Concept
Mind Like Water
Mind like water is David Allen's name for a state of relaxed readiness in which you respond to each demand in proportion to its size, because every unfinished commitment has been captured in a trusted system outside your head.
Allen borrows the image from martial arts. Throw a pebble into a still pond and the water ripples exactly as much as the pebble deserves, then goes calm again. It never overreacts and never ignores. What stops most of us from responding that way is open loops: commitments we have half-agreed to, like calling the dentist or fixing a drawer, that we have neither finished nor parked anywhere trustworthy. The mind is a poor reminder system. It nags at random moments instead of prompting you when you can act. Once each loop is written down, turned into a clear next action and reviewed regularly, your attention stops patrolling them. The goal is not doing everything. It is knowing exactly what you are not doing and trusting that choice.
A real-life example
Sara, a secondary-school teacher in Leeds, kept waking at 3 a.m. thinking about the boiler service, a parents' email and her sister's birthday. One Sunday she wrote every nagging item on paper and found 41 of them. Each got a next step or was crossed out. That week a colleague dropped an urgent request on her desk, and she handled it calmly in ten minutes instead of feeling crushed.
How to use it
- 1Spend 20 minutes writing every open loop, large or trivial, into one inbox: a notebook, an app or a single sheet of paper.
- 2For each item, decide the very next physical action, schedule it, or consciously drop it.
- 3Review the whole list once a week so your mind keeps trusting the system instead of quietly taking the job back.