A strategy for battling your mind’s “open loops”

Transitioning into a state of deep work while fighting interrupting thoughts

Imagine that you’re sitting behind your laptop and getting ready to focus all your attention on one task—what Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, calls “deep work.” Maybe you need to write a blog post or whip up some code. Whatever the task, it requires all your attention; all your concentration.

So you can fully lean in without disruptions that steal your attention, you tweak your working environment. To start with, you plug in, tossing on your over-the-ear headphones to signal to others that you do not want to be interrupted. (You make sure that both ears are covered because one naked ear tends to invite others to talk to you.) Then you silence the outside world, disabling all pop-up notifications (e.g., Slack or email) on your laptop and put your phone on silent mode.

Finally, you start digging into your work … but then, suddenly, you are interrupted by a thought, idea, or task, buzzing in your own head!

How do you handle the interrupting thought?

Do you ignore it, suppress it, or extinguish its existence? If you decide, at that moment, to temporarily discard the thought and then later want to recall it, you’re banking on your future self’s memory. And chances are that the thought might slip away, preventing future recovery.

Do you instead submit, give in to the new distraction, switch context away from the old activity, and redirect your mental processing cycles to the new thought? Should you take this approach, you may fall into a never-ending trap of recursively chasing thought after thought—working on a new idea (or task) generates more thoughts—leaving you never able to transition into a focused state.

Our human brains are busy bees, constantly buzzing with thoughts. A 2020 study[1] discovered that people think more than 6,000 thoughts per day. For me, some days, it feels like 60,000! Moreover, my thoughts respect no boundaries: They pop into my head whenever they want, especially (for whatever reason) when I’m trying to focus on knowledge work.

In this post, let’s explore a middle path. Instead of discarding new thoughts or chasing them in the moment, let’s instead develop a method for capturing them as quickly as possible, getting them out of our brains, and then transitioning back to the original activity. (If you just want to see the solution in action, jump below to My (current) solution of fighting open loops.)

Combating “open loops”

When a thought arises, if you choose to ignore it by exercising willpower and continuing to direct your attention to your original activity, then you create what David Allen[2] (author of “Getting Things Done”) calls an “open loop”:

Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop” pulling on your attention.

“Anything that does not belong, where it is, is an ‘open loop’, pulling on your attention - David Allen

Open loops are like bug bites: They keep itching until you scratch them.

We’ve all experienced them. Sometimes, they are ideas: a spanking SaaS idea to prototype or amazing blog article to write. At other times, they are “to-do tasks” such as rolling out the recycling bin to the curb on Wednesday or invoicing a client. Regardless of the type, until acknowledged, open loops brew in the back of our brains, vying for your attention. When these open loops arise while we’re transitioning into a state of deep work, we must take action.

I prefer capturing my open loops and writing them down, since the idea of forgetting or losing a potentially valuable thought tortures me.

Stephen King would disagree with my approach of capturing ideas or thoughts that occur during periods of focus. He’s a prolific author who’s written over 60 novels[3] and 100 short stories—a large volume of work. There’s no doubt that he has generated many fresh ideas, and continues to do so, many of which pop up while he’s in writing mode. But to my surprise, he (without any hesitation) discards these ideas.[4] He considers them distractions. King shares that, often, while in writing mode, his noisy brain interrupts him with new ideas, saying: “You should write this! You should write this!”. (He compares these distractions to being married and suddenly being surrounded by beautiful women.) But instead of giving in to these distractions, King ignores them:

No. I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they’re bad ideas, they go away on their own -Stephen King

One day, I’d like to be like Stephen King, in a position where I can discard ideas without any fear that I’m letting go of something precious. Until then, I’ll follow the advice of a few other established authors, such as Neil Strauss, best known for his hit novel “The Game”[5] (though I personally prefer his more recent book, “The Truth”). Unlike Stephen King, Neil Strauss values ideas, holding them dearly[6]:

“If you found a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk, would you leave it and hope it is still there when you come back later? To a writer, ideas are currency.”

Like Strauss, Sonk Ahrens,[7] author of “How to Take Smart Notes,” constantly captures ideas, suggesting that others “always have something at hand to write with to capture every day.” The late Gerald Weinberg was in the same camp as these two authors. Not only was he in total agreement about capturing ideas, I think he took it up a notch,[8] saying that he eventually “learned to keep a special waterproof slate and pen in [his] swim bag.”

Source: https://www.organizingcreativity.com/2013/08/ideas-in-the-shower/

I recognized a pattern, similar to Aaron Swart’z observation,[9] that interesting people I know tend to carry some sort of notebook in which to write down their ideas.

The evolution of my method of combating thoughts while transitioning into deep work

The two-minute rule

During my early days of idea capturing, I would, for every interrupting thought, try applying David Allen’s two-minute heuristic:

If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.

When a thought would pop into my mind, I would quickly analyze and estimate the effort required to address it. If my estimation of the task associated with the thought was that it would take less than two minutes, I would temporarily drop whatever it I was working on in the moment and switch tasks. Because it’s only two minutes, right? If I just take care of the problem right now—such as calling and booking a vet appointment for my dog—then I don’t even need to spend energy writing down the task.

