Note: A weight is anything you carry that presses on you: a responsibility, a worry, a decision, a person you are holding. This article is for you if:
- If you measure your week by what got crossed off, and you still close the laptop heavy for reasons you cannot name.
- If you are a helping professional (coach, pastor, priest, or therapist) carrying your people’s burdens so faithfully that you have stopped noticing which weights are even yours.
- If something good just lifted, a launch shipped, a hard season ended, and you feel lighter without quite knowing why.
If any of those describe you, I have a practice to hand you. It’s not 100% dialed-in yet. I am still testing it. But I already think it is worth five minutes of your time. You can find the link at the end of this article.
There is an old line in the biblical book of Hebrews about running your race. Before it says one word about endurance, it says: “Lay aside every weight” (Hebrews 12:1, NIV). Not only sin. Weight.
I have been laying weights aside by that verse for decades. Sin I knew how to confess. Burdens I knew how to name. The verse and I were old friends.
What I Hadn’t Built Yet
What I met this spring was a kind of weight the verse had always included, and that I had never built a reliable practice for. It did not arrive through study. It came through a coaching call, then an AI, then those old words returning in a light I had not seen before.
Words that sent me, of all places, back to a productivity book I have leaned on for years. David Allen wrote Getting Things Done (GTD), the method that taught my generation to empty our heads into a trusted system. I have run his GTD process since the book first came out in the 1990s.
His central claim is almost spiritual in its plainness: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” For decades I obeyed that line faithfully, for tasks. Every project, every commitment, every open loop, out of my head and into a system I trust.
It works. But there was something I hadn’t done with it. I had never pointed that same structure at what I was feeling.
It is not that my emotions had nowhere to go. I have been journaling for decades. I talk things through with friends, with my wife, with multiple coaches. The channels were there.
But the practice was loose. Stream of consciousness on the page, whatever happened to surface that morning. A good conversation when one happened to land. It went deep on the days I felt like going deep and had the time. On the days I did not, the weight just sat there, and I moved on.
So some weights got named, and others slipped past, depending on my mood and my margin. Nothing was structured enough to catch the ones I skated over. They accumulated quietly, until the morning many of them lifted and I felt how much lighter I was.
Two Instincts, One Answer
Here is where my pastoral and business instincts usually split. One instinct spiritualizes the weight: pray about it, surrender it, wait on God. The other instinct systematizes it: build the workflow, clear the inbox, fix the calendar. Each is half right.
The Tyranny of the Or says choose one. The Genius of the AND says a weight is a spiritual reality and a structural one at the same time, and the honest response works both at once. Which instinct is your reflex? When a weight lands on you, do you reach first for prayer or for the to-do list? What if you, like me, have been rationing yourself to half of your own toolkit?
The Question I Skipped
This new practice came out of one conversation, and I nearly walked past the moment that started it.
I record my calls with my coach and turn them into transcripts; I miss the best parts otherwise. After a recent call, I handed the transcript to Claude and asked it to unpack the conversation. Within seconds, it caught something my coach said that I had missed completely. Carla had asked me a direct question: “What are you going to do to identify weights like this in the future, so you know they are there before they build up?” I had skipped right ahead, the AI pointed out, as if I never heard it. It was right. I hadn’t heard it. I had plowed on.
So I sat with the tool and worked on the question. And then it did the thing AI loves to do. It tried to become my therapist. It started probing my childhood, my history, where all of this supposedly came from. I stopped it. “I don’t need you to be an armchair psychologist. I want to learn how to move forward and take action.” It apologized in that cheerful way AI does. “You’re absolutely right, David. I overstepped my bounds.”
The tool was genuinely useful and genuinely wrong, inside the same five minutes. The value was not in handing it the wheel. The value was in being the “human in the loop,” keeping the one insight worth keeping, and steering AI back toward action when it wandered off. Used with discernment, the AI surfaced something I could not see on my own. Left to its own momentum, it would have walked me somewhere I never asked to go. Do you see the difference? One is a tool serving the work. The other is a tool quietly setting the agenda.
Where Weight Goes When It Isn’t Named
Out of that redirected conversation came a simple picture that reorganized how I carry things. A weight has to go somewhere. What stays in your head pools. What you move flows. An unnamed weight is standing water; it sits, it stagnates, and it seeps into everything nearby. To channel a weight is to give it a path, somewhere useful for it to go, instead of letting it pool in you. What in you is standing water right now? What have you been calling “just how things are” that is actually a weight with nowhere to drain?
The Five Channels
So I started naming the channels. Five of them, as best I can tell so far. I want to be candid that this is a practice I am testing, not a finished system. Here are my current channels:
Architectural. Some weight belongs in a system, not in you. A role, a process, an SOP, the right person in the right seat. When a weight keeps recurring, that is usually a sign it wants a structure rather than more of your willpower.
Relational. Some weight lifts only when another person helps you hold it. A coach, a trusted friend, a thinking partner who can carry part of the load. The weight moves the moment it stops being yours alone. Who holds weight with you, and when did you last let them?
Spiritual. Some weight is meant to be handed to God, not managed. Prayer, contemplation, the reframe that asks what He might be subtracting from your life, and why. This is the channel the executive in me is slowest to reach for, and the one that most often does the deepest work.
Reflective. Some weight only needs to get out of your head and onto the page. This is David Allen’s open loop, named and let go. What stays inside pools. What gets written moves. Naming the weight is itself a way of channeling it.
Restorative. Some weight is less a problem to solve than a fatigue to recover from. Sleep, rest, rhythm, a protected day. I’ve been practicing what I call the Sanctuary Strategy and a scheduling method called S3 Scheduling for years. I don’t have an article or a tool to share with you yet, but these are the disciplines that guard both deep work and deep rest. Weight is heavy and takes a toll. Without restorative rest, it compounds.
The Practice: Five Minutes, Most Mornings
The practice itself is five questions, asked in the journal I already keep:
- What weights am I noticing today?
- Which of these are burdens, and which are loads? (more on that distinction next week)
- Which am I absorbing, and which am I channeling?
- For the ones I am channeling, which channel is doing the work?
- For the ones I am absorbing, what would it take to move them into a channel?
That is the whole thing. Five minutes, most mornings.
Your Turn
When did you last ask yourself, on purpose, what weights you were carrying?
Here is what I would ask of you. Not a commitment. An experiment. Run those five questions for one week, five minutes a day. At the end of the week, look at how many weights you have been absorbing that could have been flowing somewhere the entire time. What would it feel like to close next Friday lighter than Monday?
I will warn you about one thing, because it is the next part of this story. A practice you build on a calm week is not the same as a practice that holds when everything lands at once. Mine got tested faster than I expected, on a Sunday morning I did not see coming. That is where we go next.
For now, stop carrying what you were built to channel. The water was always going to move somewhere. You get to decide where.
This is exactly why I built a worksheet version of this practice: the same five questions, a simple step-by-step walkthrough, ready to run tomorrow morning. It’s not a finished framework; I’m still testing it alongside you. And I think it already earns five minutes.
Download The Unweighting Approach™ worksheet