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Recently, 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.

But 3 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:

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?

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

But when stacked together, they create a vicious cycle:

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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)

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)

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

Effort (1-5 scale)

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:

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

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:

For example, this could be anything from:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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