024: Vitals - I Audited Every Hour for a Week to Find Out Why I Was Always Tired (After 40)
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My Exhaustion Wasn't a Mystery. It Was a Math Problem.
For years, I could not figure out why I was always tired. And I tried to solve it the way most of us do: by guessing. Maybe it was my sleep. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was a deficit of discipline.
Then I did exactly what I would do at work if the numbers stopped adding up. I stopped guessing, and I started auditing every single hour of the week. My professional calendar and my personal calendar, stacked side by side.
What I found wasn't a discipline problem. My exhaustion wasn't a mystery. It was a math problem. And the answer had been sitting on my calendar the whole time.
You can't reinvest an hour you never found.
One important note before we go further: I'm not a physician and I'm not a guru. If you're exhausted, that's worth an honest conversation with your doctor. That is not my lane. My lane is the calendar.
Welcome to Season 4: Reinvest in the Rest
Welcome to Season 4 of All Green Lights CEO: Reinvest in the Rest. This season is about how I treat my personal bandwidth like my most valuable asset.
At the end of last season, I promised we'd dive into buying back our time. That's exactly what we're doing. And every single hour we find has a job to do.
We're talking about rest in both senses of the word. The physical recovery: the rest, the repair, the reset. And the rest of your life: the movement, the meals, the moments. The hours come back, and we reinvest them. But never into more work.
Here's the top line: one week, audited hour by hour, across work, home, and biology. And the one assumption I got completely wrong.
Why does this matter? 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, we would never run a budget we hadn't read. We would never tell a board we're out of capital without being able to say exactly where it went. We audit. That's the job.
But then I'd look at my own life and complain: I don't have time.
"I don't have time" is a budget statement, and I was making it without ever opening the books.
I would never be that sloppy at the office. So why was I accepting that standard for myself? A budget statement requires ownership. It means the capital actually exists. It's just been allocated somewhere else. I needed to become the CFO of my mental bandwidth. I had to audit my own books.
If we're just meeting, I'm Alysia Bell, a 44-year-old executive and mom. I run two calendars: Outlook for work, Google for home. Both color-coded, both going back years. So when I say I audited a week, I didn't reconstruct it from memory. I pulled it up. Every block, every color, every hour. I'm in this with you, running the experiment on myself first and then sharing the receipts.
Three things today. One: how I actually run the audit, and the color code that makes it work. Two: what the audit exposed at work, and what it exposed at home. And three: where the hours go once we find them, which is the entire point of this season. And stick around for the end, because the data surprised me. When I saw the numbers, I assumed the fix was a more disciplined, perfectly distributed schedule. It turned out to be the exact opposite.
The Method: The Traffic Light Method on My Calendar
The method is simpler than it sounds. My calendar isn't just a list of meetings. It's also my task list, my personal life, and my training schedule, all living in one place.
I know not everyone works this way, but a standard to-do list never worked for me. A to-do list has no date and no deadline attached to it. I execute better when a task has a specific window.
Here's how I structure it. Meetings stay in the default color. In Outlook, that's blue. If it's blue, it involves other people's calendars, and it's not easy to move.
Every other block gets sorted into what I call the Traffic Light Method: green, yellow, and red. It lets me read the reality of my week at a single glance, without opening a single thing.
Green means go. These are my solo tasks: processing emails, prepping for calls, approving accounts payable. Green also means flexible. Unless it's up against a hard deadline, a green block can shift.
Yellow means wait. I'm blocked. I need an answer from someone else before I can execute.
Red means stop, for personal items. Though red doesn't mean untouchable. It just means please ask first. Sometimes red is lifting weights, which I try to fit in during one lunch break per week. That's flexible; I can usually move it to another window. Sometimes red is an anchored commitment, like volunteering for an event at my son's school.
That's my audit tool. Once the whole week is color-coded, I don't have to guess where the hours went. I can see them. My calendar stopped being a list of meetings and became the balance sheet for my week.
What the Audit Exposed at Work
The week I pulled up was the week of June 22nd. On paper, a completely standard 40-hour work week. For me, that's actually a light one.
Here's how those 40 hours split: 24 hours of meetings, two hours of travel, and roughly 14 hours of actually executing tasks. The email, the prep, the board communications, the approvals.
