Close Your Open Loops Every Week

How many to-do’s are you holding in your mind right now?
Unanswered emails, unread Slacks, appointments to make, journal questions to ask, chores and errands, and things to add to your lists.

Each one of these is an open loop.

They circle around and around in your head, each one building pressure (and these days, there’s a lot of pressure already there). These open loops add up. Quickly, we have so much on our mind that we feel overwhelmed.

These open loops are like open tabs on our computer.
They eat up our bandwidth just by being open.
And when we have limited mental bandwidth, we make poor choices in our work and other areas of our life like relationships, finances, and nutrition.

So one easy thing we can do to open up bandwidth and relieve our brain of the pressure and stress of carrying all these open loops is to have a daily or weekly ritual of closing open loops. Have a post-it note where you keep a running list of all the little things that pop up in your brain. Just writing them down can relieve that pressure. Take 5-10 minutes to close your day by organizing that list. Add them to your calendar or tomorrow's to-do list.

Additionally, it may help to close those bigger open loops at the end of the week. Take 30 minutes on a Friday afternoon and clear out unread emails and translate them to to-dos, downloads, notes, or calendar events. Clear the files on your desktop and downloads folder by organizing and deleting them. Transcribe any handwritten notes into a place that’s searchable. Put those errands, chores, and to-dos in your calendar. Review the last week in your calendar and see if there are any follow-ups and to-dos to add to next week. Look ahead 2-3 weeks and do the same. Plan out next week’s to do and finish the week with a clear head and a clear space to work.

Your brain is made for having ideas, not holding them.
Let it do its job and clear that mental clutter.

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Caveday is a company aimed at improving your relationship to work. We write regular posts on Medium and send out monthly newsletters with productivity tips, life hacks, and recommendations. Sign up for the mailing list here.

Jake Kahana is a cofounder of Caveday. Sign up for his personal emails, called “The Email Refrigerator” here.