Picture this: You’re in the middle of a new project at work and everything is just flowing.
You’re at the top of your productivity game — coming up with novel ideas and feeling a rush of excitement as you conjure up sentence after sentence with nary a pause. Then all of a sudden a colleague bursts that bubble.
His, “Hey, can we talk about tomorrow’s presentation?” though cheerfully offered, has never come at a worse time. If this were a TV series, we’d call it a cliffhanger — that point of tension where a plot’s left unresolved.
For some reason, for the rest of the day, as you sit through back-to-back meetings and strategize for the coming month, you can’t stop thinking about that unfinished project. It just keeps popping up.
This is the Zeigarnik effect, a phenomenon wherein uncompleted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. Named after Russian psychologist Bluma (Wolfovna) Zeigarnik and first reported in 1927, it can certainly be distracting, but I’ve also found that it’s possible to harness such mental energy to boost productivity.