An open loop is anything that's still waiting on someone. A question you haven't answered. A file you promised to send. A reply you're still waiting for. A deadline that's coming up. The term comes from a simple idea: a task your mind has started but not finished stays "open," and open things are harder to put down than closed ones.
Why open loops are easy to lose
Most of the promises you make in a day aren't written down anywhere. They're said out loud in a meeting, typed into a chat thread, or buried three replies deep in an email. Nothing forces you to write them into a list, so the only place they live is your memory, right next to everything else you're thinking about.
That's fine for one or two loops. It falls apart once you're juggling a dozen conversations across a dozen apps. The ask from a teammate in Slack, the follow-up an investor is waiting on over email, the reply you owe a client on WhatsApp: each one is a small, separate open loop, and none of them announce themselves again once they've scrolled past.
Two kinds of open loops
It helps to split them into two directions:
- On you. Something someone else is waiting on you for: a reply, a file, a decision.
- On others. Something you're waiting on someone else for: an answer, an approval, a signed document.
Most to-do lists only capture the first kind, and only the ones you remembered to write down. The second kind, what you're owed, is just as easy to lose, and just as costly when it slips.
How to catch them without a bigger list
The honest answer is that remembering harder doesn't scale. The two things that actually help are:
- Keep the original context attached. A task titled "follow up with Meera" is nearly useless a week later. The same task with the actual message attached, who asked, where, and when, is easy to act on immediately.
- Let it close itself. An open loop that requires you to remember to check it off is still work. One that closes the moment you actually reply or send the file is not.
This is the problem Nudge is built around: it reads the apps you allow, notices the shape of a promise or a request as it's written, and holds it open with the exact message attached until the work is done.