How To Purge Your Life Of Open Loops (And Unlock A Wave Of “Trapped” Energy You Can Redeploy Into Things Important To You)

If you're feeling overwhelmed, read this:

This past Wednesday, I boarded a 3-hour flight from Austin to Miami plagued by a feeling of overwhelm.

Between life & business, everything felt cloudy & disorganized. Swirling around in my brain was a jumbled mess of unfinished projects, half-made decisions, and incomplete errands. Three hours later, I marched off the plane with elite clarity, powered only by my Muji 0.5 clicker pen, Muji B6 notebook, and an exceptionally strong cold brew from the airport Jo’s Coffee.

Every open loop in my life was carefully sorted & prioritized, ready for me to fully engage upon return to my apartment.

And in this post I’m going to walk through the exact process I followed—why it works, how to do it step by step, and how to make it a repeatable ritual you can turn to whenever your brain feels like mine did that morning.

Let’s dive in.

Why You Feel Overwhelmed & Lack Cognitive Energy

The answer is simple:

You have too many “open loops” in your brain.

Every open loop is like a browser tab quietly running in the background. You might not see it, but it’s constantly draining mental battery. Keep too many of them open and your brain starts operating far below its capacity.

For example, how many of these are currently taking up small bits of your attention?

• Unmade big life decisions

• Habits you’re trying to break

• Messages that need responding

• Relationships you want to nurture

• Business projects you’re working on

• Small errands you haven’t completed

• Anything else you’ve been “meaning to do”

On its own, each loop on its own isn’t enough to crush your momentum.

But when stacked together, they create a vicious cycle:

1. The more open loops you have, the harder it is to focus

2. The harder it is to focus, the fewer loops you close

3. The fewer loops you close, the faster they pile up

Before long, your brain isn’t a clean slate ready to take action, it’s a cluttered mess of unfinished tasks each whispering “don’t forget about me.”

This was me before I boarded the flight—an endless list of loops swirling around in the background, clogging my ability to get anything done.

Psychologists have a name for why open loops feel so mentally draining.

In the 1920s, psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed that waiters could hold multiple orders in their head before relaying them to the kitchen. Even if they were interrupted with another table or another task, they could still rattle off the order to the chef without forgetting it. However, the second they “closed the loop” in their brain and relayed it to the chef, they totally forget what the customer had ordered.

This became known as the Zeigarnik effect—the tendency to remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones.

Our brains hold unfinished tasks in an active, tense state until they’re resolved. And this is how most people spend their entire lives—an endless number of loops piling up until they’re basically unable to take action in any way.

Luckily, closing your loops will release the trapped mental energy.

And that’s what we will walk through over the next 7 steps.

• Step 0: Preparing for this exercise

• Step 1: Brain Dump Every Open Loop In Your Life

• Step 2: Rank Each For Importance, Urgency, and Effort

• Step 3: Create Your “Quick Wins” Momentum List (But Don’t Work On Them Yet)

• Step 4: Eliminate The Low Importance, Low Urgency Until Later

• Step 5: Consolidate Your Highly Important + Highly Urgent Projects

• Step 6: 60-Minute Power Hour On Your Quick Wins

• Step 7: Begin The High Impact + High Urgency

Let’s get into it.

Step 0: Preparing for this exercise

Before we get tactical, it’s worth treating this like a real reset, not a 5-minute task between tweets & slack messages.

• Block off 2-3 hours so you can fully sink into flow

• Use pen & paper ONLY without WiFi or your phone nearby to prevent distraction

• Do it on a weekend or off-day, when your brain isn’t bouncing between a bunch of meetings & tasks

None of this is mandatory, but the more you commit, the more loops you’ll actually identify + the more loops you will actually close.

That’s where the energy surge comes from.

Now, if reading this makes you think “I don’t have time for that” — keep reading. That’s a symptom of having too many open loops. Find a way to make time for this exercise, otherwise you’ll end up stuck in this same cycle for months and months.

I promise whatever you’re currently working on is actually far less important & less urgent than completing this exercise. (And you’ll see why those two “prioritization filters” are relevant when we get to the third step.)

