The Open Loop Audit: empty your head in ten minutes.

A weekly ten-minute brain dump. Write down every open loop, then sort each one into Do, Delegate, Schedule or Drop.

Try it

Tick each step as you go.

0 of 5 done

Set a ten-minute timer.At the same time each week, so it becomes a habit rather than a decision.
Write down every open loop.Replies, decisions, half-finished tasks, things you said you’d do. Don’t sort yet.
Give each one a letter.Do: a few minutes, so do it today. Delegate: someone else can, so ask them. Schedule: it needs real time, so give it a date. Drop: it doesn’t matter any more, so let it go.
Send the messages and book the time.Ask the people you’re delegating to, and put the scheduled loops in your calendar before the timer ends.
Carry over what’s left.Anything still unsorted goes to the top of next week’s list.

Why it works

The idea behind it.

An open loop is anything you’ve started or promised but not closed: a reply you owe, a decision you parked, a task half-done in a tab. David Allen gave them that name in Getting Things Done, and each one keeps asking for a little of your attention.

You don’t have to finish a loop to quiet it. In a set of experiments, people with an unfinished goal kept being distracted by it until they made a specific plan for it. Then the distraction stopped, even though the goal was still unfinished (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011).

Sorting every loop into one of four decisions is that plan, made for the whole list at once.

Sources

David Allen (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
E. J. Masicampo and Roy F. Baumeister (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683.

In practice

Where it tends to slip.

Sorting while you write. Get everything down first, because deciding as you go slows the list and hides the loops you haven’t remembered yet.
Using Schedule as a second to-do list. A scheduled loop needs a date in your calendar, or it’s still open.
Never using Drop. Some loops close when you decide not to do them; if someone is waiting, tell them.

The template

Paste it into Notion, Apple Notes or any doc, or download it as a text file.

OPEN LOOP AUDIT — week of [date]
Ten minutes. Write first, sort second.

EVERY OPEN LOOP (don't sort yet)
-
-
-

DO (a few minutes, today)
-

DELEGATE (and who to ask)
-

SCHEDULE (with a date)
-

DROP (and who to tell)
-

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