Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,18

out the door to pick up my kids from school. In the moment, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to leave a few books lying in the sunroom, two rooms away from where they belong. I tell myself I’ll pick them up when I get home. But by the time I return home, I’ve forgotten. Do this for a month or so and the system breaks down, making it difficult to find what I’m looking for. And then when I really need a book, it’s nowhere to be found.

To get my literal house in order, and to keep my physical environment from sabotaging me, I often repeat a simple mantra: complete the cycle, which is basically a fancy way of saying “finish what you start.” A Modern Mrs Darcy blog reader said that in her family, they call this “taking it through the hoop.” She says, “All of us are pretty good at getting it near the hoop, but the reward is not until it’s through the hoop.” Other readers shared similarly helpful mantras, like “touch it once” and “touch it, complete it,” and “do the next step.”

The phrase “completing the cycle” resonates with me the most. I begin cycles every day, and you do too. You probably have cycles in progress right now. And generally speaking, we’re happier—and a lot tidier—when we complete them. That means we finish what we start, in a more or less prompt way.

Some benefits of complete cycles are obvious. When we don’t finish what we start, we lose our important papers. Our clothes may be clean, but they’re rumpled in the bottom of the dryer—or worse, hanging in the closet but too wrinkled to wear. We can’t make today’s breakfast until we clean the skillet from yesterday’s eggs.

When we promptly complete our cycles, we get to bypass all kinds of avoidable last-minute emergencies. Take this example from the Bogel household, circa 2016. We finished all our tax paperwork in February and were proud of ourselves for finishing two months early. We felt like it was done, because the hard part was over. But on April 15, we found ourselves frantically searching for the checkbook, then driving across town to the only post office with midnight pickup because though we did the hard part, we never took the final step of putting the forms and our payment in the mail. We were cursing ourselves that night for not completing the cycle.

Completing the cycle isn’t a magic bullet. But its benefits are real, even if they aren’t all readily apparent. Open cycles consume mental energy, occupy brain space, and beg us to monitor them as “jobs in progress.” Our brains get anxious when too many cycles remain open, because it takes energy to maintain them. They register as clutter to our brains. We’re using mental energy and our limited working memory trying not to forget about them. Think about it as you would a computer’s memory—the more RAM that’s available, the smoother the machine operates. When a cycle is complete, that’s one less thing to keep track of so we can focus on the task at hand.

You can apply this foundational habit of completing the cycle in a broad range of instances to keep your physical space from sabotaging you. These are some ideas of what this could look like:

Sorting the mail as soon as you bring it inside

Paying bills when you receive them

Putting your keys in a designated spot as soon as you get home

Filing important papers before they get buried on your desk

Putting meat in the freezer when you get home from the grocery store

Putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of setting them on the counter

Hanging up your coat when you walk in the door

Putting reusable bags back in the trunk after you return from running errands

Adding hot sauce to the grocery list when you empty the bottle

Folding the laundry before wrinkles set in, and then actually putting it away

Clear the Clutter

We tend to think of overthinking as something that happens in our heads, but it’s also intimately connected to our physical spaces. Clearing the clutter is a key way to stop overthinking before it starts. We can avoid wasting time and energy looking for our keys and avoid the whole-life meltdown that often accompanies such an occurrence.

Clutter isn’t great for mental function, so clear counters do a lot for inner calm. It’s easier to forget that important paper if it’s buried in a sea of discarded coffee mugs and Scotch tape