You’re not “bad at time management.”
You’re carrying unfinished business in your nervous system.
That’s why you feel tired before you start.
That’s why you can’t focus on one thing without thinking about five others.
That’s why your brain feels like 37 tabs, all playing sound.
Overwhelm is open loops.
Not workload.
An open loop is anything your brain believes is “not handled.”
A bill you haven’t paid.
A text you haven’t answered.
A decision you haven’t made.
A task you half-started and abandoned.
Your brain doesn’t store these neatly.
It pings you.
All day.
Like a smoke alarm with a dying battery.
So you keep “working” while your attention bleeds out through unfinished edges.
Here’s the fix.
Not a new app.
Not a new planner.
A dump and a sort.
The 10-minute Open Loops Dump (set a timer)
Grab paper. One page. No pretty.
For 10 minutes, write every unfinished thing you can think of.
No organizing. No judging. Just extraction.
Prompts if you stall:
What am I avoiding?
What have I started but not finished?
Who am I supposed to reply to?
What decision am I dragging out?
What “someday” project is quietly haunting me?
What am I behind on (money, health, home, work)?
Keep writing until the timer stops.
You’re not making a plan.
You’re clearing RAM.
Now the part that changes your day:
The 3-bucket sort (Now / Schedule / Kill)
Go line by line and assign ONE bucket.
NOW
You can finish it in 10 minutes or less.
If it takes longer, it doesn’t qualify.
SCHEDULE
It matters, but it needs a real block. Put it on the calendar.
Not “tomorrow.” A time.
KILL
It’s guilt cosplay. It’s “I should” with no payoff. Delete it.
If you won’t schedule it, you don’t get to keep thinking about it.
This is where most people lie to themselves.
They keep dead loops because it makes them feel ambitious.
But it just makes them feel heavy.
Concrete example:
I once had “fix the garage” sitting in my head for months.
Not because it was hard - because it was vague.
I dumped it.
Sorted it.
NOW: throw away the broken box (6 minutes)
SCHEDULE: Saturday 10:00–11:30, take one shelf down
KILL: “build dream workspace” (I wasn’t doing that this quarter)
My energy came back the same day.
Not because my life got easier.
Because my life got finished.
Do this once and you’ll feel relief.
Do it daily and you’ll feel dangerous.
If you want a cleaner way to run this when your week keeps slipping, grab The Execution Bundle - it gives you the tools to stop reopening the same loops and actually close them in the next 7 days.
Save this.
Run the dump today.
Then close one loop before you open three more.
NoFluffWisdom