When I saw that ratio, it made me pause. Twenty-four hours talking about the work. Fourteen hours actually doing the work.
There is nothing I hate more than walking out of a meeting having solved absolutely nothing, with no clear action plan, knowing we're going to have to do it all over again. So I instituted a fix.
There is now a 30-minute block on my calendar every single weekday that says prep for tomorrow's meetings. On Friday, that covers Monday. I also zoom out to look at the whole week ahead and ask myself one question: is the schedule I just built actually survivable?
In that daily half hour, I look at the next day. Do I need to create an agenda for each meeting? Do I need to request one from a partner? What does success actually look like for this specific call? If there's a call to action, I decide it before the meeting so I can actually make it during the meeting. Sometimes I look at an invite, see multiple team members are on it, and take myself off to remove redundant representation.
I stopped deciding what success looks like during the meeting. I started deciding it the day before.
Now, for the honest accounting. That daily prep block costs me about two and a half hours a week. But it returns at least that much, because the agenda built the day before becomes the exact document where we take live notes during the call. When we hang up, the notes are already written and already saved in the right shared folder. That alone reclaims the 30 minutes I used to spend trying to reconstruct what we just decided.
On paper, it's roughly breakeven. But that's before you calculate the metric I can't put a number on: the repeat meetings that never have to happen, because the first one actually worked.
That's the audit doing its job at work. Next, I looked at what I found at home. And that's the part that changed how I see my entire week.
What the Audit Exposed at Home
Same week. Same calendar.
My son was signed up for daily summer camp, two weekly karate classes, and a belt test. There were my walking blocks. Three lifting blocks. Back-to-back doctor appointments. My quarterly dental cleaning. An hour-plus each evening for passion projects. Ninety minutes every night for my son's bedtime routine. A Saturday birthday party at the beach. Four hours on Sunday hosting a neighborhood potluck in our driveway. And about an hour a day of the invisible labor: the groceries, the house cleaning, the errands.
So I added up everything I was quarterbacking, and that's not even including the personal commitments my husband takes the lead on.
Forty hours of work. Forty-three hours of personal commitments. Eighty-three hours in one single week. And every one of those is a block I can point to. It's all on the calendar, which is exactly why I could run the math.
There are 168 hours in a week. Subtract roughly eight hours a night for sleep, and we have 112 waking hours. Eighty-three of mine were already spoken for.
That's 74% of my waking life committed before I ate a single meal, took a single shower, or watched a single episode of Love Is Blind. (Don't judge me.) Which leaves 29 hours, roughly four hours a day.
And here's the kicker: that was my light week. No out-of-town work trips. No youth sports games. No unexpected curveballs. Seventy-four percent of my waking hours spoken for, on an easy week.
That's when the answer finally showed up for me.
For two decades, my husband would look at my calendar, laugh out loud, and say the exact same thing: "You would have to hit all green lights for your schedule to actually work."
I always heard it as a compliment about my optimization. But sitting with the calendar audit, I heard it differently. A schedule that requires all green lights is not an optimized schedule. It's a schedule with zero slack. One red light, one sick kid, one meeting that runs long, one bad night of sleep, and the whole thing doesn't bend. It breaks.
I wasn't tired because I was failing to optimize. I was tired because I had built a week with zero margin for error.
A schedule that only works if I hit all green lights isn't optimized. It's fragile.
My Biology: Where the Hours Go Once We Find Them
Finding hours is not the point. Finding hours and then filling them with more work is just a more efficient way to be exhausted.
So on my calendar, health blocks are not aspirational. They are hard blocks with start times, just like everything else. Walking blocks for steps. Three lifting sessions. A window to get to the grocery store, or at a minimum, place the Instacart order. A wind-down window. And sometimes, though not often enough, a block for a massage, or to pick up dinner and have a family movie night.
Some people would laugh at that. I have literally scheduled the time to relax. But I don't schedule recovery because I'm disciplined.
I schedule it because an hour that isn't on the calendar is an hour that will just disappear.
