Avoiding Closed Loops

Maybe “Closed Loops” isn’t the best phrase, but I figured I’d talk about something that has constant daily relevance for me.

This is maybe sort of a boring productivity concept, but it’s still pretty relevant and important.

I need to make sure to never have any “closed loops”, where a task in a process ends and has no systemic method to proceeding to the next step other than relying on me to simply “remember”.

So for example, a place where this happens often is with text messages. I don’t like to receive many text messages in my work but it does happen.

The problem is, I often see these texts while I’m out and can’t do anything about them. If I read it, it’s marked as read forever and there’s nothing ensuring I will address it later.

So what’s an easy solution? The one I employ in this example is to email myself a reminder. Email is one of the strongest parts of my system and any email I receive will be addressed, virtually every time.

In this case, it becomes an open loop that will continue along to the next step without any likely point of failure.

Working with website projects, I need to always make sure to chart out the next step and actually set reminders.

When I speak with a new potential client, I need to leave a note in my to-do to then prepare and send a proposal.

If they accept the proposal, I need to add notes in my to-do to send out invoices and get the project rolling when appropriate.

Essentially, unless every step in a project or task is 100% complete, I always need to write something down to complete the next step.

And I’ve been working on this for years.

I’ve gotten to the point where, anytime I’m in danger of creating a closed loop, it’s like something is screaming in the back of my mind to fix it.

Every so often I ignore it.

Not too long ago, I put some leftovers into my backpack. I knew that I didn’t need to do anything with the backpack when I got home other than put the food anyway, and so I knew I should probably establish some way to ensure I wouldn’t forget it.

But I did. I got home, and forgot about it until the next day and had to throw the food out.

Another common thing that has happened is that I don’t see calendar notifications for calls for the day. Normally I just happen to see them but it’s not a great system.

Sometimes, I’ll see the notification that it’s 30 minutes out, but then totally forget when the time comes.

Normally that would be solved by the little Windows popups, but on my home PC I disabled those entirely because they were an incredibly irritating distraction that was mostly for idiotic and pointless things.

If I could make it JUST tell me when I have calendar events, I’d do that. I also recall that they weren’t super reliable so that’s part of it, too.

I’ve developed two solutions for this specific problem:

1. When I get the 30 minute notification (or whenever I see that I have something later in the day), I set a timer on my phone to go off a few minutes before. That way I can never forget.
2. I’ll often add an additional calendar entry in the morning to simply warn me of an upcoming event. Since I always look at my phone in the morning, I’ll always see it.

I could present many more examples but I think these illustrate the point.

It’s just one little snapshot into my productivity optimization. It’s not a massive part of it but it’s still quite important.

I don’t have much of a point on this one other than that I need to continue improving this and ensuring that nothing ever gets left.