The Open Loop Tax

You sat down at nine in the morning to do the one thing that actually mattered. The proposal. The hire. The conversation you’ve been circling for three weeks.

It’s now four in the afternoon.

You have been busy for seven straight hours. Your phone is warm. Your inbox is emptier than it was. You answered things. You moved things. You were, by any reasonable measure, working.

And you cannot name a single thing you finished.

I want to be careful here, because the usual diagnosis is lazy and wrong. This isn’t a discipline problem. Guys who read this newsletter don’t have discipline problems. You get up early. You train. You show up when you said you would. If discipline were the issue, you’d have fixed it a decade ago.

It isn’t a time problem either. You have the same hours as the guy two rungs above you who seems to move through his week like a knife through warm butter.

It’s an open loop problem. And it’s taxing you every hour of every day, whether you’re working or not.

An open loop is any commitment you’ve made, to yourself or someone else, that has no defined next step and no defined end.

The half-finished operating agreement. The vendor you told you’d “circle back” with. The gym membership you pay for but haven’t used since March. The text from your brother sitting in your notifications for eleven days. The pricing page you keep meaning to rewrite. The employee you know you need to either coach up or let go.

Each one of those is a small background process running on your hardware. Not loud. Not urgent. Just running.

Psychologists have poked at this for a century. There’s a well documented tendency for the brain to hold unfinished tasks in an active state and drop them the moment they’re completed. That’s the mechanism. But you don’t need a study to confirm what you already feel at eleven at night when you’re lying there doing inventory instead of sleeping.

Here’s the part that’s expensive. Your brain does not distinguish between a loop that would take four seconds to close and one that would take four months. A forgotten dentist appointment and a stalled acquisition occupy roughly the same amount of mental real estate.

So a man with sixty open loops is running sixty processes, and by lunch he’s got about eleven percent of himself left to point at anything hard.

That’s the tax. It isn’t charged in hours. It’s charged in bandwidth, and you pay it whether or not you ever touch the work.

Which explains the thing that’s been bothering you: why you can be exhausted at the end of a day where, objectively, you didn’t do very much.

You’ve tried to fix this. Probably more than once.

You bought the app. You read the book about the two minute rule. You built the Notion dashboard with the color coded views that you loved for nine days and then abandoned like a gym in February.

Those systems didn’t fail because you’re undisciplined. They failed because they were designed to store loops, not close them.

A task list is a warehouse. It gives you somewhere to put things. It does not create any pressure to remove them. And a warehouse with no outbound dock is just a nicer looking pile.

What you need isn’t better storage. You need a closing mechanism. Something that forces every loop to either die, get scheduled, get handed off, or get buried on purpose.

That’s what the rest of this is.

Five steps. You can run the whole thing in about ninety minutes the first time and twenty minutes a week after that. I’ve run this with guys doing four hundred thousand a year and guys doing forty million. Same drill, different sized loops.

Set a timer for twenty five minutes. One page, digital or paper, doesn’t matter. Write down every single open loop you can find.

Everything. Business, personal, financial, physical, relational. The strategic and the stupid. “Replace the water filter” goes on the same list as “Decide whether to raise.”

Do not organize. Do not prioritize. Do not judge yourself while writing. The instant you start editing, you start protecting your ego, and the loops you’re most ashamed of are the exact ones costing you the most.

Prompts to shake the rest loose once you stall out: What am I avoiding? Who am I overdue to respond to? What have I paid for and not used? What did I promise someone last quarter? What do I keep re-deciding?

Most men land somewhere between forty and ninety items. If you got twelve, you didn’t dig. Set the timer again.

This is the step everybody skips, and it’s the one that does the work.

A loop stays open because the next step is fuzzy. “Fix the onboarding” isn’t an action. It’s a mood. Your brain can’t start on a mood, so it files it under “later” and keeps the process running forever.

Next to every item, write the single next physical thing a person could do. Verb first. Specific enough that a stranger could execute it without asking you a question.

“Fix the onboarding” becomes “Open the welcome email, delete steps four and five, send to Dana for review.”

“Deal with Kevin” becomes “Text Kevin: got twenty minutes Thursday afternoon?”

You’ll notice something as you go. Somewhere between a fifth and a third of your list will close itself during this step, because once you name the action you realize it takes ninety seconds and you just do it. That’s not cheating. That’s the point.

