You can feel it, even if you can’t see it on a report.

The dragging fatigue. The half-started launches. The “I swear I’m working all day but nothing is getting finished” mood.

That’s not a motivation problem.

That’s inventory—unfinished work sitting in your business like unsold stock. Except it’s not sitting in a warehouse. It’s sitting in your head, your tabs, your drafts folder, your half-built funnels, and your “someday” Notion pages.

And just like physical inventory, unfinished work carries cost.

It’s Tuesday night. You tell yourself: “Tonight I’m finally shipping the offer.”

You open your laptop and meet your real business partner: your backlog of open loops.

This is how invisible debt begins: not with failure—with unfinished intent.

Every unfinished thing keeps a tiny process running in the background: remember this, don’t drop this, come back to this.

That’s not woo. It’s studied.

Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue shows that when you switch from Task A to Task B, part of your attention stays stuck on Task A—reducing performance on Task B until you’ve mentally “closed” the prior task.

Open loops don’t just sit there. They steal quality from the work you are trying to do.

The American Psychological Association summarizes it bluntly: juggling multiple tasks (especially complex ones) reduces efficiency because of switching costs.

And on interruptions specifically, Gloria Mark’s research is commonly cited for an average of ~23 minutes to resume an interrupted task.

So when your day is full of micro-interruptions—Slack, email, “one quick thing,” idea-hopping—your business isn’t losing minutes.

It’s losing momentum, over and over, all day.

Here’s the uncomfortable operational truth: Work-in-progress (WIP) is a lead-time multiplier.

Little’s Law in queueing theory describes a steady-state relationship between:

In plain terms: if you keep WIP high, lead time expands.

Entrepreneur math: the more half-done projects you keep alive, the longer everything takes to finish—especially the revenue-generating work.

You don’t manage what you don’t measure. Do this in 20 minutes:

Group them into three columns:

Choose one:

Those are your true liabilities. They’re the ones charging interest.

This isn’t productivity theater. It’s basic accounting—for execution.

A task can’t be “kind of alive.” Give every open loop one of four endings:

Why this works: unfinished goals create mental interference, and research shows that making a concrete plan can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals (less intrusion, less mental tug).

Closure isn’t just emotional relief—it’s a performance move.

Kanban got famous for a reason: limit WIP to improve flow.

Atlassian’s explanation is simple and lethal: WIP limits reduce the pile of work that’s “nearly done” by forcing focus and increasing throughput—creating a culture of “done.”

Your solo-founder version:

Everything else goes into a trusted backlog (dated) or gets killed.

If you can’t say what you’re actively finishing this week, you’re not “building.” You’re stockpiling.

Unfinished work doesn’t just delay results.

It drains your creativity, frays your confidence, and turns every workday into a thousand tiny restarts. And the science backs the lived experience: unfinished tasks fuel rumination and can impair sleep—meaning the debt follows you home, too.

Here’s your clean, perfect closeout plan for the next 7 days:

Create your Open-Loop Balance Sheet (one list, three columns) → Apply Ship / Schedule / Shrink / Scrap to every line item → Set a hard WIP limit of 3 active projects → Run one daily “closure sprint”: finish or kill—no new starts.

This is how you restore execution velocity: not by adding more effort but by stopping your business from financing unfinished work.