Learn to Thrive with ADHD Podcast

Ep 101: Finish What You Start - My ADHD Loop-Closing System

• Mande John • Episode 101

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What if you could move forward in every area of your life where you're feeling frustrated or stuck? If you've ever felt like you're holding onto a hundred tasks in your head – from important things to completely trivial ones – and they keep piling up every day, making you feel like you're standing still, falling behind, or just spinning your wheels, you are going to love what we're talking about today.

We're diving into open loops: what they are, why they pile up in an ADHD brain, and how you can finally close them in ways that actually feel good and stick. I'll share how this played out in my own life and with clients, what changed when we finally tackled these items, and the simple steps you can take to go from frustrated and overwhelmed to clearheaded and calm – maybe even creative again.


In This Episode, You'll Discover:

  • The Zeigarnik effect and why ADHD brains remember unfinished tasks so well
  • My complete Brain Sweep system for mental decluttering
  • How to stop carrying other people's to-dos in your head using shared systems
  • The visual goal board method that keeps annual goals from becoming forgotten open loops
  • Why closing loops gives you back time and energy for activities that truly recharge you
  • A 24-hour challenge to start experiencing relief from mental overwhelm


Key Takeaway: "When you close the loops, you get that mental and emotional space back for whatever fills you up. It's about freeing up your mind so you can be more present, creative, and calm."

This isn't just about productivity - it's about reclaiming your mental bandwidth so you can enjoy hobbies, be present in relationships, and tap into your natural problem-solving abilities. When our minds aren't cluttered with open loops, we have more capacity for the things that truly matter.


Tools and Resources Mentioned:

  • Google Tasks and Google Keep
  • Trello boards for project management
  • Canva for creating visual goal boards
  • FREE download: Visual Goal Board templates + Trello board template with instructions at www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/closingtheloop

Connect with Coach Mande:

Ready to go from mental fog to mental clarity? Let's close those loops together.


Click here for full show notes.

Send us a text

CLICK HERE for more resources. We're on this journey together!

 Hello and welcome back. I have a question for you. What if you could move forward in every area of your life where you're feeling frustrated or stuck? If you've ever felt like you're holding onto a hundred tasks in your head from important things to completely trivial ones. And more. Keep getting at it every day, making you feel like you're standing, still falling behind, or just spinning your wheels.

You are going to love what we're talking about today.

We are diving into open loops, what they are, why they pile up in an ADHD brain, and how you can finally close them in ways that actually feel good and that stick. I'm going to share how this played out in my own life and with clients.

What changed when we finally tackled these items and the simple steps that you can take to go from frustrated or overwhelmed to clearheaded and calm, maybe even creative again.

We all have experienced a server at a restaurant taking your order and not even writing it down. They're holding that order in their head until it's delivered to the table. They may even stop and check on a few tables on the way to put your order in back in the 1920s.A psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik.

Nik noticed this exact phenomenon.

She found that people remember uncompleted or uninterrupted tasks

Far better than tasks that have been finished. A discovery now known as the Zeigarnik effect

for waiters, that can mean that they remember the details of your order perfectly while it's still open. But once it's delivered, it fades from memory.

Well, here's the thing with ADHD, we often don't deliver the orders. We just keep holding onto them and more orders keep coming in.That's exactly how my brain used to feel every single day. I'd be carrying around important things like making doctor's appointments for my kids, right alongside with trivial things like deciding what flowers I wanna plant in the front bed of the house.

And none of these things would actually get served or finished. Every time I saw something that still needed to be done or realized I had forgotten something, again, the frustration would spike. Overwhelm would set in.

It wasn't that I didn't care. I cared so much. I was carrying it all around in my head, trying to remember it all. Keeping all those tabs open,

The real turning point for me was when I created a system to handle this, almost instantly I felt relief.

Once these things were organized and down somewhere, I could finally start completing the tasks more easily, closing the loops, and that made me feel happy, proud, and actually productive.

I want you to notice what open orders you have in your brain for the next couple of days. Just observe

how many times your brain pings about something unfinished, even if it's small. Awareness is the first step to change.

