The Zeigarnik Effect

If you’ve ever been sat on the sofa at the end of the day, with a nagging feeling about work you’ve got left outstanding that you need to do the next day, or a growing pile of household tasks that you need to get around to at some point, then it’s likely you’ll be experiencing the Zeigarnik Effect. Although sometimes this can cause you to feel disorganised or even stressed, there are ways to combat it and ways to make it work for you.

In 1927, the Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a restaurant in Vienna and she noticed that though the waiters were incredibly busy, they still managed to remember everyone’s orders without writing them down. However, when she returned to collect the bag she’d forgotten, the waiter who served her had forgotten who she was. After further investigation, she established that once the bill was paid and the diners left, the orders and faces simply disappeared from the waiters’ minds and they couldn’t easily recall the interaction they’d had. After many studies asking hundreds of people to complete different tasks in her lab, Zeigarnik found that people recalled unfinished tasks 90% more effectively than those that were completed.

Since then, many psychologists and researchers have studied the phenomenon, with some theories evolving around cognitive tension that unfinished tasks create in your brain, keeping it at the forefront of your memory, which completing a task then releases. Others have suggested that factors such as motivation, reward expectancy and achievability have an impact on the strength of the effect.

If you read an attention grabbing headline that misses out key details or watch a TV episode with a cliff hanger, these are also examples of the Zeigarnik Effect being used to draw you back into an unfinished thought pattern. Have you ever noticed that you get a song stuck in your head if you stop listening to it half way through? That’s your brain trying to finish the ‘task’ of completing the song.

Online advertisers and the gaming industry are particularly good at using the effect, knowing that your attention will be caught and you’ll come back to the task or click through until your brain has a resolution. But there are ways that you can dull or stop the effect so that you can switch off at the end of the day, to help you relax, reduce anxiety and even sleep better. You can even harness it in your favour to stop yourself from procrastinating over tasks you just don’t want to get started on.

To combat the evening dread, here are some tips to put the tasks on hold until you can come back to them:

  1. Write a to do list at the end of the day. By making a plan for the tasks you have left outstanding, you can feel more comfortable that you’re in control of them rather than they’re in control of you.
  2. Tackle your most challenging tasks first so that you know that you’ve only got ones you find easier or more enjoyable to do once that’s out of the way.
  3. Check your calendar for the next day each afternoon. This way you’ll know if you need to prepare anything for meetings and plan when you can get things done around meetings so you won’t be worried that you’ve forgotten to prepare for anything come bedtime.

Use the Zeigarnik effect to boost your productivity:

  • If there’s a task or project that you’ve been putting off, just commit to taking the first step or working on it for a short period of half an hour or less. Once the task is in your head, you’ll be encouraged to come back to it to get it finished.
  • When you need to memorise something, instead of repeating it over and over again, review it a few times and interrupt yourself with a break. While you’re focusing on other things, you’ll find yourself mentally drifting back to what you were trying to remember.
  • Apply a two minute task rule. If you think it can be done in two minutes or less, just get it done, don’t add it to your to do list. If it takes such a short amount of time and you don’t do it, you’ll end up spending more time thinking about it because it’s not finished than the task itself would have actually taken.