Alright—with your space, time, and tools all set, it’s time to start the purge.

Step 1: Brain Dump Every Open Loop In Your Life

The first step to purging the open loops is to identify them.

And this is best done through a no-filter, pen & paper brain dump exercise that lists anything and everything on your mind.

The EXTREMELY important part here is that you do not try to take action during this brain dump step. Before we can shut any of these tabs, we need to get all of them out there in one great long list.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Set a timer for 10 minutes and list everything you possibly can

2. Make a heading title “Open Loops” at the top of the page

3. Start bulleting out anything & everything that’s currently taking up your attention

Pro tip: If you’re like me and “segment” your personal & business brains, you can create two lists, one for life & one for business. Or if you want to keep it simple, you can use one big list and save the sorting for the next step.

To jog your memory, here’s a list of common categories that are ripe with open loops:

• Ongoing projects you’re already working on. Think any business project, home project, fitness goals, upcoming travel, taxes, budgeting.

• Projects you’re thinking about working on. Habits you want to start, initiatives you want to get into, hobbies you want to try, challenges you want to explore, etc.

• Unmade decisions. Where to live, relationship choices, financial moves, firing decisions, etc.

• 1-off admin tasks. Filing your taxes, buying someone a birthday gift, cancelling a subscription, ordering groceries, cleaning out your closet.

During the brain dump, do not try to sort or solve anything. Just list as many things as you can. It’s supposed to be messy—we’re going to organize it later.

When the timer goes off, you should be sitting with a long & slightly overwhelming list. That means you’ve done it correctly.

If you’re like me, just looking at that list helps you understand why you’ve been so foggy. Each item on this list has been pulling at you below the surface without you knowing it. That realization alone (that it makes sense that you’ve been foggy) should give you the first hit of relief.

Now let’s figure out what to do with this list.

Step 2: Rank Each For Importance, Urgency, and Effort

Now that everything is out of your head and onto paper, it’s time to make sense of it.

Rather than dive into the first one, we need to understand that all items on this list are not created equally.

• Some are far more important than others, meaning that if they were solved or worked on, everything else on the list would become easier.

• Some are more urgent than others, meaning they need to be handled quickly otherwise there will be tangible negative consequences.

• And some require more effort than others, which means they likely need to be broken up into smaller steps & tackled over a longer period of time.

Most people never do this type of prioritization.

And as a result, they spend all of their time working on things that are not very important and take a lot of time & effort. And they spend every day working like this but wonder why they never move anything meaningful forward.

Instead, we’re going to create a list of weights that will make it extremely clear what’s actually worth working on.

And to do that, we’re going to rank each on 3 simple dimensions:

Importance (1-5 scale)

• 1 = Basically irrelevant. Closing this will not change your life or any other’s lives.

• 5 = Highly impactful. Closing this would make everything else easier, less stressful, or less important.

For example: “Clean up notes on my desk” might be a 1. “Decide where to live next year” might be a 5.

Urgency (1-5 scale)

• 1 = Not urgent. No consequences if this waits 6 months

• 5 = Highly urgent. If this isn’t handled in the next day or two, something breaks

For example: “Rearrange bookshelf” might be 1. “File taxes before deadline” might be a 5.

Effort (1-5 scale)

• 1 = Very low effort. Can be knocked out in under 5 minutes.

• 5 = Very high effort. Big, time-intensive, emotionally-heavy lift.

For example: “Make this week’s date reservation” might be a 1. “Sell house” might be a 5.

A few guidelines to make this process smooth:

• Do all your Importance scores first all the way down the list, then move onto Urgency, then move on to Effort. Don’t try to do all 3 scores for each project as that will require too much mental energy from context switching.

• Don’t overthink it. Your first gut reaction is usually right. You can adjust later if you notice something was off.

• Do not take action while you rank. That again will require cognitive switching. Your goal here is just to prioritize, we will take action in the next step.

At this point, you should have the following list things:

• A full list of all the open loops in your life

• A 1-5 score for Importance, Urgency, and Effort for each loop

Now we can create a structured plan of what to work on + build momentum along the way.

