Best Results Organizing

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

~ William James

Yes, I know I’ve used this quote here before, but it’s an important one, especially at this time of the year.

As I type this post, there’s barely more than a week left in 2024. As we look toward 2025, I can’t help thinking about what I didn’t quite finish this year. (Yes, even professional organizers fall short of our sometimes-lofty goals.)

THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT: WAITERS AND THE CUSTOMERS WHO HAVEN’T PAID

Tasks left un-done scratch at the brain. There’s even a name for it  — the Zeigarnik Effect.

As the theory of this phenomenon goes, people remember tasks that are unfinished or interrupted better than the ones they complete. Initially, psychologist Kurt Lewin recognized that waiters had clearer recollections of the orders of patrons who hadn’t yet paid for their orders. Once everyone paid, the waiters basically wiped their brains and couldn’t recall the details of the orders anymore.

This is why I am always so dubious of Law & Order episodes when the police track down a suspect by credit card order to pump the bartender or waiter for details. Invariably, although paid (and ostensibly tipped), servers seem to still remember all the details. Yet somehow these Manhattan waiters remember not only the patrons’ orders but what their dates looked like and the basics of the conversations they were having? Is the world of Dick Wolf a Zeigarnik-free zone?

But I digress.

The central concept of the Zeigarnik Effect is that once you start a task, there’s a “task-specific tension” created in the brain which keeps the task active. Basically, when you start something but don’t finish it, it’s like it’s still on the burner on the stove, and (assuming you’re not distracted by other things you’ve started), that tension pushes you to work on the task. Get interrupted again? The tension persists. 

Once you actually do finish the work, the tension is relieved. Keeping that continuous tension up — having the task pop to the top of your To-Do list, putting a sticky note on your steering wheel, etc. — keeps the essentials of the task accessible to the part of your brain that says, “Damn, I really have to work on that!”

(Usually, men get the credit for women’s work, but in a striking rarity, the effect is named not for Lewin, but for Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who continued the line of research of her friend and mentor, Lewin.)

The Zeigarnik Effect keeps unfinished tasks sticky in the brain and work in several ways to get you across the finish line. Unfinished tasks can prompt you to finish them by acting on your brain in the following capacities. They:

• Serve as Mental Reminders — You naturally keep remembering things you started but haven’t finished doing. The unfinished tasks stay top-of-mind, prompting your brain to say, “Hey, you got interrupted (or got bored and wandered away) but this thing is still here! Don’t forget about it!”

Wooden Brown Scrabble Tiles Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels

• Boost Motivation — The next time you curse your brain for reminding you of an unfinished tasks, give yourself a little slack. This mental tension can increase your drive and magnify your focus to resolve those icky, lingering tasks. Sometimes, that motivation may just be, “Dang, I don’t want to be reminded of this again!” but that’s motivation in its own right.
• Build Momentum — My clients hear me say this all the time, but “Small victories breed success.” Even — and sometimes especially — when you take action on the tiniest of unfinished tasks, it can create a domino effect. Have you ever noticed that when you knock something off your list, particularly something that’s been hanging out there a little too long, it gives you the push to tackle more and larger tasks?
• Give You the Satisfaction of Closure — That “whoohoo!” you get from finishing something? It can make you feel like a bit of a superhero. It can work magic. That relief you get when something is no longer hanging over you frees up mental energy so you can set (and tackle) new goals.

Sidebar on the Zeigarnik Effect and ADHD

Of course, the Zeigarnik Effect is just a typical psychological phenomenon and may not hold up under all circumstances. For example, if you’re undergoing a lot of stress, whether at work, or due to illness, or an upheaval in your relationship, an unfinished task that has nothing tangible or digital bringing your attention back to it may just, in effect, escape your brain and fall out of your ears. 

When I started to write this post, I wondered whether anyone had researched the relationship between the Zeigarnik Effect and the experiences of individuals with ADHD. They have, but it turns out some of my initial instincts were wrong.

Since the Zeigarnik Effect says that that people remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones, I figured that people with ADHD might have so many simultaneous thoughts and unfinished tasks that newer unfinished tasks would push older ones off the burner. Nope. Or at least, not always.

Actually, the research shows that there’s sometimes a heightened sense of unfinished task recall in individuals with ADHD. Even with all my professional work with organizing clients who have ADHD, I still figured they’d forget more of their unfinished tasks. In actuality, the research shows that the brains of people with ADHD often keep unfinished tasks active, which has just as problematic an effect as forgetting — it increases mental clutter.

So, it’s a good news/bad news situation. The Zeigarnik Effect isn’t making people with ADHD forget their not-yet-completed tasks; it’s just filling their brains with a lot of blinking lights about those tasks. And that “mental tension” that’s supposed to be good for remembering creates real, human tension (that is, stress), that hurts productivity. Ouch.

