Unfinished business, and why your brain won’t let it go

How to use the Zeigarnik effect to your advantage

Are you normal, or does it feel like you always have a thousand unfinished tasks bouncing around in your head, every day, all the time? Trim the hedges. Call your family. Don’t forget your niece’s birthday present. Write that report for your boss. Also, you need more yogurt.

Well it’s not you. It’s your brain.

Today, let’s talk about the Zeigarnik effect. I’ve been wrestling with it all month, so this post may be just as much for me as it is for anyone else.

And besides, “the Zeigarnik effect” is really fun to say and it illustrates an aspect of how our brains work that has a deep—but sometimes subtle—effect on our behavior.

Waiters, Soviet psychologists, and clay figurines

In a nutshell: the Zeigarnik effect is a cognitive bias that causes unfinished tasks to occupy more mental real estate than completed ones.

It’s what makes trying to remember to get yogurt and write your boss’s report so painful.

The effect was first documented by Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s. According to the—likely apocryphal, but fun to tell anyway—story, Zeigarnik noticed that waiters had an uncanny ability to remember complex orders, until they served them. Once an order was delivered, the details seemed to evaporate from their…