Bias Towards Action: Close Those Loops

Take a moment and picture a quick, relatively simple task you’ve needed to do for some time now.

• How long have you had to do it for?
• How many times a day do you think about doing it?
• Do you have a timeline to actually complete it?
• Is it stress inducing to think about? Is it more stress inducing now than it was originally when it first came up?
• Do you know exactly what needs to be done to resolve this task? How long have you known this for?

This is an open loop. It’s eating up your finite energy and increasing cognitive load. Sure, both by a small amount for this small task. But you probably have tens or hundreds of these open loops out there. And many of those other open loops are probably larger and more important.

An Example

Emails at work are an easy but effective example. I fall into this trap with them daily. A new email comes in and I’ll decide to address later. For most emails, the moment I read it, I know what I’m going to do to resolve it. I need to forward it to so-and-so, need to call someone, need to reply with a few sentences, need to delete the email, or need to spend some time performing a task.

There is some nuance to using email as an example. Does a single email often cause hours of work, or cause tough conversations? Yes. Does it make sense to batch similar tasks together? Yes. Do I sometimes just really need to get something else done, go to meeting, have an uninterrupted focus session, etc.? Yes. Set these situations aside.

In scenarios when I can action the email right then and there, for some reason, I’ll still tell myself that “I’ll get to that email later.”

Torturing Ourselves

So rather than just address the email… I’ll:

• Look at the email 10 times during the course of the day, multiple days in a row.
• Sometimes think about it at night and when I wake up.
• Let it pile on stress.

All for what? Why do I torture myself like this? Why can’t I just address the email? I have every power to close that loop within a few minutes of reading the email (again, nuances aside). But I don’t do that.

Email became a metaphor for all things out there that we need to do. Let’s take that basic email concept and apply it upwards. Upwards to the more important, time consuming, and stress inducing tasks. Where the impact on your finite energy and cognitive load is more intense for open loops.

If we bias towards action, we can close loops, preserve energy, and maintain appropriate cognitive load. Giving our brains a cleaner slate to work with, and a better chance of success.