Luckily, research also indicates that planning is a particularly effective mitigation strategy for reducing the stressful aspects of the “mental tension” of the Zeigarnik Effect. According to Harnessing Two Horsemen of Productivity Havoc, the kind of detailed planning we talk about here at Paper Doll HQ all the time really helps. 

Florida State University researchers found that when people with ADHD were allowed to create their own super-specific plans for completing their unfinished projects, the distracting Zeigarnik-esque thoughts went poof! As we talk about here all the time, planning is powerful; it frees up your mental resources and quiets all those Zeigarnik beeps and boops in your brain reminding you of what needs to get done.

But there’s a hitch. I suspect it works for people for ADHD much like it works for those of us without ADHD (especially when we’re overwhelmed), which goes back to why we’ve got unfinished business at the end of the year. 

The Zeigarnik Effect has our brains full of stuff we have yet to finish. So we look at when the thing has to be completed, and think, “Aha, I’ll make a plan to attack it.” The problem is that, too often, we either see no deadline (so we don’t feel any pressure to complete a task) or we see a deadline far on the horizon — perhaps several weeks out — and our brain convinces us that it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, we have plenty of time, and we procrastinate. Oops.

So, be sure to embrace the advice in Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination when planning your attack on whatever is incomplete.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t entirely wrong about ADHD and forgetting. In one study on the impact on prospective memory — that is, the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future — researchers looked at activity-based prospective memory in people with ADHD found that the Zeigarnik Effect can influence how unfinished tasks or “intentions” remain active in memory.

Their findings suggests that the ADHD brain sometimes puts uncompleted tasks in a state of “suspended activation,” which can adversely impact task recall and completion upon waking up. (This points to the idea that if your unfinished task is going to remain unfinished overnight, you’re going to need more support than if you just have to remember to take the pot off the stove in the next five minutes.)

For what it’s worth, whether you have ADHD or not, research shows that intentionally starting a task, even for the briefest bit of time, can increase the likelihood of returning to the task again and completing it.  

ZEIGARNIK YOURSELF INTO FINISHING THE LINGERING TASKS

We can’t finish everything.

Finish Line Photo by RUN 4 FFWPU

I know, that’s a shocking comment on someone who comes here each week to tell you how to organize and be productive, but it’s the truth. It’s why I don’t believe in Inbox: Zero, or Laundry Basket: Zero, or any other Task:Zero mentality.

Seriously, the email, like the laundry, keeps coming. Unless your family members are all about to become nudists, the laundry will always be piling up, and while you can try to keep up with it, like all those inbound emails, when it comes down to it, email and laundry aren’t why you are here on this planet.

Finish what you can, and what you must, and get on living your life. The goal is to have more time to focus on what matters most to you, not to have the emptiest in-boxes.

As we head into the final week of the year, I encourage you to finish up as many of the small, hanging-on tasks you can, just so you can go into the new year unencumbered and more revved up for the tasks and projects about which you feel passionate.

• Make a list — Santa isn’t the only one who is busy making lists and checking them twice. Grab a pad of paper or your phone (because you’ll want to be mobile) and walk around your house (and if applicable, your office) and make a list of all of your unfinished tasks and projects. The Zeigarnik Effect means that a bunch of these tasks are in your brain already, or at the periphery of your focused thought, but some tasks may have edged others off the front burners. Write them all down.

• Delete what doesn’t matter anymore — I know, this feels like failure. But it’s not. Before you can really prioritize what matters, you have to let go of the things that really don’t matter anymore. It doesn’t mean those things never mattered (though they might not have), just that dragging them around with you is doing yourself a disservice.

If it’s been three months since your friend’s birthday, give up the belief that you’re going to time-travel back and send her the perfect card. Forgive yourself (as she’d forgive you) and send her a New Year’s card with all the good gossip about why your life has you so frazzled. You remembered her birthday is September 20th. You just forgot that September 20th was September 20th when September 20th came around. 

If there was a grant you were going to apply for, but the deadline has passed, or a work opportunity that you never quite got things together to pursue, forgive yourself and move on. The universe will present new opportunities. Not all unfinished tasks have to be finished. Focus on the ones that shine a light on what fits your values and goals in your life and at work.

• Break down the list into smaller component pieces. — You’ve heard this before: projects are not tasks. You can’t DO a project. Divide every item on your list into small, actionable tasks. This will reduce your sense of overwhelm, making it easier to start…and then to finish.

• Identify your priorities — Let’s face it, some lingering tasks are more vital than others, and the amount of time they take to accomplish isn’t always the key factor.

