020: Vitals - I Had 40 Decisions Open Before 9 AM. Two Principles Cleared the Noise.

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I Wasn't Tired From the Doing. I Was Tired From the Re-Deciding.

I had already made the big command decisions about my health. But before 9 AM, my morning routine was still a string of open tabs — deciding what to eat, which supplements to take, and when to lift.

None of those are hard choices. That's the trap. They're small enough that I didn't notice I was making them, until I made them again tomorrow from scratch.

That's decision fatigue too. Not one heavy call — 40 light ones, on a loop. I wasn't tired from the doing. I was tired from the re-deciding.

Today I'll share two principles I've leaned on for years from The Power of Less — and how I took what I was doing at the office and applied it to my personal life.

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 3 is the personal operating system. Episode 1 was choosing the 90-day priority. Episode 2 was closing the big decision. Today is the layer underneath both of them: the dozens of small decisions that quietly drain our energy and our productivity.

Here's the top line: two principles, three places I use them — at work, at home, and with my own health — including one where I'm still not very good at it.

Last episode was about one big decision: closing the question on my training. But making the big choice doesn't eliminate the daily friction of the small ones. To fix that, I looked at habits that were already working in my professional life to see if they carried over to my health.

Today I'm sharing two principles from The Power of Less. I've relied on these systems at work for years to protect my mental bandwidth, but it wasn't until recently that I finally pointed them at my own biology — and the daily noise disappeared. It's the operational layer that makes the big goals possible.

Why does this matter? Here's what I notice about us: executives who lead at work, at home, and are finally ready to bring that same intensity to ourselves. At the office, we systematize relentlessly. We build the template, the recurring meeting agenda, the standard operating procedure — specifically so no one has to reinvent the same thing every week. Then we go home and run our entire physical life off the cuff.

Every open decision is a browser tab. I had 40 open before 9 AM. My battery was dead by noon.

If we're just meeting, I'm Alysia Bell — a 44-year-old executive, a mom, and someone who has logged her food in MyFitnessPal for nearly 4,000 days. That streak isn't powered by discipline. It survived for roughly 11 years because I stopped building it from scratch every day. I'll come back to that. I'm not a physician and I'm not a guru. I'm in this with you — running the experiment on myself first, and then sharing the receipts.

So three things today. One: the two principles, and why they're different. Two: how I use them at work, and where I'm still falling short on them at home. And three: how I applied them to my health to remove an entire category of daily decisions. And at the end, I'll share what all of this actually bought me — and it's broader than a single health metric.

The Two Principles: OHIO and Batch Processing

Quick definitions of two principles from the best-selling book The Power of Less — an incredibly easy read, offering truly impactful principles.

The first is OHIO: Only Handle It Once. This one is about how many times we touch a single task or decision. Consider email. We open it, we think about it, we leave it sitting in our inbox. We come back to it later, think about it some more, and maybe we finally answer it the next day. That's four or five touches for one email — and we paid the cost of rereading and rethinking every single time. Only handle it once means when I open it, I'm prepared to act. I respond. Or if it actually needs deeper work, I schedule the time on my calendar. Or I file it. Or I delete it. One touch, one decision, done.

The second principle is batch processing. This one isn't about a single item — it's about how and when we handle a whole category of them. Instead of leaving my inbox open all day and getting yanked out of deep work every time something arrives — the electronic equivalent of someone yelling "squirrel!" every 30 seconds — I hold one or two blocks labeled "batch email" on my calendar to process the messages. The book even recommends turning off email alerts entirely, so no windows pop up announcing each email's arrival when we're trying to think.

So OHIO is about touches. Batching is about timing.

At Work: Using Both Principles Together

First, at work — where I use both principles to maximize efficiency and minimize decision fatigue.

Here's the setup. For batching, I have 30 to 60 minutes of email management blocked on my calendar every day, and my new email notifications are always off. All of them. Because a notification isn't information. It's an interruption wearing a costume.