Now go back through and put a number on each one.

Two numbers, actually. How much has this cost me so far, and what does it cost me every additional month it stays open?

The unsigned contract with your best client: maybe nothing so far, maybe forty grand if he gets recruited away and there’s nothing on paper. The unreviewed merchant statement: two hundred a month, twenty four hundred a year, for four years running. The team member you haven’t addressed: ask anyone else on that team what it’s costing and watch their face.

Some of your loops are worth pennies and you’ve been paying them enormous emotional rent. Some are quietly bleeding you five figures and you’ve been treating them like background noise.

You will not know which is which until you write the numbers down. That mismatch is almost always the most useful thing that comes out of this whole exercise.

Every loop on your page gets exactly one of these. No fifth option, no “maybe,” no starring it for later.

CLOSE TODAY. Under ten minutes. Do it before you get up from the desk. This pile is usually bigger than you expect and clearing it feels absurdly good.

SCHEDULE. Real work that deserves a real block. It goes on the calendar with a date and a start time, not on a list. If it can’t get a slot in the next fourteen days, it isn’t a schedule item. It’s a bury item. Be honest.

DELEGATE. Someone else can carry this. Hand it off today, with the next physical action already written out for them, because you did step two. Include a due date. A handoff without a date is just a rumor.

BURY. You are never doing this. Say so. Out loud if the moment calls for it. Delete the file, cancel the subscription, tell the person it’s a no. The relief here is going to surprise you.

The rule that makes this work: nothing goes back on a list. A list is where loops go to hide. Everything becomes an action, a calendar block, another person’s problem, or a corpse.

The big cleanup is a one time event. The system is what keeps it from happening again.

Twenty minutes, every Friday, same slot, non-negotiable. I do mine at four. Whiskey optional, though I’d argue it improves the experience.

Three questions. What opened this week? What’s still open from last week? What am I burying right now?

That third question is the whole game. Without a standing permission to kill things, your list grows monotonically until it collapses and you go buy another app. With it, your open loop count stays roughly flat forever, and no loop lives longer than seven days without a deliberate decision to keep it alive.

If you want the harder version of this, run a two week audit of where your hours are actually going before you sweep. Guessing is useless here, because every man alive thinks he spends more time on deep work than he does. Rize tracks it automatically in the background and hands you the receipts, and the receipts are usually humbling. Pair that data with your Friday sweep and you stop guessing at which loops are eating you.

“I don’t have ninety minutes for this.”

You spent longer than that this week re-remembering things you’d already decided. The inventory isn’t added to your workload. It’s a withdrawal from a tax you’re already paying at a terrible rate.

“My list is going to be humiliating.”

It is. Mine was. The first time I ran this I found sixty three open loops, including a business partner conversation I’d been avoiding for fourteen months and a state registration that had lapsed in a way that would have been genuinely expensive to discover later.

Here’s the thing though. That list already existed. You were already carrying every item on it. The only thing writing it down changed was that you could finally see it, and you can’t fight something you refuse to look at.

“I’ve tried productivity systems. They don’t stick.”

Agreed, and that’s why this one has exactly one recurring component. Twenty minutes on Friday. That’s it. There’s no tagging taxonomy, no daily review ritual, no morning ceremony to skip and feel guilty about. If you can protect twenty minutes a week, this holds.

“Some of these loops aren’t mine to close.”

Then they’re delegate or bury, and either way they leave your head. “Waiting on someone else” is still an open process burning your bandwidth unless you’ve written down who owns it and when you’ll check. Do that and the loop closes on your side even though the work continues on theirs.

The men who seem to operate at a different speed than everybody else are rarely faster. They’re just carrying less.

They finish things, or they kill things, and they almost never let something sit in the middle where it can charge them rent indefinitely.

You don’t need more capacity. You need to stop leaking the capacity you’ve got.

Twenty five minutes. Timer on. Dump the list.

Don’t sort it, don’t price it, don’t fix anything. Just get it out of your head and onto the page tonight.

Then, before you close the notebook, pick the three cheapest items on there and close them. Send the text. Cancel the subscription. Make the call you’ve owed somebody since June.

Three loops closed in one evening. You’ll sleep differently. And that’s just the down payment.

Stay sharp.

Marcus Cole
The Savage Gentleman
Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.