It's still climbing.
What a Rock Actually Is
Quick definition, because I don't want to assume. A rock is a single priority we commit to for 90 days. Not a wish. Not a theme. One thing with a finish line that we can look at on day 90 and say plainly: done, or not done.
The version I use comes from Gino Wickman's book Traction, which lays out a business operating system called EOS. But the metaphor is older than that. Author Stephen Covey made it famous with the mason jar demonstration — where we put the big rocks in the jar first, because if we pour in the pebbles and the sand first, the big rocks never fit. Author Verne Harnish is the one who took the idea and put it on a 90-day business clock.
So this isn't new. What was new for me was pointing it at myself.
How I Use Rocks at Work
In EOS, the guidance is three to seven rocks per quarter — not 20. And honestly, I encourage my colleagues to lean toward three rather than seven. The benchmark for a healthy team is finishing about 80% of them.
I want to pause on that for a moment, because 80% is a strange target. It's purposely not 100. If we're hitting 100% of our rocks every quarter, the guidance is that our rocks are too easy — we're not actually reaching, and we need a stretch goal. And if we're consistently under 80, we took on too much. So the system has a built-in tolerance for missing stretch goals — which, for a recovering perfectionist, was genuinely disarming.
Here's where this got real for me at work. We had a major new initiative on the calendar — a big cross-functional effort that pulled multiple people from different teams. And here was the challenge: it wasn't any one person's responsibility. It wasn't in a single job description. It was meant to be a proof point. We were prototyping, trying something new.
And I've been doing this work long enough to know exactly what happens with work like that. Nothing. It doesn't fail dramatically. It just quietly loses every week to the things that are each team member's actual job. The urgent takes precedence — not because anyone dropped it, but because nobody owned it.
So I made it a rock. Which sounds small, but what it actually did was change the question. Every single week, in a meeting, out loud, someone had to say whether it was on track or off track. And when it was off track, that wasn't a failure. It was just an issue to solve while we still had the runway to adjust. It went from a thing we hoped would happen to a thing we deliberately made space for.
My takeaway: work that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. Naming it a rock is how we stop letting the urgent eat the important.
That's the entire mechanism. A rock doesn't create time. It creates accountability. It gives a priority a name, an owner, a deadline — and forces us to check on it out loud every week. Which is exactly why it translates so well to life at home.
How We Use Rocks at Home
Applying a business tool with our family was an eye-opener.
My son is working toward a black belt in karate. And what I love about martial arts as a system is that nobody hands my eight-year-old a black belt and says, "good luck, see you in a decade." They essentially break a black belt into rocks. He just earned his sixth. At his studio, that's green. He has eight more to go. That sounds like a lot, but eight more is not what he's thinking about. He's focused on his next belt test, where he hopes to earn the next level. That's the whole design.
But here's the part of his karate studio I didn't expect to change how our house runs. To test for the next belt, the instructors make it clear that it isn't enough to show up twice a week and master the physical component. Each student brings home a sheet with 24 empty boxes on it — eight per month, in three-month chunks. And to qualify for the test, a parent has to sign off on all 24.
They're called karate boxes, and my son only earns one for doing something responsible without being told. Not by a teacher, not by a parent. Packing his backpack before school. Clearing his dishes after dinner on his own accord.
So the studio, without ever calling it this, handed our family a quarterly rock. It has a finish line. It has a scoreboard on the refrigerator. And it's completely binary: done or not done. On day 90, the sheet is either full or it's not.
To be clear, he's still eight. He didn't magically turn into a fully independent adult, and I certainly still have to ask him to do things. But for the items on that list, the sheet takes over. It completely changed the conversation. Instead of me constantly directing him, he's excited to take the lead, and I just get to sign off on his success.
A piece of paper on the fridge changed the discussion. It turned a daily chore battle into a shared quarterly goal. And that's the same machinery as the boardroom, just in kid mode: a big, daunting goal broken into a simple 90-day plan with something visible we can check every week.
And once I saw it working in both of those places, I realized I had a massive blind spot. Because there was one part of my life where I was still setting the 10-year, undefined, no-finish-line version of a goal.
How I Use Rocks for My Own Health
The hardest part for me wasn't committing to the 90 days. It was narrowing my focus down to just one rock.
Here's the thing about health goals: lose weight, build muscle, body recomposition. They're enormous, they're vague, and they have no end date — which makes them incredibly easy to shelve. There's always next quarter.
And this is my favorite idea in all of this. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. That's as true for your body as it is for your P&L.
