Closing Loops

And how to let your mind think

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

Miller’s law says that we can only have 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information in working memory at a given time. Working memory refers to the place just below your conscious thinking, where your mind stores things for quick recall. It’s like a sticky note collection for remembering a few different things at once, like a few people’s names or a handful of numbers that need to be ordered highest to lowest.

But working memory is also the place where you’re actually working: not just remembering ideas, but processing them. It’s the workbench where you pick up and put down all the things that are currently important to you. Or rather, your subconscious mind does. Usually without your direct input.

And in the same way Miller’s law is applied to remembering a few digits for a math problem, it can also apply to the amount of things your subconscious mind can think about, and work on, in a given day or week.

Throughout your day, your mind is running subroutines where it checks on things you’re supposed to be thinking about. It periodically opens an If-Then loop for one of its responsibilities, for a progress update or a safety check. Your mind will spontaneously ask “have you done the laundry yet? If so, is it time to fold or change loads? Is your car in the shop yet? If not, when are you going to take it? Is that going to conflict with Lily’s ballet practice?”

“Have you opened up to your therapist about that thing that’s been bothering you? Have you said enough nice things to your significant other, or is he/she going to start a fight when he/she gets home? Is the relationship in a good enough place that you can ease off the gas a little? If so, when do you need to be back on the gas? Is their mental well-being in a good enough place that you can ask them about your own needs? If not, when?”

“If you don’t stand up to your co-worker about that thing he did, will you ever be respected at this company? Are you even happy here? Should you start looking for another job? When? What kind of job?”

“It’s been 14 years, and you still haven’t talked to your mom about that thing she did that hurt you. Is it time yet? What happens if you don’t?”

If these questions aren’t answered or resolved this time around, the loop will be suspended and then re-open later. Tomorrow, or during dinner, or while you’re sleeping. It stays in working memory. (This is, I believe, where most of our dreams come from. They’re our mind’s way of opening those loops and playing with possible answers in a creative and sometimes scary way.) (This is also, I think, why I rarely dream at night. Because I aggressively close loops in my life, so my sleeping mind doesn’t really have anything to fret over.)

And the more loops you have open, the more of your (7 plus or minus 2) mental subroutines are spoken for. The more they’re dedicated to mere fires that need putting out, checking on open to-dos that still need do-ed.

If you’re the kind of person who works on intense, adventurous, and difficult things, that number of loops you can have open shrinks down towards 1. If you’re an exceptional person, you can work on 2 really difficult things in the same chapter of your life. But some people can’t even do that. And you probably shouldn’t want to, because then your mental subroutines won’t be able to ask enough difficult questions about the most important thing.

One thing I’ve noticed over 3 years of writing is that most of my writing happens when I’m not at my desk. If I free up enough mental real estate for my mind to seriously, deeply wrestle with a question, then I’ll receive insights and notice connections while I’m doing other things. (In fact, over the last month and a half my life has changed significantly — and that’s why I haven’t been publishing. My mind hasn’t had time to write, because it’s been focused on too many other things.) If it wasn’t for this process, if all of my writing was done by actually writing, I would hate this. I’d have to spend 40 hours a week typing just to arrive at my most basic ideas.

Most of my published essays could be described as 7 days of thinking and 2 hours of writing. (Plus the rewriting process, which is sometimes easy and sometimes hard.)

When you’re working on one really big thing, whether that’s a business, a website, a re-brand of your company, a relationship, a creative project, or anything else, you will constantly be checking in on it subconsciously.

This is also why shower thoughts are often not just funny and unexpected, but revelatory and important. The shower is like a sensory deprivation tank where all of your loose thoughts are permitted a little bit of time to just bubble freely.

I’m not the kind of person who “meditates.” But I love taking showers. Doing absolutely nothing is incredibly productive.

My writing process, and I imagine the process of most other nonfiction writers, involves taking notes of every angle I need to attack a thing from. All of the questions I have. Every little rant or bother or issue I have with something, every place where I need to flesh out my reasoning or find a story about people that confirms or denies what I’m thinking. When I first start attacking or asking about a problem, I slam it all down into one big, disorganized pile of notes. I add more notes as I think about it, and then I re-read the pile as it grows. This puts all of the branches of the idea into working memory, and shows my mind where to develop it. My mind doesn’t need to know what the next thing is, it just needs to know where to look.

And then some connection or progress will pop up while I’m watching Dexter or eating or reading. And I’ll go back to my notes and add it. This is how many of my bigger, more ambitious essays develop: by simply giving the ideas a place to live. A garden to get some sunlight in. And if there are too many weeds, they can’t. Writing, like starting a company or fixing a marriage, requires total mental clarity and focus. The kind of focus that a heckled mind cannot provide.

And so one of your biggest priorities in life should be to aggressively, definitively close loops. As quickly as possible, for anything that can possibly be closed. To give fewer problems a bigger garden. So that when your subconscious mind runs its little routines, it’s checking up on things that actually need to be checked up on.

But closing loops doesn’t just help good ideas flourish, it helps you relax. It helps free you from things you simply don’t need to be worrying about. Or thinking about at all. Having the hard conversation before it festers, taking your car to the shop today so you don’t have to open that subroutine at all tomorrow (or while you’re sleeping).

For people who leave their lives in disarray and consistently put things off that they know they should be taking care of, their minds become a toxic place. It’s like being in a swamp where you’re endlessly bitten by mosquitoes, losing a little bit of blood each time. It keeps you in a perpetual state of If-Then.

That’s what anxiety is.

And I suspect that’s why anxiety is such a big deal in modern, developed countries. It’s because our lives are so busy, so complicated, with small decisions and small moving parts. It’s all minutiae, all the time. We have solved the problem of survival — it’s incredibly easy to stay alive these days — and now we have nothing to do but think about our lives and what they could or should be like. Our mind spends all of its time wrestling with oughts. With how many tasks we have to complete in our absurdly busy, decentralized lives. And then punishing us when we don’t.

We worry about money, all the while knowing that our spending habits are out of line with our goals. We keep reopening the same loops, and yet refusing to close them by fixing the underlying problem.

Leaky pipes, subscription renewals, needy people, finances, appointments, chores, and too many material things in our lives to worry about the safety of. There are too many things to try not to break, and there are too many things to keep up with. People who aren’t excellent at closing loops get eaten alive in the modern world. They end up spending all their time inside those loops, going around and around, puking, and hating themselves.

Paul Graham said that you should have One Big Idea in your mind at a time. One thing that you’re constantly checking on, and that your mind is constantly running tiny If-Then experiments on until something interesting shakes loose.

And the cool thing is, you can trust your subconscious mind to deliver it to you if it finds something interesting. If your conscious mind does not recognize a breakthrough or a pain point, your subconscious mind will deliver it again later like the postal service. I believe this is where recurring dreams come from.

But even if you’re not a creative person or the founder of a company, you could still benefit from using your mental subroutines better. By not wasting them on things that suffocate you.

So if you get good at one thing this year, get good at aggressively closing loops. If you stop spending all your time thinking, maybe you can think for a change.

Drink some water and take a shower.

JR

“As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.” - Michael Easter