We all have days when we simply can’t get the ball rolling when it comes to work. People who have stay-at-home jobs know this best. You maybe even have that forever-lingering task on your to-do list that you simply can’t finish. And the reason? You simply haven’t even started.
If all this sounds way too familiar, you came to the right place.
Postponing Is Never The Answer
Yes, some tasks are just so boring, tedious and require a decent amount of time to complete, but the more you delay it the harder the task becomes. The trick is rather simple, actually:
You need to start in order to finish it!
This is when the Zeigarnik Effect comes in. This effect is somewhat similar to the snowball effect – all you need to do is start doing it and this will make you feel that niggling urge to complete the damn task.
Why? Because once you start it, you are practically half way done and the motivation will only rise from that point onward.
The Zeigarnik Effect
This interesting phenomenon of human psyche was discovered back in 1920s by Bluma Zeigarnik. Bluma based her research on the fact that people tend to have a better memory for tasks that they have not yet completed.
Zeigarnik’s experiment mirrored in her giving the participants puzzles to complete but interrupted them half way through completing some of the tasks. She found that participants were actually twice as good at remembering the tasks during which she interrupted them (the tasks that weren’t finished yet) compared to the puzzles they were allowed to complete.
The whole idea started when Zeigarnik’s professor Kurt Lewin noticed that waiters were much better at remembering their open orders than the details of their completed orders.
It appears that once we get something out of the way (like tests, tasks, orders) we tend to erase these from our memory almost completely. Talking about the uselessness of schools, right?