Now, once I realized how good it felt to get these things done,

I needed a way to do it, often, not just when things got bad. That's when I develop the process that I'm gonna show you today.

it's my go-to whenever I start to feel mental clutter piling up again When I start to feel bogged down when there's just so much piling up in my brain, I do what I call a brain sweep. You may have heard me refer to this in the past as a brain dump. I'm finding I like the sweep terminology because it implies that we're cleaning everything up.

You don't have to do this all the time. I do this maybe once or twice a month, But always when I feel that mental fog creeping in, I grab a couple sheets of paper or use the notes section in my planner, and I gather up all those little notes in notebooks and papers and post-its,

Then I add everything that's in my head, no matter how big or small it could be as simple as take out the trash or plan a major project.

I do this across all areas of my life on the same sheets of paper.

The best part, as I add the items from the Post-Its or scraps of paper, I get to crumple them up and toss them away, which is super satisfying.

Once I've dumped everything down, I start sorting. If it needs to be on the calendar soon, I put it straight into Google tasks

If it's not urgent, I drop it into the Not Now section that I created in Google tasks as a subcategory to keep my main list clean and concise,

To make that more clear, I add not now as a task and I move it to the bottom of my tasks and then I categorize all the things that can wait underneath that.

If it's a bigger or further off idea or something I'm just curious about, it goes into my Trello board called Closing Loops.

That is especially great for big projects because I can attach photos, sketches, checklists, and everything is in one place. So just to note, I'm telling you the tools that I use, but something like this would work for any tools that you prefer. When a task gets put onto the task list or the Trello board, it's marked off of my brain sweep list. Then I go through Google tasks and I assign each item a day and a time on my calendar estimating how long it will take. Then I check it done in Google tasks because it's on my calendar and I know I will either get to it as scheduled or move it to a new time or day. Nothing gets deleted.

Nothing gets forgotten.

by the time I've placed each thing where it belongs, every item is checked off the brain sweep list and the mental weight is gone. There is no longer that strain of trying to hold onto so many things at once.

I can completely take things as they come.

You could create a brain sweep habit, and it would be the fastest way to have relief from overwhelm.

That system works beautifully for my own tasks, but there's another kind of mental clutter that can be just as draining carrying other people's to-dos in your head. Yeah. That's where the next tool comes in. Sometimes it seems we're at our limits with keeping up our to-do list, nevermind family members or coworkers. For me, that was especially true with my husband.

He's a super busy guy and he's happy to help, but when I'd ask him to do something like fix the flat tire on the travel trailer, sometimes months would go by simply because when he did get some free time, neither of us would remember that the task even needed to be done. It's not because he didn't want to do it, It just didn't come to mind at the right time. So we started using Google Keep.

Now, anytime I think of anything that he said that he'll take on, he can add it to his Google Keep with the app on his phone, or I can add it to mine and make him a collaborator by adding his email that he uses for his Google Keep. That way, it's out of my head and into his reminders, not sitting in my mental to-do pile.

GoogleKeep is great because we can set reminders for certain days, times, or even locations.

We can pin the most important things on top, add pictures or links that we might need, and easily search for things later.

That way if he's got time to work on something, He can pull it up, see what's pending, and either do it right then or schedule it. The funniest part is the day after we set this up, I texted him and I said, how's Google keep working? And he texted me back and he said, it seems to be working fine. It gave me the notification and I laughed and replied to him.

I wasn't asking if it's functional. I'm asking if you actually called the person that you planned to at 9:00 AM.

So we're still refining the process, but even now it's already taking weight off my brain and he likes that. It helps him to remember without me having to ask him.

Plus, it makes it easier to have the conversation about whether we should hire this work out, Which is something I'm always encouraging because it can do anything, but there are only so many hours in a day. If you're holding other people's task in your head, find a shared system.

Google keep a shared Trello board, or even a joint calendar can work. the goal is to get those loops out of your brain and into a place where the other person can see them easily.