My wind-down window does two jobs at once. It's on there to make sure my son gets to sleep on time, but it's also on there to make sure that I do. While he's getting ready for bed, I'm getting ready for bed. Teeth, pajamas, makeup off, all at the exact same time. Then we go into his nice dark room and listen to a sleep story. I either come out of there relaxed, or sometimes I fall asleep right there in his bed, which I'm enjoying while it lasts, because I know kids don't let you cuddle them forever.
And here's the mechanical benefit I didn't plan for. If I want to go straight to sleep after he does, I can. I'm not standing in a bright bathroom at 10 PM doing a whole routine that wakes me back up.
The Assumption I Got Completely Wrong
Now here's what I promised at the top: the thing I got wrong.
When I saw the audit, my instinct was to fix the asymmetry. Spread out my commitments. Work only between the hours of eight and five every day. Go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, like a reasonable person.
That is not what worked. What worked was letting the week be asymmetric as needed.
My lifting is not evenly spread. It's one weekday hour, wherever it fits, often over lunch. And then it's two two-hour blocks on Saturday and Sunday mornings at a family gym with a kids' club. On paper, back-to-back weekend sessions are not optimal. In reality, they're the only place I have that much flexibility, and they're the reason the third session is even possible.
On the other end of the spectrum, we get incredibly repetitive with food. We tend to repeat the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner for most days of the week. Some people might find that incredibly boring. But I do not always have the bandwidth to invent a new dinner on a Tuesday, and pretending otherwise is how the whole plan falls apart.
So my schedule is asymmetric, and my menu is repetitive. Those are not failures of discipline. They are the reason any of it survives contact with a real week.
The Bottom Line: You Don't Need More Discipline. You Need More Margin.
We've been sold the idea that the answer to a full life is a better morning routine, or more willpower, or a version of ourselves that simply wants it more at 6 AM. But that isn't the reality. The reality is that we're running weeks with zero margin, and then treating our own exhaustion as a character flaw.
The calendar audit didn't magically give me more hours. There are 168, and there will always be 168. What it gave me was the ability to actually see them.
Here's the bottom line.
You don't need more discipline. You just need more margin.
Boring + Consistency = Results.
Two Things You Might Be Wondering
"Isn't putting your whole life on a calendar exhausting in itself?"
I understand why it looks that way. For me, it's the opposite. The calendar is what stops me from carrying the whole week around in my head. I don't color-code my life so that it looks impressive. I do it so that when someone asks me for an hour, I can see exactly what that hour costs.
"What if my week cannot be cut down?"
Then the audit did its job, because now we know there's a real difference between feeling overcommitted and knowing we're overcommitted. One of those is a trap. The other is information. Honestly, most of what I found in my audit wasn't fat to trim. It was just a week with zero slack. So the first thing I protected wasn't a task. It was space for hitting red lights.
I stopped asking where the time went and started looking at where I had already sent it.
Your Next Move
Don't try to rebuild your entire week tomorrow. Be kind to yourself. Pick one.
If you've been saying "I don't have time," the move is to open the books. Pull up last week's calendar, work and home side by side, and add up the hours that were already spoken for.
If your calendar is only meetings, the move is to try color-coding everything else: solo tasks you can move, items where you're waiting on someone, and personal blocks that mean "please ask first."
If your meetings keep ending without decisions, the move is a short daily prep block for tomorrow's calls: an agenda, a definition of success, and a quick check on whether you actually need to be in the room.
If your week only works when everything goes right, the move is to protect margin before you protect another task. Leave space for the red lights.
If you want to figure out which part of your own week deserves the hours you find, 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: “I Audited Every Hour for a Week to Find Out Why I Was Always Tired (After 40)”
Up next in Reinvest in the Rest: Now the hours are visible, but that clarity comes with a catch. I can see exactly what's taking them, and I'm the one who said yes. Finding the time is just the math. Reclaiming it requires boundaries. I've been saying yes to things I didn't have room for, because saying no felt like letting people down. Next time, I'll share how I cut a meaningful chunk of my calendar without feeling guilty about it..
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 4 of the show, Reinvest in the Rest, about treating personal bandwidth like your most valuable asset.
Topics referenced in this episode:
A personal time audit across professional and personal calendars; color-coded calendar blocking using the Traffic Light Method (green, yellow, red); daily meeting preparation and agenda-setting; the 168-hour week and waking-hour math; scheduled recovery and wind-down routines; 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.
