Understand the Zeigarnik effect and work efficiently
Published
10/2024 by Team buildData
We’ve all been there: you’re on your way to work in the morning, listening to a good song on the radio, when you’re interrupted by a phone call. Later, it feels like the song is stuck in your head all day. The same applies to unfinished tasks! They are constantly nagging away at our minds. Read on to find out what causes this and how to stop it:
It is caused by the so-called Zeigarnik effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who completed her doctorate at Humboldt University under Professor Kurt Levin in the 1920s.
Zeigarnik undertook various studies to determine whether there was a universal law behind the fact that unfinished tasks and unachieved goals keep coming back to us, while completed processes no longer occur to us.
Numerous other psychologists subsequently studied the research and results. Some believed that the earwigs were an unfortunate by-product of a basically very useful function, namely the complete completion of tasks. This led to various theories about how the Zeigarnik effect works.
The best explanation of the Zeigarnik effect comes from an experiment by E. J. Masicampo.
In this experiment, students were asked to write down all the tasks they had to complete in relation to their most important exam of the semester. The students in the control group were also asked to create a study plan. After that, all students had to solve a task.
And it happened as expected. The students who had not set up a learning plan but had only written down the tasks achieved worse results than the students in the control group. Apparently, their thoughts revolved more around the upcoming exam and the tasks to be completed for it. The students in the control group who had set up a specific learning plan were able to concentrate. They apparently had a clear mind.
In further experiments, the plan always made the difference. If the test subjects did not have a concrete plan, the unfinished and sometimes not even started tasks ran through their heads. They were less able to concentrate than the test subjects with a plan.
The Zeigarnik effect is therefore not a subconscious voice constantly reminding us of unfinished tasks, but rather an invitation to our conscious mind to make a specific plan. Once the plan has been made, the subconscious mind is at rest.
So, to avoid hectically jumping between the tasks on our to-do list and consequently getting nothing done, we should also set up a work plan with priorities. And very important: to achieve our big goals, the work steps should always be divided into stages and the next step should always be defined very clearly.
