At a glance

• Based on the reader question: 'I feel worn out by all the things I’ve started, postponed, or quietly abandoned. How do I sort through my goals and to-dos, finish the right ones, and let the others go?'
• Open loops drain you by keeping part of your attention elsewhere, even when you think you’re resting
• You can overcome this by off-loading first, writing a clear next step, then closing what matters and deleting what doesn’t
• The New Year instinct to add goals to an already full plate is usually self-sabotage, not self-improvement
• Some loops should be retired or protected, especially the ones tied to grief or still incubating

Introduction

With no other obvious culprit, we blame our exhaustion on our modestly packed schedule. Yet, when we check our maths, the numbers don’t quite add up. There’s another factor at play. We have too many open loops.

The unanswered message.
The unfolded clothes.
The unframed art.
The unwanted, still‑uncancelled toothbrush subscription.

This family of unfinished business beeps away in the background, like a ceiling full of smoke alarms with low batteries. Every loop demands a slice of attention, a sliver of guilt, and carries a haunting worry that we’re falling behind.

It’s no wonder that, when we sit down to work or play, we’re exhausted. Half our reserves have been eaten up by our open loops.

Close these loops and you’ll rediscover fresh wells of energy and mirth. Without the burden of a cluttered mind, you can unclench and finally breathe again.

To get there, I’ll share why open loops and mental clutter are so draining, point out a common mistake we make when setting goals (especially at New Year), and offer a guiding exercise to help you start closing the loops that keep tapping you on the shoulder.

Then we can discuss the kinds of loops that are the exception to all the rules.

Why open loops are draining

When you sit down to rest or focus on work, your attention keeps getting pulled to all the open tabs in your life.

You may be stationary, but your mind is churning. It’s rehearsing, planning, re-deciding, worrying, prioritising, drafting, and stressing about all the outstanding bits of unfinished business on your list.

The drag isn’t an illusion. In lab studies, participants who wrote about important unfinished tasks reported more intrusive thoughts during a later reading exercise and performed worse on comprehension; when they first made a specific plan for those tasks, the interference largely disappeared. The practical point: unfinished business tends to stay mentally “alive” until you either finish it or mentally park it.¹

Think of your open loops as a bottleneck: your brain can only feed so much focus through at once, and your open loops clog the pipe.

Unclogging your attention and reducing the drain of your open loops comes down to two choices:

1. Off-loading your loops: writing down your loops and adding a little plan of what’s next helps the brain to let go of the task. I explored the practical power of this idea in Evening Pages.
2. Closing your loops: getting through your unfinished business by completing or deleting tasks.

Off-loading your loops is a great way to return to the present moment, especially when you can’t deal with them there and then. It turns a vague, needy loop into a named item with a place to live.²

For this piece, I’ll be focusing on closing loops. But first, there’s a relevant way we often make our lives worse when trying to make them better.

The New Year trap: adding to an already full plate

We have a plate full of food. Someone offers us more. The wise part of our mind declines. We already have enough to eat. More food will overwhelm the plate, leaving some to go cold, or worse, rot.

These sensible instincts abandon us during New Year’s. The pressure to rebrand and upgrade our lives is heavy. We are tricked into believing adding to our lives will make us happy. New habits, routines, reading lists, languages.

We have a plate full of unfinished business that needs our attention. Adding more will only exacerbate our sense of overwhelm. It’s also illogical. Why add more challenges to our life when we’re at our limit? That’s a recipe for failure.

Against this backdrop, adding another goal isn’t self‑improvement. It’s self‑sabotage. You’re solving the wrong equation. You don’t feel stuck because you lack ambition. You lack closure.

Your life and peace of mind will be best served by subtracting. Not adding.

It’s unsexy, but it’s oh-so-satisfying. Subtraction isn’t what the goal-setting industry sells. But freeing up your capacity by letting go of the weight dragging you down is far more empowering.³

An exercise: what don’t you want to carry?

Near the end of 2025, I was angry. For too long, I felt like misfortune had stopped me from living my life. Steeled by frustration, I looked at my stack of unfinished business and asked myself:

What goals do I not want to carry into the New Year?