Step 3: Create Your “Quick Wins” Momentum List (But Don’t Work On Them Yet)

The fastest way to build momentum isn’t by tackling the most challenging & important loop on your list—it’s by clearing out the small stuff that is quietly taking up space.

Closing these will give you a quick dopamine hit that will make it easier to get started on this path of progress.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Pull up your list of loops

2. Title a new list called “Quick Wins” underneath

3. Scan your list for all items on the 1 or 2 on the effort scale and put them on your new list + cross them out from your old list

For example, this could be anything from:

• Scheduling a dinner reservation

• Booking a haircut

• Sending a reply to a lingering text message

• Cancelling a random subscription

• Paying an overdue bill

• Etc. etc.

These might not be very important or even very urgent, but they’re quick wins that should have some net benefit to your life + don’t deserve to take up any more cognitive bandwidth.

Assemble this list, but don’t work on it yet. We’re going to churn through this list in a couple steps from now.

Step 4: Eliminate The Low Importance, Low Urgency Until Later

At this point, you’ve separated the easy stuff from everything else.

From here, we’re going to “close the loop” on loops that aren’t worth closing. This doesn’t mean we’re never going to work on them. But it does mean we are going to wait on working on it because we have other more urgent & more important things.

Here’s how to find them:

1. Title a new list called “Someday/Later”

2. Scan everything that’s left on your list

3. Find anything that is 3 or below on Important AND Urgency and add it to this list

4. Set a simple date in the future when you’re going to reevaluate the items on this list

The transferring of these projects to this list should give you a rush of energy.

These are the projects that aren’t really worth doing, and they’re not really time sensitive, yet they’re hogging mental bandwidth.

Importantly, this step allows you to close the loop for each of these even though you haven’t completed it.

Simply by having them all listed out on the same list + a time in the future to reevaluate them = tons of tabs closed, like the waiter relaying the order to the kitchen.

If you’re anything like me, you probably noticed:

• A good number of items on your list were not important & not urgent

• These were things you were actively spending time thinking about despite their relatively low impact

• And chances are, you’ve been operating like this for a long period of time with a good chunk of your brain power going toward these things that don’t matter

At this point, you should begin to see clarity emerging.

The only things remaining on our list are going to be the Highly Important + Highly Urgent loops.

Step 5: Consolidate Your Highly Important + Highly Urgent Projects

The final organization step is to take everything that’s left over and put it on your fresh Active Projects list.

We’ll follow the same “rewriting” process we’ve done in the last two steps:

1. Make a new header under your Quick Wins + Someday/Later list called “Active Projects”

2. Scan your list for everything that’s left over

3. Transfer each of them to your new Active Projects list + cross it out from your original list

If you’ve done the exercise correctly so far, you should only have items on this list that have 4 or more for Importance or Urgency. These are things that are worth working on either because they’re due soon, they’re impactful on your life, or both.

This is what prioritization feels like.

In this reevaluation step you might notice a few scenarios:

• Projects you thought were highly urgent or important aren’t actually as urgent or important as you thought. If you find these, you can transfer them to your Someday/Later list

• Projects you thought were relatively high effort are actually much easier. If you find these, you can transfer them to your Quick Wins list

After this step, bask in the feeling of clarity with all the loops on your original list sorted into 3 clear categories:

1. Quick Wins

2. Someday/Later

3. Active Projects

This is the end state I reached at the end of my flight from Austin to Miami.

I had all my loops organized with a list of things I could tackle immediately + a list of things I could move forward over the next few days and weeks.

From this list of organized loops, it’s time to build momentum.

Step 6: 60-Minute Power Hour On Your Quick Wins

Our first momentum-building step will be to tackle as many Quick Wins as we can.

• Set a timer for 60 minutes

• Take the list of quick wins we just created and start on the easiest one

• Complete it / handle it and then give yourself a big fat checkmark next to it (or cross it out with a line if you fancy that style)

• Repeat for as many as you can in 60 minutes

Hopefully you find you’re able to complete your entire list of quick wins during that time. If not, keep the list and set a time either later today or the next day to finish it out.

