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This curious effect was first described by Bliuma Zeigárnik, a Lithuanian-born psychologist in her doctoral thesis in the 1920s. Zeigarnik is said to have noticed this effect while watching restaurant waiters work. The waiters seemed to remember complex orders that allowed them to offer the correct combination of foods to the tables, yet such information quickly vanished when the food was delivered. The psychologist observed that uncompleted orders seemed to stay in the waiters' minds until they were finally completed, at which point they evaporated from their memory..
Following this observation, Zeigarnik returned to the laboratory to test a theory about what was happening. He asked some participants to perform about twenty small simple tasks in the laboratory, such as solving puzzles and a string of beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except for a few occasions, participants were interrupted in the middle of the task. They were then asked what activities they most agreed to do. It found that people were twice as likely to remember tasks during which they had been interrupted than those they had completed..
Almost sixty years later, Kenneth McGraw and his colleagues conducted another experiment on the Zeigarnik effect (McGraw et al., 1982). In it the participants had to do a very complicated puzzle; but the task was interrupted before either of them could solve it and they were informed that the test was finished. Despite this, almost 90% of the participants decided to continue working on the puzzle anyway, until it was finished..
And, if you look around you, you can find the Zeigarnik effect practically everywhere. It is used especially in the media and advertising. Have you ever wondered why melodramas work so well or why you can't stop watching that series on TV (just one more episode ...)?
Although it may not seem like it to you, the Zeigarnik effect can actually be used to positively improve productivity at work.
When we cannot successfully complete a certain task, we experience intrusive thoughts about it, and this effect provides the key to productivity, which is based on working during periods of time in which we focus on a single task, avoiding multitasking and interruptions. Getting to finish a task gives us peace of mind, while intrusive thoughts about a pending task are synonymous with anxiety.
Multitasking forces us to divert our attention from one task to another (basically making the new task interrupt the previous one and so on), in these cases, your brain will not allow you to fully concentrate on the new task, since they have left the previous one incomplete. This is why productivity techniques such as the Pomodoro Technique work so well. Of course, another key element is the adaptation of the duration as required in each job; some tasks will require a longer focused work period than others.
Since we are apparently less likely to procrastinate once we start them, then where does the problem lie? Well, start doing homework. It all depends on what kind of procrastinator you are. If you are a person who easily tends to postpone obligations, especially when you think you are facing a big project, then the best strategy you can carry out is never to start with the “hardest” part of the project. Start with what seems most manageable for you at the time. This way you will be more likely to finish the task simply because you started it. The Zeigarnik effect shows us that the key to overcoming procrastination is to start somewhere ... at any point.
A study published in the Journal of Personality in 2006 showed that the Zeigarnik effect is undermined by the expectation of reward. In this study, a group of participants was put to work on a task, interrupting them before they could finish it. While one part of the participants was told that they would receive an amount of money for participating in the study, the other part was told nothing. The result was that 86% of the subjects who were not going to receive the reward chose to return to the task anyway after they were interrupted, while only 58% of the subjects who were waiting for the reward returned to the task. As the study ended and the participants were given the reward, they found no reason to return to the task. What's more, the subjects who were waiting for the reward actually spent less time on the task once they returned to it, those who returned.
Now compare this to an 8 hour work day. The end of the work day is the same as the interruption in the study: once the 8 hours are finished, the task is interrupted as well. Also, we know that we have already earned pay for such work. In other words, working 8 hours a day actually makes us detach ourselves from our work in some way ...
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