And then inside every block, OHIO: every message gets exactly one touch. Answer it, schedule real time if it needs real work, file it, or delete it. What I don't do is read something, feel a small amount of dread, and set it back down for later me to handle. That's doubling the punishment for a communication I don't even want to handle once, let alone multiple times. Because later me has to reread the whole thing. Later me pays the startup cost again.

Coming back from my last vacation clearly demonstrated the value of these two principles. Instead of picking at my inbox on my phone all week while I was supposed to be off, I blocked an extra-long batch for my first day back and left it completely alone until then.

And I want to be honest about why that's hard. The story I tell myself is that a quick check doesn't cost me anything — that I can glance at my phone by the pool and stay in vacation mode. That has never once been true. All it takes is one email with an edge to it, and I'm carrying it around for the rest of the afternoon, pretending I'm not.

So on day one back at the office, I sat down with a few hours and sorted by subject — stay on topic and follow the trajectory of all the folks who had chimed in on that conversation. And that's what gave me the arc. I could read an entire situation my team had handled while I was gone, from beginning to end. Here's where it started, here's what they tried, here's where the conversation currently stands.

Most of them had been resolved. They hadn't needed me. They had needed room.

Piecemeal on my phone, I would have parachuted into the middle of that on day two and helped. Batched, I could see it was already finished — because every thread got exactly one decision. Answer, schedule, file, or delete. It didn't sprawl. A few hours of genuinely tedious work, and I was completely caught up halfway through my first day back.

Batching my inbox didn't just protect my attention. It gave my colleagues the room to decide without me.

That's the pair of principles working together. Batching decides when I engage. OHIO decides how thoroughly I engage when I do. One protects the calendar. The other protects the follow-through.

At Home: Where I'm Still Falling Short (and That's Okay)

And I wish I could tell you I've applied both flawlessly in my personal life.

Second, at home. This one's pure batch processing — and this is one where I'm going to be straight with you, because I don't think there's value in pretending.

Meal prep is the obvious place to batch. In theory, instead of baking chicken and steaming broccoli every single night, I could cook several days all at once and buy back that repeated time. Cook once, eat four times. I know exactly how this works.

In practice, I'm partially there. I batch the things I love. I'll roast a big kabocha squash and eat it for days. My son's food is easy at his age — pasta and pizza are a solved problem in this house.

Where I fall down is protein. I'll cook meat in a batch occasionally. And then a genuinely chaotic week shows up, and I'm buying a rotisserie chicken or the pre-cooked, pre-portioned steak bites from Costco — which, honestly, those are fine. That's a system too. It just costs money instead of time. I'm not going to pretend that outsourcing to Costco is a character flaw. I know the difference between a system I chose and a gap I keep patching.

The fresh-cooking version is something I'd really like to get better at. So maybe that's a rock for next quarter. I'm not going to pretend that the kitchen is solved. We can't upgrade every department at the exact same time.

Honesty, not a highlight reel. A system doesn't have to be perfect to yield a return. Batch what you can, patch the rest. Name the difference so we know which is which.

But there is one place I got this completely right — and it removed an entire category of decisions from my day.

My Health: The Supplement System That Removed an Entire Category of Decisions

Third, my health — specifically, my supplements. This is one where "only handle it once" stops being about tasks and starts being about decisions.

Supplements are an almost perfect decision-fatigue trap, because every one of them is a small question that feels answerable. What should I take? How much? With or without food? Does this one cancel out that one? And there are real interactions to think about — things that shouldn't travel with the caffeine in my coffee or the calcium in my Greek yogurt. So timing matters, not just dosage.

That morning energy drain comes with a steep opportunity cost. If we burn our bandwidth on micro-decisions before breakfast, we pay for it at 4 PM, when we actually need our mental clarity to close a meeting.

So here's the system, and it's deliberately boring. When I get new labs, I sit down once. I go through the blood work with my doctor. I read the actual research — not the ads — and I decide on my supplement stack. Then I work out the nuance: what can go together, what needs fat to absorb, what to avoid too close to bed. That's the decision, handled once. OHIO.