So instead of the enormous version, I picked two levers. Just two: calories and protein. In the ASSETS framework, those are the T — total energy — and the S — sustenance. And I gave myself one quarter. Not an extreme juice cleanse. Not an extended fasting challenge. A small, deliberate calorie deficit, tracked every day for 90 days.
Across that quarter, I averaged 1,843 calories a day. Outside of that window, my average sits around 2,158. So the whole intervention — the entire thing — was a delta of about 315 calories a day. That's it. Meaningful, but not radical. I stopped chasing a dramatic transformation and started chasing a manageable deficit. The unglamorous number is the one that actually lasts.
And to be clear, that specific number is just what worked for my baseline. I'm not a physician, and this is not a prescription. The exact math isn't the point. The point is that the deficit was small enough to actually sustain for an entire quarter.
The second lever was protein. Same quarter. Across those 90 days, I averaged 131 grams of protein a day — a deliberate focus on increasing my baseline.
Now here's the part I didn't plan, and it's exactly what I promised to share at the top of this video. The quarter ended. The deficit ended. And when I added those calories back, I didn't go back to where I had been. I put most of them back as protein. Not because I made a new rule — because after 90 days of paying attention to it, my defaults had quietly moved.
My daily protein average now, outside of any focused quarter, is 165 grams. That's higher than during the quarter I was actually trying. 26% higher.
The quarter ended, but the number kept climbing. A 90-day rock doesn't just hit a target. It moves the floor.
The Bottom Line: A Quarter Has a Finish Line. "Get Healthier" Doesn't.
"Get healthier" doesn't fail us due to discipline. I think we're just running our biology on the one operating system we'd never accept anywhere else in our lives.
At work, we know that a project without an owner or a deadline quietly disappears. At home, we naturally break daunting milestones down into short-term achievable steps for our families. Yet our bodies get the vague, tenure version with no finish line — and then we call it a willpower problem.
And what gave me so much peace of mind with this framework is that perfection is not required. Hitting the mark about 80% of the time is meaningful. The system is actually designed to absorb the days where life has other plans for us. It's not about lowering the bar. It's about giving ourselves the flexibility to simply begin.
Here's the bottom line: a quarter has a finish line. "Get healthier" doesn't.
Boring + Consistency = Results.
Two Things You Might Be Wondering
"Isn't this just a 90-day challenge with a business word slapped on it?"
Fair. But here's the difference for me. A challenge ends, and we go back to normal. By treating it like a rock, the goal was to shift my defaults — to make them part of my standard operating procedure. I wasn't trying to hit 165 grams of protein a day. That's just where I live now.
"What if I miss a week?"
When I missed a week, I didn't panic — because my benchmark was 80%, not 100. I stopped viewing an off-track week as a verdict and started seeing it as a signal to adjust while I still had runway. Catching a miss early just gives me information, rather than a surprise at the finish line. My goal setting finally clicked when I stopped accepting a baseline for my biology that I would reject in the boardroom.
Your Next Move
Don't try to rebuild your entire approach to goals tomorrow. Be kind to yourself. Pick one.
If you've been carrying a vague, open-ended health goal for years, the move is to give it a finish line. Pick one 90-day version of it — a single rock with a date you can look at and call done or not done.
If you've been trying to change everything at once, the move is to narrow. Remember: if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Choose just one lever this quarter.
If you tend toward perfectionism, the move is to adopt the 80% benchmark. Build in the tolerance for the weeks life has other plans, so a single missed week doesn't become the reason you quit.
If you want to figure out your own starting line, the free one-page ASSETS Audit is linked below. It's a one-page audit I built to help identify 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: "I Stopped Setting Vague Health Goals. Quarterly Rocks Fixed That.”
Up next in The Company of One: Getting down to just one rock was the heavy lift for me — but having the plan didn't stop my brain from constantly trying to negotiate it. I found myself in massive decision fatigue because I kept treating my own health like an open debate. Next time, I'll share how I use the framework from another best-selling book, Crucial Conversations, to stop taking a vote on my own health goals — so one clear decision can replace the endless daily negotiation.
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. She is now running Season 3 of the show — The Company of One — a personal operating system that applies executive team standards to running oneself.
Topics referenced in this episode:
The "rock" / 90-day priority concept and the EOS operating system from Gino Wickman's Traction; Stephen Covey's big-rocks mason jar demonstration; Verne Harnish's work placing the concept on a 90-day business clock; and the ASSETS framework pillars of Total Energy and Sustenance.
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.
