Episode 34 - Close the Loop: Incompletions Are Why Everything You Haven't Finished Is Draining You

Head

Sep 15

An incompletion is the task that has not been done, the conversation that has not happened, the decision still sitting open, and the loose end nobody tied off. In this solo episode, Ben Brooks, founder of PILOT and host of The Lift, makes the case that uncontained work is quietly taxing your attention, your sleep, and everyone waiting on you. The fix is not finishing all of it. The fix is containing it, and the first pass takes about 20 minutes.

Why did a perfect vacation start with 36 hours of work?

In August 2024, Ben took the two weeks off he looks forward to every year, at the Salzburg music festival. The first day delivered on the plan: a run around the lake, a bike ride into town, dinner outside alone.

The next morning he could not stop thinking about work.

What came out of his bag was the accumulated paper of an entire year, sticky notes and documents and mailers carried across an ocean, alongside a laptop running 80 open browser tabs. Laying it all out felt productive for about an hour, and then it stopped, because every item written down surfaced three more. That continued for a day and a half with his heart rate elevated the entire time.

The frustration was compounded by principle. He is a separator rather than an integrator, and PILOT practices what the company calls pure PTO. When the person at the top does not model it, nobody else believes they are allowed to take it.

Here is what actually happened in those 36 hours. Not one item on the list got completed. It got scoped, clustered, and written down. Roughly 20 percent of it turned out to be finished already. Some of it no longer mattered and went in the trash. Once it was contained, the rest of that trip became what it had been booked to be.

This is not a recommendation to spend a vacation this way, because that was reactive work done under pressure. The argument is to do the containing before you leave.

Why does unfinished work follow you home?

The individual items are never the crisis. The accumulation is. It produces the state most executives describe in nearly identical language: always behind, always underwater, always playing defense, carrying a low-grade exhaustion that a weekend does not touch.

Researchers found in 2011 that unfinished goals generate intrusive thoughts, and those thoughts degrade performance on tasks entirely unrelated to the goal. What switched them off was not completion. It was making a specific plan. The task did not have to get done and the goal did not have to be achieved.

There is one condition attached, and it determines whether any of this works. You have to believe the plan. Another sticky note thrown back onto a pile you have already stopped trusting releases nothing. The item has to land somewhere you are confident it will be picked up again.

The second cost is what researchers call attention residue. When you leave work unfinished, part of your attention stays behind with it. That is the mechanism behind sitting at a Broadway show or at the pool and reaching for your phone to write something down, which means you are not really at either one.

It reaches sleep as well. Unfinished tasks at the end of the week predict worse sleep across the weekend, which is precisely when busy people are counting on recovering.

Sometimes the accumulated weight is enough that people change jobs. The stated reason is usually a new challenge. Often it is closer to bankruptcy on tasks, open loops, and attention residue all at once. You hand in the laptop, the browser tabs go with it, and you start the next role at zero. Eleven years into building PILOT, that reset has never arrived. Anyone who intends to stay somewhere has to be far more deliberate, because nothing external is going to clear the decks.

What does your silence cost everyone else?

Thirteen years ago, before PILOT, Ben was starting his coaching practice and was introduced to a business owner in his neighborhood. They had breakfast at Cook Shop on 10th Avenue, shook hands, and the owner said he looked forward to working together. The proposal went out within a couple of days, and then nothing came back. After four follow-up emails, a phone call finally surfaced the truth: the owner had forgotten the last name, could not locate the proposal, felt disorganized about the whole thing, and wanted to get started.

The silence had meant the opposite of what it appeared to mean. That incompletion cost the owner days of worrying about a proposal he could not find, and it cost the other side confidence and the start of an engagement.

Years later the roles reversed. A senior consultant brought into PILOT as an interim COO was doing strong work spread across Slack, email, Asana, and Google Sheets. In a recent one on one, they raised that they had been interpreting the lack of engagement as dismissiveness and as a verdict on the quality of the work. None of that was true. It was a backlog, which is exactly where the business owner on 10th Avenue had been.

People do not fill silence with generous interpretations. Your brain, as one description has it, is a dangerous neighborhood to walk through. Position makes this worse rather than better. A friend will follow up about weekend plans without hesitating, while someone who needs a decision, a budget, or a job from you worries about being a nag.

The antidote is being explicit. Define the outcome and what good looks like before anyone starts. Clarify roles, specifically whether someone is deciding or being informed. Give a real deadline, because "let's get that next week" is not explicit and "Thursday at 3 p.m. by email" is. Then give your team and your vendors standing permission to keep a visible list of what they need from you. Reviewing it regularly means you can sometimes say that something has changed or is no longer needed, which returns people's attention to them instead of leaving them waiting six weeks on a loop that was always going to close differently.

How does this stall an entire organization?

A CEO succession at a 25,000 person company makes the pattern visible at scale. Everyone was at the office and very little moved, because the organization was waiting on the new strategy, the new plan, and the listening tour. Rent and salaries were paid the entire time.

The smaller versions are everywhere. A year that opens without defined budgets or performance goals leaves everyone directionally aware and no one operating with urgency. A vendor decision or major project sitting unapproved generates weeks of check-ins that produce nothing. The most expensive version is the offsite, where executives jockey for agenda time and the slides get sorted the day before, which turns an event meant to build culture into one large incompletion.

The timing makes this more costly than it used to be. In 2016, employees absorbed an average of two company-wide changes a year. Six years later that reached 10, while willingness to support those changes fell from 74 percent to 43 percent. Organizations are asking people to carry considerably more at the moment they want to carry less, so driving your own incompletions to closure is one of the few levers that reliably reduces the friction.

PILOT puts this on the calendar. Every November a Slack channel called loose ends opens, and November and December are reserved for finishing rather than starting. It functions as winter cleaning, with the goal of returning in January carrying less. Three operating principles do the same work year round: clean up the mess, add structure early, and cut through it.

What to do this week:

Give it 20 minutes. Gather the to-dos, close the browser tabs, collect the sticky notes and the emails you sent yourself, and put all of it into one container. Cluster them, put a date on them, assign a name, and throw out whatever no longer matters. You are not committing to finish any of it today. You are giving yourself a plan you actually believe, which is what turns the nagging into quiet.

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