Your Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open

There's a psychological principle called the Zeigarnik effect, and it's the reason you feel mentally exhausted even when you haven't done that much. Your brain keeps every unfinished task active in working memory. That email you keep meaning to send. The follow-up you've been putting off. The project you started and set down. Your brain is quietly tracking all of it, all the time, like background apps draining your battery.

For us with ADHD, this is especially brutal because working memory is already limited. So those open loops aren't just annoying background noise. They're eating into the actual cognitive bandwidth you need to think clearly, make decisions, and do the work that matters.

The fix isn't doing more. It's aggressively closing loops — especially the small ones — because small closed loops free up real space.

And sometimes the easiest way to close a loop is to have somewhere to PUT it so your brain doesn't have to keep holding it.

The system doesn't have to be fancy. A notebook, a notes app, a Notion table, a whiteboard — it doesn't matter. What matters is two things: one place where everything lives, and a daily habit of looking at it.

Here's the basic structure that works for me, and you can apply it to whatever tool you already have:

Everything goes in one place. No separate lists for work stuff vs. life stuff vs. "someday maybe." One list.
Due dates are optional and mean something specific. A due date should mean "there are real consequences if this doesn't happen today" — not just "I assigned a date so this wouldn't get lost."
Every morning, make a Do Today list. Go through what's due, what's overdue, and what's sitting open. Choose what you're actually doing today and mark it. That's your real list.
Prioritize due today over past due. This feels backwards, but it keeps today clean and stops the cascade where everything ends up overdue anyway.

My version lives in Notion, but I've run the same logic off a legal pad before. The tool isn't the point. The daily review is the point — because that's what tells your brain it doesn't have to keep tracking everything on its own.

What tool are you using to store your open loops right now? And is the review habit the easy part or the hard part for you?

5 comments