The Weight of Unfinished Tasks
Have you ever had so many tabs open in your browser that your computer slowed down?
Well, the same thing happens with our brains.
Unfinished tasks keep “running” in the background of our minds!
This is known as the Zeigarnik Effect, the power that unfinished tasks have to occupy a space in our memory.
Unfinished tasks create a cognitive burden, weigh more on our minds, and are more easily remembered than completed tasks.
Zeigarnik Effect
The effect was first described by Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927, while she was in a busy restaurant in Vienna. She noticed that waiters had a better memory for unpaid bills than for paid ones.
In other words, they remembered unfinished orders better than finished ones.
As soon as a customer paid the bill, the waiters had difficulty remembering the exact details of the orders. But why?
Because our brains are programmed to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. It’s like a to-do list; when you complete a task, our brain marks it as completed and moves on to the next one on the list.
But that also means that the more unfinished tasks we have, the more we use the “resources” of our brain to keep…
