{"id":21251,"date":"2025-10-02T22:47:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T21:47:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=21251"},"modified":"2025-10-11T22:57:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T21:57:24","slug":"daily_3866_-_open_loops_collected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2025\/10\/02\/daily_3866_-_open_loops_collected\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily: 3866 – open loops, collected"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

An “open loop” is a term that David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done<\/i>, uses to refer to unfinished commitments – anything that needs to be acted upon, finished, or decided. Most people have most their open loops in their heads, but they can also be physical things. Every time you walk past it, it reminds you – oh, right, I should really be doing something about this.<\/p>\n

Somehow I had accumulated a lot of physical open loops recently. Every room in the house had several piles of things that I really should be doing something about, but don’t have the time or energy or resources to address right now. They were stressing me out and annoying me. I dislike clutter, and I particularly hate ugly, messy clutter.<\/p>\n

I may not be able to close all those loops immediately, but at least I could gather them all into one place. Now I have a pile of boxes and bags and smaller piles in my bedroom, but I can move through all the other rooms without stuff constantly nagging at me. David Allen would certainly tell me to identify all the tasks in this pile and write them down, but for me this pile acts as a physical to do list. Yeah, you’re supposed to only have one list of tasks and this clearly isn’t it, but it’s good enough for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An “open loop” is a term that David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, uses to refer to unfinished commitments – anything that needs to be acted upon, finished, or decided. Most people have most their open loops in their heads, but they can also be physical things. Every time you walk past it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,22,4,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-house_and_garden","category-observing_the_self","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21252,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21251\/revisions\/21252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}