Hey friend,

Happy Friday. I don't know where you're reading this from but where I live in the PNW we've just wrapped up our second week of warm weather and I couldn't be happier about it.

This week, I want to bring you the second habit out of four in the Full Circle Habit Stack

To review, Habit #1 was all about identifying what you can actually control and freeing yourself from the anxiety of feeling responsible for things you can't control. This week is about managing the things you can control and all the open loops that come our way.

Remember, an open loop is any problem, decision, task, idea, or conversation that is unresolved.

Again, open loops are everywhere.

They are the tasks you get assigned at work, the chores at home, the events on your calendar, and the projects you're managing. Or, if you're like me they are the massive play structure from Costco in your backyard that your three-year-old manages to mention every time he opens his mouth. I really need to get that loop closed. Alright, here's how you can manage and close open loops.

Habit #2: Manage and Close Open Loops

Once you have a better grasp on the things you can actually control or have agency over, you can start to organize all the little things that are begging for your attention.

At any given moment, there might be hundreds of things on a list in your head that are asking for your attention.

The conversation you had with your spouse before you left the house that wasn’t resolved, the concern you have for your kids that you just aren’t sure how to handle, the big life decision or crossroad that you see on the horizon.

Whatever the source, every little open loop occupies some part of your mental capacity and creates drag on your ability to be creative and productive.

You can picture this like RAM in a computer. Every open loop is a new tab in Chrome.

Every tab takes up a little bit of RAM until your computer gets so bogged down that it can barely load a new website or switch between apps. And God forbid there are so many loops open that it just decides to crash. That's what we call burnout.

The same thing happens in your brain. As the number of open loops increases, so does your anxiety and overall feeling of chaos. Some of us can handle more than others, but we all have a limit.

This is NORMAL. For most of human history, this wasn’t really a felt problem because the world just wasn’t as overstimulating as it has become since technology took off.

Psychologists attribute this to something they call the Ziegarnik Effect.

The Ziegarnik Effect postulates that "unfinished tasks (open loops) are much more readily recalled to our minds."

In simpler terms, our brains are hardwired to close open loops as soon as possible and they have a hard time forgetting things that are undone.

This means that open loops will occupy your mental RAM until you deal with them.

The more I learned to pay attention to this the more obvious it became. Any time I was feeling overwhelmed or anxious it didn’t take long to realize that there were just too many things in my head that I hadn’t dealt with. Once I closed some loops or committed to a plan to close them I saw my anxiety and that feeling of being “out of control” diminish.

So how should we go about closing open loops? The good news is it’s not complicated.

I use the acronym CDA to remember what to do.

COLLECT

The first step is to collect your open loops. This has to be a way of recording them outside your head. You cannot keep the list in your head.

It can be digital or in a notebook or on your phone, whatever you want but you have to have a place to collect open loops the moment they pop into your head.

I have used a couple of different tools. I’m a big fan of Notion for this. I’m currently switching over to Airtable for work loops because my team loves it so I’m trying to help them commit to a system that they’ll use.

Here are the basics.

You need a place to capture loops with enough information that you’ll know what they are days later. This is just a little note to remind you what the loop was.

You also need a place to categorize or organize loops into "projects."

Projects are simply groups of related loops.

I call this collection space my inbox. It’s the list that receives all the open loops I need to act on later. Then I assign them deadlines and projects. I have a second space that surfaces things based on their deadline so I’m working on things based on their urgency. If something is not urgent but is very important and will take multiple sessions to complete I give it an arbitrary deadline sometime in the same week so I don’t delay taking action.

DECIDE

The next step is to decide what you’re going to do with each loop. You can either decide to take action, decide to wait on it, and assign it to be done later, or you can decide that it no longer matters and you are going to let it go. What you can’t do is let it sit forever.

Even though it’s no longer in your head, it’s going to find its way into your consciousness over and over every time you pull up your list of open loops. Eventually, you’ll just wish it wasn’t there. You might as well kill the idea and intentionally let it go if you’re not going to act on it. If there’s value in the idea it will find its way back into your mind further down the road, but at least you’ll have closed the loop for the time being.

The last thing you must decide is when you will take action on the loop. You have to block time in your calendar to close the loop or make progress on closing the loop. If you don’t block time for it, it’s not going to happen.

If it’s an easy or quick task, do it as soon as possible. David Allen, in his book, Getting Things Done, says if a task will take less than two minutes, do it right away. Again, there’s no benefit to letting things sit undone, no matter how small, because even the small stuff occupies your mental margin.

ACT

The final step is to act. Do the action that you committed to. Don’t delay. Don’t betray your calendar. Take action.

There’s so much temptation in modern life to spend time administrating our lives and talking about work more than we actually do and build. This is what Cal Newport calls, Pseudo-productivity. You feel busy but nothing actually comes to be from all your “hard work.”

You have to actually close the loop.

That's habit #2. I hope that's helpful.

To get started, you can simply write down all the open loops you're currently keeping in your head. Try to apply the CDA method to clear out some loops and watch your sense of being overwhelmed decrease.

I'll be back next week with Habit #3.

Till next Friday,

Craig