There I was lying in bed desperate for sleep. It was the third night in a row. I finally rolled over. 2:11am. UGH.
Knowing my mind was spinning, I just decided to get up and go. “Might as well start the day…”
Later, as I was strolling into work, one of my Project Managers looked at me and said, “Are you ok?”
I shrugged. I muttered back, “Yep. Just got a lot of things going on…”
(I thought to myself, “Greeeeeat. I must really look like shit.”)
I wasn’t lying. We were scaling that year from $13MM to $28.5MM. We were objectively busy.
But, it’s more than that.
I was CRUSHING work. It’s silly how productive you can be when drinking from the fire hydrant of growth. The next action item always sits directly in front of you on a silver platter. But, it’s not the amount of work you’re doing. It’s the Open Loops left behind.
Here’s what I learned:
Open Loops are all the commitments you’ve made, but haven’t completed. It doesn’t matter the stage. Started, not completed is the same as committed, not started.
- The 17 calls you haven’t returned.
- The hard conversation with the employee you’re probably going to fire.
- The Purchase Order process you’re halfway through writing.
- The bread you need to grab on the way home.
- The electricity bill that needs to get paid.
- The Ikea coffee table that needs to be put together.
- On and on and on…
- All of it. Both personally and professionally.
Open Loops are a human problem. It’s not just you. Your brain remembers the unfinished, open commitments. And, it focuses on them much more than the ones you completed. This is called the Zeigarnik Effect. Sidenote: It’s also a reason you don’t celebrate the wins as often because “there’s always more to do.”
Open Loops have long memories.
This means they pile up…waiting on you. Kinda like the ports in California with your Christmas presents. As these open loops pile up, your mind cannot stop. Your brain never turns off. Your mind obsesses over unfinished business. It replays all the commitments like TNT replays Shawshank Redemption. Day and night, night and day.
Your brain never rests. At some point, the Open Loops pile so high that it starts a nasty negative spiral. You’re sleep deprived. Leads to stolen energy. Full of anxiety because we focus on what we haven’t done instead of what we got done. And then, we start lacking confidence because our mind tells us that we are not getting enough done. Day after day. It’s debilitating. It crushes productivity.
Death by a million paper cuts. Until you burnout, freak out or flake out.
Open Loops – a Visual
I reboot my computer regularly. Why? I start every day with 47 tabs open. I end with 103.
The open tabs cause my computer to slooooow…and crash. The same is true of your brain.
It’s not that I haven’t been hugely productive during the day. It isn’t that I didn’t complete a Herculean amount of action items. It’s that I haven’t completed the tasks on 103 tabs. They’re still open. And, in the morning, I wake up to 103 tabs open…ready to add another 60. Over time, it’s like pouring sand into the gears of progress. I’ll get less and less done if I don’t close out the Open Loops.
How to Close Loops
Learning how to close loops is critical to your productivity and mental health. Here’s a process I’ve found that works well in closing Open Loops.
Write it down
When I have a lot of Open Loops and I’m feeling anxiety, I brain dump them into a Note on my phone. Writing it down breaks the replay cycle of your brain. And, it passes those items off to the subconscious for creative solutions. For many people, the last 10 minutes of each day is a great time to brain dump. I find this particularly effective as I go to bed. I do it daily to stop the replay mechanism.
Once you have your brain dump, you have 4 options:
Do it
David Allen, the productivity guru, says that if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it. Right then. Right now. Many times it isn’t the heft of the Open Loop – but really the sheer number of Open Loops that is crushing. It’s all the “little things” that need to get done that weigh you down. Knock ‘em down. Ease your mind.
Schedule It
Winners dominate their calendar. If you are working on an Open Loop and can’t finish it, then schedule it. The start-stop friction is too great to approach it any other way. And, yes. Block it on your calendar. If it’s a big project, break it up into milestones.
Consciously Eliminate
The world changes therefore your commitments will need to change. Embrace it. Don’t feel guilty about the changing landscape of business and its impact on a commitment; the alternative is to NOT do it and not communicate, which is far worse. Eliminate previous commitments. AND, communicate your decision to change. The communication piece is what ends the Open Loop. Don’t operate in a vacuum.
Delegate
You mind will release the Open Loop if you delegate it to someone who is capable of doing it. Stress comes when you hand it off to someone without enough clarity or skill to execute. In short, don’t hand it off to be completed poorly. Delegate improperly and your mind will still own it. Delegate wisely.
And, then going forward…
Be Intentional
I’ve talked about #15Forward before where every Sunday I take 15 minutes to look fifteen days out. It’s a process of being intentional and aligning actions with objectives. If something is no longer needed, it gets cancelled from my calendar. It also helps me to get very disciplined to say, “No.” This ensures I have fewer, uninvited, non-aligned Open Loops. Phew.
Challenge
As you finish off the year (week, month), try and close as many Open Loops. No matter how big or how small. Your mind, your family and your holiday time will thank you.
Let me know how many Open Loops you closed between now and the end of the year.
1-2-3, Let’s Go!
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