228: Improve the Productivity of Your ADHD Brain by Completing Open Loops

Open Loops: The Invisible Baggage Weighing Your Brain Down

How many tabs do you actually have open right now? I checked before writing this: 21 in Chrome and 5 in Safari on my iPad, another 8 in Chrome and 36 in Safari on my phone. That’s before even glancing at the inbox waiting on some kind of response.

Those tabs are a decent metaphor for something bigger: open loops. Not just the digital clutter, but every task in real life that got started and then stalled. A call you’re waiting to hear back on. A task that paused because you needed an answer to something else first. A dining room table full of items waiting to be listed on Marketplace, dropped at a donation center, or returned to whoever they belong to. None of these are finished, and none of them are quite forgotten either. They just sit in the background, making noise, the same way too many open programs slow down an overloaded computer.

Why these loops never seem to close on their own

Gretchen Rubin, host of the Happier podcast, often says tasks that can be done anytime get done at no time. Her fix is to schedule it, put it on the calendar like an appointment with yourself. That works fine for a more linear, monkey-brained approach. It doesn’t work nearly as well for brains that need real urgency to actually move, which is exactly why so many of these tasks just don’t have a natural deadline attached, and quietly never get addressed.

Designate a Closure Loop Day

The fix is deciding, on purpose, that a specific day is for closing loops. I’ve been informally calling this Closure Loop Day (working title — send me a better name if you’ve got one), instead of just another Wednesday. Without naming a day for it, these tasks only get handled once they accidentally become a fire that has to be put out, and by then you’ve often already missed something: a deadline you never fully registered because you only skimmed the email once, or a paper you glanced at and never fully processed.

Every one of those missed opportunities tends to spiral into the same tired self-talk: I’m just bad at this, I can’t handle phone calls, this is just who I am. That story gets reinforced every time a loop stays open long enough to become a genuine problem.

The exercise: ten minutes to dump, then pick the easiest one

Set a 10-minute timer and just dump every open loop out of your head onto paper. Calls to return. The email you’re dreading. Physical items waiting for their next step. Don’t sort or prioritize yet, just get it all out of your head and into one stack you can actually look at.

When the timer goes off, don’t linger deciding what matters most. Set a new timer and pick whichever loop looks the simplest. This morning, before recording, I called a contractor who’d been trying to reach me three times that week (I’d already paid the deposit; all they needed was to get me on the schedule). The call took maybe three minutes, and a loop that had been silently weighing on me for days closed completely.

Lob the ball back, even if you can’t fully close it

Right after that call, I tackled a second loop: finding a new lawn person now that my kids, who’d always handled it, are grown and gone. I’d already done the research and picked someone, but the actual reaching-out step had stalled. I texted to confirm we wanted to hire him and asked him to get us on his calendar. It’s not fully closed yet, but the ball is now in his court instead of sitting untouched in mine. That still counts. You don’t need every loop to close completely in one sitting; moving it forward, so someone else now owes the next step, is real progress.

Why the small stuff matters here

So many of these tasks take moments once you actually do them, but carry disproportionate weight while they just sit there unresolved. Each one you close, or successfully pass back to someone else’s court, gives a small dopamine hit that makes the next one easier to attempt. You’ll still hit roadblocks sometimes, but the momentum from a couple of quick wins tends to carry you further than you’d expect.

Your practical, actionable step

Set a 10-minute timer right now and dump every open loop in your head onto paper. Then set another timer, pick the easiest one on the list, and take whatever the next step is, even if it’s just lobbing the ball back into someone else’s court.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.