Have you ever reached the end of a day feeling oddly tired, only to realise you haven’t actually done very much? No marathon workday, no impossible deadline, no heroic attempt to get through an overflowing to-do list. And yet, all you want to do is put your phone away and crawl into bed. (Which, if you’re anything like me, is exactly when your mind decides to remind you of everything you’ve been avoiding.)
We have a habit of measuring how much work we do, but not how much attention we spend on work we haven’t done. That message you read but didn’t answer. The apology you’ve been meaning to make. The decision you’ve put off because you know somebody won’t like it. The call you promised to return. The conversation that keeps getting postponed, not because it’s unimportant, but because it matters enough to make you uncomfortable.
None of these things takes up much time on a calendar. They don’t appear as meetings. They rarely make it onto our task lists. And yet they have a rather annoying habit of turning up when we’re doing something entirely different. In the shower. Over dinner. At three in the morning, when the rest of the world seems quite content to be asleep. You can spend an entire day avoiding a five-minute reply, and somehow feel as if you’ve been dealing with it the whole time.
These are what I think of as open loops: things we’ve neither done nor made peace with leaving undone. And perhaps the worst part is that putting them off often feels easier than facing them. A late reply may need an explanation. An apology requires us to admit we were wrong. An honest conversation may lead to an answer we don’t want to hear. So we tell ourselves we’ll deal with it tomorrow. Except tomorrow has a rather poor record of keeping these promises.
Of course, not all exhaustion comes from mental clutter. Long hours, poor sleep and real stress are tiring in their own right, and we can’t solve those by clearing an inbox. But I suspect there are days when what wears us down isn’t how much we’ve done. It’s how much we’ve left unresolved.
So perhaps the next time we feel drained, the answer isn’t another productivity hack or a longer weekend. Perhaps it’s a message sent, an apology made, or a decision finally taken. And sometimes it might be the simple act of admitting that something no longer deserves our time, and letting it go.
Closing a loop doesn’t always mean finishing the task. It can mean deciding, honestly, that we won’t.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few messages that have been waiting far longer than they should. (And writing about them doesn’t count as replying, unfortunately.)
Cover photo by Pew Nguyen on Pexels.