Explain why open loops drain your attention, and why one list you trust works better than several you half use.
Take a minute now and write down anything you've agreed to do that exists only in your memory. Whatever you put on the paper was already using some of your attention before you wrote it down, whether or not you were doing anything about it.
Picture the ride home on the MRT after a long day, somewhere between Bishan and Ang Mo Kio. You remember that you promised a colleague you'd send her some supplier contacts. Then you remember the dental appointment you meant to book, and then the form your landlord needs signed. You go through the list three times before your stop, do none of it, and get off slightly more tired than when you got on. Productivity writing has a name for this loop, and there is a fix for it.
David Allen is an American consultant and the author of Getting Things Done. His method rests on one observation: anything you have agreed to do, and have not finished or put somewhere you trust, keeps pulling at your attention. He calls these unfinished commitments open loops. A promise to send supplier contacts is one. So is "I should really sort out my insurance", and so is "I need to reply to Ahmad about the wedding".
Your mind keeps coming back to open loops because, as far as it knows, nobody else is tracking them. The reminders arrive at random moments, usually when you can't act on them: in the shower, during a meeting about something else, at two in the morning. Each reminder costs a little attention. Once you're carrying dozens of open loops, the cost builds into a background hum of worry that makes it harder to focus.
Allen's fix is to get every open loop out of your head and into an outside system, such as a list or a calendar, that you trust and check regularly. When your mind is confident a commitment is recorded somewhere it will be seen again, it stops sending reminders.
Most people already write things down. The trouble is where they write them. Marcus, the operations team lead you met in Lesson 1.3, kept tasks in nine places (an invented example):
his work email, both flagged and unflagged three WhatsApp chats with drivers a Teams chat with his manager a notebook he carried to meetings a sticky note on his monitor the Notes app on his phone a whiteboard in the office his memory
Some of those were never meant to hold tasks. A chat thread, for example, scrolls away. With his commitments spread out like this, Marcus couldn't answer a basic question: what have I agreed to do this week? Answering it meant checking every place. He never did, so all he had was a vague feeling of being behind.
Real requests also go missing when tasks are scattered. On a Tuesday, a driver asked Marcus for a shift change in a chat. He replied "ok noted". By Friday the message was forty scrolls up and the roster hadn't been changed.
Scattered lists make choosing harder too. When you have a free hour, you can't pick the best use of it if half your options are in places you didn't check.
A task system only works if you trust it, and you can tell you trust it when your mind stops rehearsing the list. Suppose you've written "send supplier contacts to Wen Hui" in your app, but you still repeat it to yourself on the MRT. Your mind doesn't believe the app, and it usually has good reason. Perhaps the last time you wrote something there, you didn't open the app again for two weeks.
Trust has to be earned, and it comes from two habits. Neither depends much on which app you use.
The first habit is to capture everything. If some of your commitments stay in your head, your head keeps watching all of them, because it can't tell which ones are recorded. Put 90 percent into the system and keep 10 percent in your head, and your head still has to watch all of them. Allen's standard is that every commitment goes in, small or large, work or personal.
The second habit is to review regularly. Tasks you write on a list you never read get forgotten. Allen puts a lot of weight on a weekly review, which you'll set up in Module 8. Between weekly reviews, a daily look at your next actions and your calendar keeps the list in use.
Switching apps rarely fixes a messy system. People who move from paper to an app, and then to another app, often find the same mess comes with them, because their habits didn't change. Lesson 8.1, "Choose tools without turning tools into a hobby", comes back to this. The app matters far less than the two habits.
Marcus didn't need a perfect system to see a difference. He changed one habit: every time he said "noted" or "will do" in a chat, he added a line to the task list on his phone before moving on. Within a week, the roster changes stopped slipping. You can start the capture habit the same way. The rest of his system, how to sort the list and what to put where, comes in the next two lessons.
Before you build a system, you need to know what you're replacing. Most people underestimate how many places they keep tasks, because some of those places, like a group chat or a pile of papers on the desk, don't feel like lists. Your activity is to find all of them, including the ones you would rather not count.
Write down every place you keep tasks right now, including chat threads and notebooks, and count them.
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