Unfinished work does not sit harmlessly on a task list. It occupies cognitive and emotional space. Photo: File.
Unfinished tasks, even if they are not urgent or are relatively unimportant, can have a draining effect on a busy leader. Michelle Gibbings suggests a method of dealing with these nagging distractions.
I recently found myself putting off a task. I kept thinking: “I’ll get to it when I have more time.”
When I did get to it, it was finished in less than 10 minutes. I had spent weeks delaying my response to a relatively simple task. That delay had a cognitive cost.
Unfinished work does not sit harmlessly on a task list. It occupies cognitive and emotional space.
It shows up as 3 am wake-ups, distracted meetings, and the nagging sense you are never quite ‘’done’’.
These are the ‘’open loops’’ of leadership. They come in the form of work unresolved — the decision never quite made; the project sitting in draft; the conversation postponed three times; or the email repeatedly marked as unread.
These elements sit in the background, drawing on your attention, cropping up in quiet moments, and fuelling the sense of never being fully switched off.
Rather than pushing harder or leaving everything dangling for another day or month, choose a third, more sustainable path — creating micro-closures.
These are the small, deliberate acts of finishing or properly parking work so your brain, your team, and your future self are not left carrying a vague and stressful load.
Research shows that making a concrete plan for how and when you will tackle an unfinished goal can dramatically reduce its mental pull, even before you actually complete the task. Closure, in other words, can be psychological as much as it is practical.
So, where do you start? The first step is identification. You can set aside a focused block of time to uncover your open loops. To help with this discovery, use the following prompts.
Decisions: Which decisions are technically ‘’in your court’’ but have not been communicated or finalised?
Conversations: Where have you said, “We should talk” and never actually scheduled the time?
Commitments: Where have you implied or promised something, even informally, that has not yet been honoured or explicitly renegotiated?
Ambiguities: Where are people left guessing about priorities, responsibilities or timelines because you have not been clear?
This is not about creating a longer to-do list; it is about clarity. You want to move items from the fog into the light so you can decide what to do with them.
In your next step, the aim is not heroic productivity; instead, it is focused, intelligent containment.
Three principles underpin this approach.
Decide or explicitly defer: For each open loop, ask yourself: “Can this reasonably be decided now with the information available? If not, when and how will we revisit it, and who is responsible?”
Some items will fall into the ‘’just decide’’ category because they don’t warrant further analysis. So, decide and move forward. Others genuinely require more input. For these issues, explicit deferral is kinder than silent drift.
Make the decision clear and explicit to the people who need to know. For example: “We will revisit this in the first week of April once the new data is available.” Or: “We are not going to pursue this proposal in its current form. If we pick it up again, we will start from a fresh brief.”
Document the state of play: Write a short state-of-play note. Where is this project really up to? What assumptions are you/the team currently testing? What decisions have already been made, and which are still open? What are the first two or three sensible next steps?
This kind of documentation is not bureaucratic. It is helpful because it relieves your memory of the burden of having to hold everything in place.
Close the loop with people: Tasks are one thing. People are another. Many of the most draining loose ends are relational, not operational.
Micro-closure in this context means circling back to conversations that were not quite finished. For example: “We will not resolve this restructuring question at this juncture. Here is what you can count on for now, and when we will revisit it together.”
“I know we spoke about a possible opportunity for you. I don’t have a definitive answer yet. Here is where things stand right now.”
“You raised an issue with me last month. I haven’t forgotten it. Here’s what I have done so far and what I plan to do next.”
These conversations may feel uncomfortable in the moment, particularly if you are delivering partial clarity rather than complete resolution. Yet they are critical for promoting trust.
Silence invites speculation, and in the absence of information, people rarely make benign assumptions. They assume the worst.
When you look at your list of open loops, some items will be too large to complete now. Others can be closed or significantly advanced in 10 minutes or less. For the items in this category, it is helpful to get them off your desk quickly.
The best way to approach these is to set a timer and batch them into small tasks. These micro-finishes might include:
- Responding to an email that has been sitting in your inbox for weeks because it requires a clear yes, no, or not now.
- Signing off on a document that is 95 per cent ready.
- Sending a short note of feedback or appreciation that you have been mentally composing for days.
- Clarifying ownership of a task: “From next month Sam will lead this, and I will stepback into a sponsor role.”
There is a psychological benefit here, too. Each micro-finish is a small signal of agency. It reminds you that you are not entirely at the mercy of your workload.
You can tidy part of the system, even if you can’t perfect it.
Michelle Gibbings is a Melbourne-based workplace expert, and an award-winning author. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces — where people thrive and progress is accelerated. She can be contacted at [email protected].