However, as you might have guessed, blindly following the two-minute rule was doomed from the beginning. As pointed out earlier, a single thought or task can spawn a recursive situation where one ends up stuck in a vicious cycle of chasing task after task, caught up in interruption after interruption.

Jotting down thoughts somewhere—anywhere

When the two-minute heuristic failed me in the context of transitioning to deep work, I turned to writing down thoughts using good old pen and paper.

I tried carrying around a physical notebook (e.g., Moleskine) and even used 3×5 flash cards in my back pocket. When an open loop popped up, I’d immediately pause whatever I was doing and write down the idea or task. While writing down the open loop was incrementally better than using the two-minute rule, the problem for me was that I would often forget or lose the paper itself, unable to find my way back to it.

My (current) solution for fighting open loops

I’ve recently transitioned to capturing notes digitally.

I capture and save all my tasks in “OmniFocus”[10] (sorry, Windows or Linux users—it’s Mac only). OmniFocus saves all my tasks — including recurring tasks—live. For instance, 5:00 am cold exposure (cold-only showers…they never get easier, by the way) and client follow-ups (e.g., sending a proposal, generating invoices).

However, adding my thoughts and task to OmniFocus still costs me a context switch—an expensive one at that. First, I have to lift my right hand off the keyboard and move over to the mouse. Then, I have to move the cursor to the correct icon in the launch pad at the bottom of my monitor. After waiting for the app to load, then I need to navigate through several application tabs, eventually landing in the “Inbox” view, where I finally click the “+” symbol, type in a short description of the task, and then exit OmniFocus. With the thought tucked away in OmniFocus, I’d switch back to focusing on the original activity.

Serendipitously, while reading Dini Kourish’s “Creating Focus with OmniFocus,”[11] I discovered a keyboard shortcut that allows me to complete the above steps without ever having to lift my hands off the keyboard or click through windows.

Here’s a video clip demonstrating this keyboard shortcut. In the animated image below, I was writing the article that you are now reading when my brain reminded me that I needed to send out a proposal for an existing client.

Demo of me rapidly capturing an idea

I followed these steps:

1.        I pressed the following keys: control + option + spacebar.

2.        I typed out the to-do task as quickly as possible.

3.        I hit enter.

4.        I refocused on the original activity.

When typing out the description of the task, I’m not trying to write a novel—I’m trying to be brief, as much as possible. At the same time, I can’t be too sparse or leave out too many details; I need enough keywords, enough context, to remember the task should I return to it a day or more later. (Forgetting about the task I wrote down has happened to me more than once.)

After saving the task, the to-do window disappears, and I return back to the original activity that I was working on before the interrupting thought occurred.

Summary

More optimal solutions undoubtedly exist. I’m sure there are ways to shave off a few hundred milliseconds, but I’m not looking for perfection; I’m for looking for good enough! Naturally, there’s a price to pay for any choice, and in episode 16 of his podcast,[12] Cal Newport weighs the trade-offs between ignoring the open loop and temporarily switching contexts to write it down:

“I mean, it would be best to have no interruptions like that, but I think to keep the open loop alive in your head is probably worse than just taking a brief moment and closing the loop. So it’s like something kind of bad happened from a cognitive performance standpoint that you had an idea pop up that has to be taken care of. It’s a different context, but it’s just gonna get worse if you try to ignore it. Now, the one silver lining I’ll say is that, you know, as you train deep work, you will have less of those interruptions because the interruptions really come from unrelated networks in your brain that are still running and still kind of thinking in the background, and the one that’s relevant to lawn mowing remembers like, oh we gotta mow the yard. But as you get better at concentrating, those networks get more severely inhibited. You’re actually gonna have less of those thoughts pop up while you’re working; you will get lost in what you’re doing.”

In short, get into a state of deep focus and, as time progress, your mind will quiet, and eventually, you’ll be fully dialed in and focused on your deep work session.

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[1] Healthline. “How Many Thoughts Do You Have Per Day? And Other FAQs,” February 28, 2022. https://www.healthline.com/health/how-many-thoughts-per-day.

[2] Allen, David. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Penguin, 2015.

[3] Ball State Daily. “Ball State Daily.” Accessed January 4, 2023. https://www.ballstatedaily.com/byte/article/2021/01/why-stephen-king-is-the-greatest-living-author.

[4] Parker, James. “Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More.” The Atlantic, April 12, 2011. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/04/stephen-king-on-the-creative-process-the-state-of-fiction-and-more/237023/.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game:_Penetrating_the_Secret_Society_of_Pickup_Artists

[6] Neil Strauss. “Writing Tip #5 TK,” December 29, 2020. https://www.neilstrauss.com/writing/tk/.

[7] Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking, 2022.

[8] Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

[9] “HOWTO: Be More Productive (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought).” Accessed September 14, 2022. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity#fn:sub.

[10] https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/

[11] Dini Kourish. Creating Focus with OmniFocus 3. Third., 2019.

[12] Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 1st edition. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016.