As you tackle these items, here are a few pro tips to keep in mind:

• Pro tip #1: If you find yourself spending more than a couple minutes on one of these, chances are it’s actually a 4 or 5 on the time/effort scale. If you find it’s going to take more than a few minutes, rerun the sorting algorithm. If it’s not important or urgent, move it to your Someday/Later list. If it is Important or Urgent, move it over to your Active Projects list to tackle later.

• Pro-tip #2: As you do this, you may find some loops are things you’re going to have to repeat in the future on a consistent basis. When you find these, think about how you could build a system to handle these in the future. This likely creates a new loop that will be important/not urgent, so add it to your Active Projects to tackle later.

Step 7: Begin The High Impact + High Urgency

At this point, you should feel a solid sense of clarity for all the things you’re currently responsible for working on.

If you’ve followed the steps so far, you should be sitting with three lists:

1. A list of low effort quick wins that you’ve completely checked off

2. A list of highly important + highly urgent projects

3. A list of non important & non-urgent projects that are not worth your time at the moment

Take a second to breathe it in.

This is how you should be operating most of the time. Tackling quick actions the second they pop up to prevent them from piling up. Keeping the highly important & highly urgent projects top of mind to work on daily. And closing the loop on things you’re not working on by putting them on a later list and revisiting them in the future.

Now—armed with this project list, how do you proceed with actually getting work done?

There are many ways of going about this, but I’ll share what I believe is the simplest daily productivity routine. (And stay tuned for next week’s post where I’ll do a full breakdown of my process here.)

• Each day, you’re going to set aside time for Deep Work—whether that’s 5 hours on a day with no meetings or just 60 minutes on a day with tons of meetings

• You’re going to block that time on your calendar so nothing can interrupt it

• And you’re going to create 1-3 action items based on your most important projects that will move one or more of them forward

That’s it.

That’s all you can do on a daily basis to guarantee you move the important things forward.

Some days you’re going to do way more than that, but I promise you the momentum of checking of 1-3 tasks every day will compound faster than you think.

If 1-3 tasks doesn’t feel like a lot, good. You’re more likely to get 5-6 tasks done if you just focus on getting 1-3 done because it’s less daunting. If you knock those out in the first hour or two, you can always take on more after.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of going to bed thinking about the task you’ll work on first thing the next day.

Wrapping Up & Recap

Aaaaand that’s it.

To recap all 7 steps:

• Step 0: Preparing for this exercise

• Step 1: Brain Dump Every Open Loop In Your Life

• Step 2: Rank Each For Importance, Urgency, and Effort

• Step 3: Create Your “Quick Wins” Momentum List (But Don’t Work On Them Yet)

• Step 4: Eliminate The Low Importance, Low Urgency Until Later

• Step 5: Consolidate Your Highly Important + Highly Urgent Projects

• Step 6: 60-Minute Power Hour On Your Quick Wins

• Step 7: Begin The High Impact + High Urgency

That’s the entire process I turn to whenever I feel myself lacking clarity.

Give it a try after reading this and leave a comment to let me know what you think.

To your clarity,

Dickie

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PS… If you’ve made it this far, there’s probably a handful of questions swirling around that you’re looking to have answered.

How often do I need to redo this exercise?

In my experience, this is better done from feeling than from rigid scheduling.

The indicator I use is whenever I find myself unable to properly set my 1-3 deep work tasks for the next morning, I have too many open loops and must repeat this exercise.

Sometimes that means I repeat this every couple of days during busier times of more turbulence.

Other times it means I don’t repeat this for 2-3 weeks because I have the right amount of clarity to keep going.

Start with doing it once and then seeing how many days of clarity that brings you.

Once you’ve done the exercise once, you have a “starting point” of projects with which you can use when starting the exercise, which should reduce the total time it takes from a few hours down to 60 minutes.

Do you use any kind of software system to keep tracking of these?

I am in the top 0.1% of people in terms of time wasted trying to optimize the perfect productivity system.

And every single time I feel the urge to do so, I force myself to return to pen & paper because it’s the only way I’ve been able to reliably get real meaningful work done on a consistent basis.

That’s not to say there aren’t great softwares out there that may be able to do this for me, especially powered by AI. But for now, I enjoy the process of putting these lists on paper and operating from there.

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