Originally published on Medium on November 21, 2019.
Don’t underestimate the power of closing open threads of thought and action. Things that aren’t closed out take up more attention than they should. You see them, and you have to decide “What was this? Why do I care? Is this done? What’s the next action?” And since these items are often left in an ambiguous state, this will require reprocessing part or all of the information time and again.
Particularly insidious cases are the not quite done task and the currently unactionable task. The first are things where the primary goal has been achieved, but there’s something left that would be nice to do. For bugs this often looks like a clean up task. For email it often looks like something that the email reminds you of but which is not actually the direct task the email thread was meant to achieve.
The second category includes things that will be actionable at a particular time or when a particular prerequisite is done. It also includes the even trickier case of things that you _could_ take action on, but the limiting factor is time or interest (“I ought to…”).
You probably have more of these open threads than you think. Emails in your inbox, open bugs, unresolved doc comments, open tabs, meeting notes, unanswered chats. Essentially, every channel of communication is a source of open threads.
This is not a new observation, and neither is the solution for handling it. Close the threads, and find some way of capturing the niggling remainders—the things that kept you from closing it out—in a more actionable form. Create a new bug with the remaining work and the appropriate priority, and close up the old one. Integrate the content in the open docs thread into the doc, and close it. Add the action the email reminds you of to a to-do list, either your active one or your aspirational one, and archive it. Or snooze the email to a future date, whether a specific one, or an arbitrary one sometime in the future (although snoozing often requires reprocessing the information when it pops back into your inbox, because it doesn’t allow you to snooze with a note; but at least you do it less often). For managers, often closing a thread means finding the right owner and communicating both transfer of ownership and expectations.
This takes time, but it is better to spend even a minute or two processing something now than have it take up 30 seconds again and again and again, perhaps multiple times per day for many days. Even more than the directly attributable time is the gain from decreased context switching. Future you will thank current you.