Then I batch it. I physically sort the various bottles into four clear containers in my pantry. One I take when I wake up, one on my way to the gym, one with lunch, and one before bed. Then — and this is the whole point — I don't think about it again. Not once. Not until the next set of labs tells me something has changed.

There is no morning where I stand in my kitchen deciding how to execute. The research already happened. The pantry is just where the decision is stored.

I didn't just batch my supplements. I batched the mental load — because I refused to use today's bandwidth to answer yesterday's questions.

And to be clear, what's in those containers is built around my specific labs. The transferable part here isn't my stack. It's the system.

What All of This Actually Bought Me

Now here's what I promised at the top: what all of this actually bought me.

We've established that my food-logging streak isn't purely discipline. It survives because when I find a meal I like, I save it in my app — the whole thing, every ingredient — so I never build it again. That's "only handle it once," applied to a recipe, applied to tracking. And I go on streaks where I'm quite repetitive with food. I find what works and I repeat it for months.

Is it laziness? A lack of creativity? Perhaps. Here's what I know: saving those meals as one-button defaults cuts my logging time at least in half.

But that's not the number that matters. The real return is that I know exactly what we're eating this week. That means the shopping is simpler, the prep is simpler, and I have stopped standing in front of an open refrigerator between Zoom meetings — door wide open, wasting electricity, trying to decide what lunch is.

That's hours. Not health hours. Life hours.

I don't build these systems because I have it all figured out. I build them because I don't. Cutting down the daily friction around small decisions doesn't fix everything. It just buys back enough headspace to focus on what actually matters.

The Bottom Line: Morning Routines Run on Pre-Made Decisions

I used to think that morning routines ran on pure willpower. I was wrong. They run on pre-made decisions.

Hard choices will always cause decision fatigue. That's exactly why we can't afford to waste our clarity on the small stuff. Every repetitive choice we eliminate is a down payment on our focus the rest of the day.

I decide once, so my mornings don't have to.

Boring + Consistency = Results.

Two Things You Might Be Wondering

"Doesn't this make life rigid?"

I understand the concern, though for me it's the opposite. Pre-deciding the boring, repetitive things is exactly what leaves room to be spontaneous with the fun decisions. I don't want flexibility for what supplement goes with lunch. I want flexibility for my weekend plans.

"Where do I even start?"

Personally, I'd start with the decision you make most often. That's how you simplify your life without a full overhaul. For me, it was food logging — something I did every single day that could free up real time and mental energy. I made the decision once, because my morning bandwidth is too expensive to waste on defaults.

Your Next Move

Don't try to systematize your entire life tomorrow. Be kind to yourself. Pick one.

If your inbox is running your attention, the move is to try both principles together: block one or two "batch email" windows on your calendar, turn the notifications off, and give every message exactly one touch when you're in the block.

If your mornings feel like a string of small, draining choices, the move is to find the one category you can pre-decide. Maybe it's what you eat, maybe it's when you train, maybe it's your supplement routine.

If meal prep is your friction point, the move is to batch what you can and patch the rest — and to name the difference, so you know which is a system you chose and which is a gap you keep filling.

If you want to work out which part of your own week is costing you the most in small, repeated decisions, the free one-page ASSETS Audit is linked below. It's a one-pager 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: “How to Reduce Decision Fatigue After 40 (Systems, Not Willpower)”

• Up next in The Company of One: I've got the priority, I've closed the big decision, and I've pre-decided the small ones — which raises the obvious question: what about the habits I've been trying to get rid of for years? White-knuckle discipline has a shelf life, especially after 40, especially mid-career. Next time, I'll share what changed when I stopped trying to brute-force my way out of bad habits and learned how to replace and stack them instead.

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 "OHIO" (only handle it once) and batch processing principles from the book The Power of Less; 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.