With those two systems. One for my own tasks and one for shared ones, I felt lighter almost immediately,

but I also knew I needed a way to keep my big picture goals from becoming forgotten. Open loops. That's where my visual goal board comes in.

For those of you on the podcast, what I am holding up is a canvas which has multiple pictures in it has 2025 in the center and it has a collage of pictures, and it's probably like a 16, but. I 20 something canvas and I put this on the wall right next to where I get ready. So I see this thing every single day.

Annual goals can feel like huge open loops, and for years I would set them with so much desire and intention, and then I would just forget they even existed. Not because I didn't care, but because they simply didn't come to mind.

That was so frustrating and I'd get to the end of the year and feel like I had lost so much time and like I had missed opportunities that I really wanted.

That changed when I decided to make my goals visible every day. I wrote out my goals for the year, and then I created a collage in Canva. For each goal, I chose a picture that represented it, but you could easily use words or symbols as well.

I had the collage printed on a cannabis, and I keep it next to the mirror where I get ready in the morning. It's impossible to miss.

Because it's always in my line of sight. Check-ins happen naturally, not because I schedule a date for them, but because I see my goals every day.

I'll glance at it, notice one that's not done, and ask myself, how can I move forward with this? That might mean deciding what month it's going to happen,

Figuring out how it will happen or who I might need to involve. One of my favorite examples from this year was the goal to go to a white sand beach. At first I thought it might be a Caribbean island or Florida, but I kept running into roadblocks. No time for a Caribbean trip in the year, The cute place that I wanted to go in Florida. I couldn't book for the month I wanted to go. Then one day my husband suggested staying in California, which I didn't even realize. We had white sand beaches. we ended up booking a trip to Carmel by the Sea.

We flew into Monterey, and it was only 15 minutes from the airport. It was an amazing trip, and I'm certain that it would've just stayed a good idea someday without that daily visual reminder.

If you want to make one of those yourself, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can have my

Canva template and instructions, plus a copy of the Trello board that I use for my annual goals, all in a downloadable PDF I've created for you. Just go to www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/closingtheloop

And if a printed canvas isn't your style, You could set it as a collage on your phone, home screen, your desktop background, or even print it as a poster. The important thing is that you see it often enough that it never fades from your awareness.

Make your annual goals visible. The more often you see them, the more likely you are to take action and avoid letting another year slip by without the things that you really want. Between the brain sweep, Google Keep, and my visual goal board, I started to notice something unexpected.

Closing loops wasn't just helping me be more productive, it was giving me back time and energy for the things I truly enjoy.

One of the many things I do with my freed up brain space is diamond paintings. If you've never seen one, it's where you take tiny little individual diamonds and add them to a picture one by one, like paint by number, but with jewels I love this activity because it slows down my brain

I've also grown a succulent garden. which is another thing I wouldn't have had the space and energy to do before.

By giving my brain a break, I can come back sharper and calmer and more creative. More than that.I used to have a hard time relaxing in any way When I would feel the weight of so many undone or unaccounted for things for you, it might not be diamond painting or gardening.

It might be reading, writing, baking, or taking long walks.

the point is when you close the loops, you get that mental and emotional space back for whatever fills you up. That's because when our minds aren't cluttered with open loops, we have more capacity to do the kind of problem solving our brains naturally crave. for me that means I'm not only more creative in my work,

I'm also more present in my hobbies, my home and my relationships.

Closing loops is about more than productivity. It's about freeing up your mind and your time so that you can do the things that recharge you, spark ideas, and let your natural problem solving shine.

So here's your challenge. Within 24 hours do your own brain sweep,

then close at least three open loops, no matter how small.

Feel the difference it makes To help you start, I've put together a free PDF with my Canva Visual Goal Board templates, and a template of my goal. And closing the loop Trello board with instructions. The link is in the description, but if you're on the go, I'll say it again.

www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/closingtheloop

I think we can get so bogged down in our lives by the never ending to-do list and all the open-ended tasks.

The peace and freedom you feel from wrapping these things up

Will feel amazing.

Thank you for being here with me today. I will see you next week.