Try it. You’ll find that it filters through the noise and surfaces the goals, big and small, that are splinters in your mind, weighing you down, and sapping your energy.

Despite the New Year being in full motion, the spirit of this question still guides my priorities. I just reframe the time scales:

What do I not want to carry into next quarter/month/week/tomorrow?

Once you’ve named a decent number of loops, you can decide what to do about them.

Not every loop deserves saving

‘The easiest task to complete is the one you delete’. Likewise, not all your loops deserve closing.

Broadly, there are three kinds of loop:

• Meaningful: closing this would make your life lighter.
• Outgrown: this mattered once, but the version of you who needed it has moved on.
• Performative: this only existed because you once said you would do it, or think you “should” do it.

Only the first kind deserves your attention.

You can spot where an open loop best lives by asking yourself a few questions:

• If this loop was magically closed, would I honestly feel relief? → Meaningful
• Do I care about the outcome, or just not looking flaky? → Outgrown
• Do I want to do this task, or am I just trying to impress someone? → Performative

You may notice a tug of anxiety when doing this. We carry a quiet belief that we should tie up every loose end. Ironically, the urge to “complete life” or not be “lazy” will keep you stuck.

Accept that some loops need to be retired, not completed. Letting go of them will hurt, because some are tied to grief, not productivity.

A few of your loops belong to a future you can’t have now: taking your parents on holiday, planning your anniversary, starting a family before 30. Letting go of these isn’t about deleting the past; it’s closer to holding a quiet funeral for a version of your life that won’t happen and turning back to the one you still can.

If it helps, give these loops a small ritual: write them down, name what they meant to you, and then mark them as ‘retired’. That way, you’re not clinging to an impossible future as a way of staying loyal to what you lost.

Letting go hurts. But it’s also what frees you to chase new promises, instead of circling old ones.

Incubation (the exception)

Some loops can’t be rushed. They need time to incubate.

Deleting photos of an ex-love.
Choosing a headstone.
Donating old clothes.

These aren’t errands. They’re digestion.

Consent is the way you tell the difference. If you have chosen to postpone closing a loop, then it’s not procrastination. It’s something you have realised still needs incubating until you’re ready.

Rushing one of these loops usually comes at a cost. It will look like progress on paper, but it will feel like punishment in your body.

A practical way to protect incubation (without letting it sprawl) is to give it a container:

• Name it: ‘Old clothes – first pass’
• Decide what ‘not yet’ means: ‘I’m not doing this in February’
• Set a review date: a specific Sunday, or the first weekend of next month
• Define the gentlest next step: ‘Open the folder for five minutes’ counts; ‘sort the entire archive’ doesn’t

Conclusion

Open loops drain you because they keep asking for attention: they pull you out of the present, and they invite the same tired re-decisions again and again.

Start by off-loading what you can. Not as a productivity hack, but as a way of giving your mind permission to stop rehearsing. And then, one by one, close the loops that will genuinely lighten your life.

Delete the ones that were never yours. Retire the ones that belonged to a future you can’t have now. If that retirement stings, treat it as information: you’re not failing a task; you’re grieving a path.

And protect what still needs time. Some loops don’t want to be closed. They want to be held, contained, and revisited when you’ve got the capacity to do it without frying your nervous system.

In a nutshell: close what you can. Delete what you don’t truly want. Protect what still needs time.

If you'd welcome more guidance for how to sort through your loops, I recommend the piece I wrote on the Energy/Money matrix.

1. Of all the papers I read on this topic, one worth calling out is ‘Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals‘ ↩︎
2. Before moments that need my full attention I write down every open loop that’s sitting at the front of my mind. Two minutes. Pen and paper. Nothing clever. I do this before an improv show, a date, a speech, an exam. Anywhere I want my whole mind in the room. Once the loops are on the page, I feel calmer, and it’s easier to listen, think, and respond. I wish more people tried it. It would make the world slightly less anxious and distracted. ↩︎
3. Even if you’re not a Naruto fan, you’ll likely be familiar with the iconic scene when Rock Lee takes his weights off mid-battle. ↩︎