Hello friends,

For the past three months, I have been trying to track my eating. Not calories, not macros. Just a simple daily log of what I ate, roughly how much, how stressed I was, and whether I moved my body that day.

It sounds easy (theoretically). It is not.

The mental effort of recalling a full day's food, combined with the discomfort of seeing how blindly I actually eat versus how I imagine I eat, means this habit has resisted every system I have thrown at it. I set reminders. I added it to my to-do list. I have it in two habit tracking apps.

On most days, the task sits there, noted, acknowledged, and completely ignored.

I have been thinking about why this keeps happening, and what I found surprised me.

Today we will explore how open loops can actually help us get things done, by harnessing the tension between where we are and where we want to be.

Enjoy the read!

Siri

Why Writing It Down Is Not Enough

The concept of open loops has been around in the productivity space for a few years now, popularised by David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done.

To close these loops, Allen advises capturing them externally (writing them down), identifying the desired outcome, and determining the very next actionable step.

Those of us who live and swear by our lists know the relief that comes on an overwhelming day when the very act of writing things down alleviates anxiety and channels our focus into what needs to happen now.

But here is the problem. The to-do list is meant to remind us to do something, but the moment we write it down, we seem to magically forget it exists. The habit tracker sits unopened. The task is noted, acknowledged, and completely ignored.

So what is actually happening here?

Let us take a detour back a century.

The Waiter Who Forgot Everything

In the 1920s, psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed something fascinating at a café. Waiters could hold multiple orders from different tables in their heads before relaying them to the kitchen. Even when interrupted by another customer or task, they could still rattle off the order to the chef without missing a beat. They would bring the right food back to the right table, to the right customer.

But here is the fascinating part: once the bill was settled, the information vanished entirely. Quiz the same waiter minutes later about what that table had ordered, and he would draw a complete blank.

Lewin's student, Bluma Zeigarnik, tested this in a laboratory and published her findings in 1927. Zeigarnik found that when you start a task, your brain creates a kind of mental tension, a cognitive thread that stays active in your working memory, nudging you to come back to it. Once you complete the task, the tension releases, and your brain files it away or lets it go.

This is why writing to-do lists offers relief, but does not necessarily prompt action. The brain gets the soothing signal without the follow-through. This is also why making plans can become a form of procrastination. The planning seems like progress.

So What's Happening Here?

Allen is right that most open loops drain us. But there is a distinction he does not often make: some loops do not drain you, they drive you. And if you can design one deliberately, it will do the remembering that your to-do list never could.

Back to my eating log. After three months of failed reminders and ignored app notifications, what finally worked was strange and slightly embarrassing to admit: a half-drawn cross in my bullet journal.

When I review my BuJo in the evening (which I do every night), the incomplete cross sits there, visually unfinished. My hand wants to complete it. There is something faintly irritating about a half-cross, the way an unscrewed bottle cap is faintly irritating. So I open my eating log, spend ten minutes filling it in, and then draw the second half with my orange highlighter. The relief is disproportionately satisfying for something so small. That is Zeigarnik at work, except this time, I designed the tension rather than stumbling into it.

The difference is not the loop itself. It is whether you designed it or stumbled into it.

Designing a Loop You Have to Close

Find a loop that already has teeth, and make your struggling habit the condition for closing it.

Think about what you do automatically before bed or before leaving the house. Switching off lights. Plugging the phone in to charge. Filling the water bottle. Locking the front door. These are not discipline. They are loops whose incompleteness you simply cannot sit with comfortably. Your brain will not let you leave them open.

Your struggling habit needs to borrow that discomfort. Here are a few pairings to consider, depending on what your reliable anchors are.

If you charge your phone every night before sleeping (and most people do this as automatically as brushing their teeth), make a five-minute habit a condition of plugging it in. The phone sits uncharged, and your compulsion to plug it in creates a mild discomfort, and that becomes your trigger.

If you fill a water bottle every morning before leaving the house, attach your medication, your supplement, or a single written intention to that sequence. The bottle sitting empty on the counter does the reminding for you.

If you do a lights-off walkthrough before bed, put a Post-it near the switch with one thing you need to review or complete. The lights cannot be switched off until it is done.

If you close your laptop at the end of every workday, make writing tomorrow's single priority a condition of shutting it. The open document sits there on the screen, and your habit of closing things down for the day does the nudging for you.

Try this:

Think of one thing you close every single day without fail.

Then think of one habit you have been failing to stick to. Make the habit a prerequisite for the closure.

Start with one pairing, and after a week notice specifically whether the habit happened on the days you had the least inclination for it.

That is the test. Motivation will carry you on good days. The loop is what carries you on the rest.

Siri's Pick

I have been reading The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. It is firmly Young Adult fantasy, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

The book is narrated in part by Bartimaeus, a sardonic djinni with several thousand years of opinions and very little patience for human self-importance. What makes him irresistible are his footnotes. Mid-narrative, he interrupts himself with asides, corrections, and commentary that are often sharper than the main story.

There is something worth borrowing in that. Bartimaeus watches himself and his master think. He catches their contradictions and names them, often with considerable amusement.

I have been wondering lately whether we read and listen too narrowly, staying inside what is considered appropriate for our age or stage. Some of the most useful perspectives come from unexpected places. A djinni in a teenage fantasy novel has no business being this insightful. And yet.

If you have been meaning to diversify what you read, starting somewhere that does not take itself too seriously is not a bad place to begin.

Bye for now.

Siri 🌱🌀

P.S. If you would like to work with me, drop me an email at siri@sanerworklife.com and let's talk.