Your mind may not remember everything you think about or experience, but somehow it feels it all. And any stress, fear, apprehension, or a sense of urgency about something unfinished rides upon your back–so to speak–until you resolve things.
That’s why it’s so important to address tasks and other open loops in your life as they come up.
Your emotions are constantly running in the background — behind all your thinking — and they’re using up mental energy. Make sure you’re able to process and close the loops on the things that impact you emotionally, or you’ll be mentally exhausted all the time.
And here’s the kicker: the more mentally exhausted you are, the less likely you’ll be to proactively process the things going on in your life. It can become a negative feedback loop if you don’t step back and address it.
Many of you operate at Level 1 of the Today System–using the simple daily card with points on your tasks. But until you start using a master list of some kind to keep track of all your open loops and assure yourself that you’ll take care of them, you’ll carry their weight around with you.
The magic of the Simple Scheduling System (S3) is that it allows you to unload those open loops of your life into a place where you not only know that you’ll address them eventually, but also when. And you don’t need to make a decision about the exact day you’ll get to it, but rather a relative time period. And that’s usually good enough to de-stress about it and move on with what you need to do today.