[2021-03-25] Zeigarnik effect
This morning, I discovered a small puddle of hair oil on my vanity. I grabbed a cleaning wipe to pick up the mess. The oil gone and the bottle wiped and put away, I looked at the rest of the vanity and decided that it needed to be refreshed as well. Before I knew it, I had washed the entire vanity and the sink.
This is a common experience for me. Once I start a project—whether cleaning a vanity, writing a blog post, or completing income tax forms—I'm more likely to finish the project than if I haven't begun it at all.
And I'm not alone. The desire to complete a task once begun is known as the Zeigarnik effect and is well explained in a two-minute video on The Science of Productivity. The narrator states that,
Before starting, our brain visualizes the hardest parts to come, and instead tries to simulate real work by focusing on small mindless tasks. Luckily there’s a construct of the mind known as the Zeigarnik effect, which compels humans to finish a task that they’ve already started. The Zeigarnik effect shows that when we don’t finish a task, we experience discomfort and intrusive thoughts about it.
Most of us are daunted by a task before we begin. A little voice inside us says, "This will be so hard, and it will take so long." But once we start, a new voice takes over: "See, this isn't so bad; now just get it done."
This phenomenon is similar to what I described in Put on your shoes. Just putting on our shoes and getting out the door is often a first action that will be followed by subsequent actions.
When I'm struggling to start a project, I'll tell myself, "just get started." For example, I'll download the income tax software and enter basic information. Once that step is done, I feel like Scrooge being visited by the Ghost of Getting Things Done.
It's also possible to trigger the Zeigarnik effect in someone else. When I became an Assistant Deputy Minister, I had to take a series of online courses. My executive assistant did everything she could to help: she registered me for the courses; she added them as tasks on my homework list; she booked time in my calendar to do them during office hours. But the real difference came when she said, "how 'bout we get one of those courses started?" Having me actually start the training made all the difference. I finished my first online course that day and the remaining courses the following weekend.
Similarly, some years ago, a colleague and I were asked to develop a holiday message for the Deputy Minister. We spent a few hours drafting an email that we thought would sound right coming from him. But when we saw the final product, it didn't look much like our draft, reflecting at best half of what we had written. I remarked to his chief of staff, "I guess what we developed wasn't what he was looking for." But she insisted that it had been very helpful to the Deputy.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I've since come to recognize the value of providing a first draft to a boss. It can be tremendously helpful in triggering the Zeigarnik effect, and often assists the boss in figuring out what they want or don't want by providing a starting point. That doesn’t mean that we should produce a poor first draft because the boss will change it anyway. It simply means, as Mary Poppins said, that "well begun is half done." So if you want to nudge someone toward starting a task, offer to get the ball rolling.
The next time you have a daunting task to complete, just get started. I hadn't intended to wash the vanity this morning, as I was feeling nauseated at the time, but cleaning that one spot triggered the Zeigarnik effect and I just kept going.