There are big things you may not have finished. There are small ones, too. Spend one 25-minute Pomodoro to see how they rank. It’s OK to revise your priorities. You don’t have to create a list of 72 ranked items, but get a highlighter and pick out what will give you the most bang for your buck.

If you started it and still value it, see the next bullet. If you didn’t tackle it at all but want to keep it on your list, dig a little deeper and define what the obstacles have been so you can tackle the tasks with awareness.

What are the most important ones to start so you can finish? Do those first!

• Commit to a time and place for taking action — Someday is not a day on the calendar. If you don’t schedule when you’re going to work on a task, you’re not going to start working on that task.

This is where time blocking comes in handy. You don’t have to schedule working on that 2024 bookkeeping task for 3:15 p.m. this Thursday. But if you have a block for doing financial tasks every Thursday afternoon, it’ll be easy to slot that bookkeeping into a cozy spot on your schedule. Revisit my past posts on time blocking to get thinking about the kinds of blocks you need to tackle your overhanging tasks:

Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity

Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done

Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022

Highlights from the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

I have previously written a lot about activation energy and its importance in getting you over the hump when motivation isn’t doing the trick. William James had a nifty quote about this, too:

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

We can’t wait to be inspired. Sometimes, we just have to take out the trash, replace the light bulb, or call to complain about a mistake on the bill, whether we feel like it or not. But it’s easier to do if there’s a slot on the calendar for household care or dealing with problems.

• Celebrate every win — There’s a reason why so many of us write down things we’ve already done on our task list for the day, just so we can check them off. Having done something, and particularly something that’s been hanging over us for a while, is an accomplishment.

Acknowledge each and every completed task. It will reinforce your sense of satisfaction and motivate you to keep taking action. Nobody is saying you have to shout it from the rafters (though that would be cool), but perhaps go out for a nice meal to celebrate and see if you can spot a server doing a great job remembering all the orders.

Once you have it on your schedule, give some thought to where you’ll work on this task. Find the right environment, or create a virtual one to get you in the mood. I’m already tickled to use this 12-hour Gilmore Girls-themed video so I can finish my tasks at Luke’s Diner in Stars Hollow.

 
You might prefer a Yule Log video like the ones that used to run on television on Christmas Day. Youtube is full of them, and there’s even a playlist of the best. But if you’d like to feel like someone is cozily keeping you company while you check items off your list, perhaps Nick Offerman’s ten-hour Yule Log might be the way to go.

FINISHING UP

In James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter from Thursday, November 14, 2024, I was introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poem Forever – is composed of Nows – (690), on the power of the moment.

Take advantage of the upcoming moments in the quiet lull between now and the end of the year. Use these moments to get started. You don’t have to DO THE THING, but you can plan to do the thing.

You don’t have to rebalance your financial portfolio to make your retirement more accessible. But you can call and make an appointment with your financial planner, or with a certified financial planner if you don’t already have one. (And hey, my colleagues at Eddy & Schein Group have even put together some guidance on Wrapping Up Year-End Personal Financial Affairs regarding with whom you should be speaking, and about what, in terms of your money life.)

Perhaps your hanging-on task is spending down your flexible spending account (FSA). If your employer permits it, you can carry over up to $640 of unused funds from 2024 into 2025, but why not get your goodies, now? You set aside money, pre-tax, for healthcare stuff; don’t let it go to waste because you forgot to check what you could buy. Look up how much you’ve got left in your account, and then Google your options. For example, Yahoo Tech has 35 Surprising Things You Can Buy with Your FSA Money. (Seriously, did you know you could buy an Oura ring with your FSA?)

You were supposed to pick a new dentist or doctor or schedule that mammogram but just never found the time? OK, don’t kick yourself. But look at your insurance website or app to find out who is in-network, and schedule. (Well, yes, you’ll then sit on hold for a bit before you get to sync up your nifty 2025 calendar with a provider’s schedule. But it’s not going to take as much time as learning calculus. For what it’s worth, I learned just enough to pass the class in college and then, Zeigarnik-style, let all that unnecessary knowledge fall out of my head. You will not be shocked to know that it’s all been OK.)

Go through the unanswered emails in your inbox and send replies, even if the reply just says, “The year got away from me, but I appreciate you contacting me about [whatever], and if it’s still something you want to discuss, let’s get on each other’s calendar’s for late January.” Or you can say “nope, but thanks anyway.” Whatever you do, you’ll feel like you moved forward.

Make a list, chuck the tasks that no longer really matter, pick the ones that will be most satisfying (emotionally, financially, or practically) to complete, schedule time to do them, and give yourself a resounding “HUZZAH!” And if you could use a little accountability, feel free to share in the comments section: what overhanging task might you complete in the next week?