Another interesting way to interpret this is that perhaps the Zeigarnik effect is a good description of the "psychological" cost of unpaid technical debt. For instance, during any project at my job I run into at least 5 things -- bugs, code improvements, components I could build to make this task easier -- and I jot them down. When I finish, I move on to the next feature, and that list grows to 10, then 15, then 30... the anxiety that "man I really need to fix this shitty codebase" actually affects me psychologically in tangible ways, and IMO is one of the under-talked about aspects of ignoring technical and design debt.
What the article doesn't mention is to use this effect as a tactic to get going in the morning: Plan your day so that you stop in the middle of an interesting task at the end of the day. I find it's effortless for me to pick it up the next morning.
Given that the site is so engineered to make me click, share, and otherwise engage, I have a hard time trusting the content. Is it written for accuracy? Or for virality?
I definitely notice that effect personally. The problem is, I often find myself easily distracted (e.g. opening HN!) when faced with a hard problem or a "mental wall". It really hinders my ability to finish tasks sometimes. What do you do to help you focus on tasks, specifically hard ones?
Related, I like to leave non-working code or tests at the end of a day so I can easily find where I left off. For some reason when I try to build / test and the errors pop up I'm able to immediately pick up where I left off. A combination of a bookmark and the Zeigarnik Effect I guess?
This probably explains "earworms" (songs that get stuck in your head) as well. Usually the hook that repeats doesn't have a musical resolution, and/or you can't remember how the song ends. Just hearing or imagining a single chord that sounds final can help get rid of them.
Great article, except for the last paragraph. The duration that you work has little to do with your reward structure. If you had a <i>one</i> hour workday, at any time of your choosing, but were then paid cash afterwards, you'd still nullify the effect.<p>If anything, I think the effect is an indictment of hourly wages, as opposed to salary or some other outcome-based compensation.
I waited tables the whole time I was in college and I can say that these observations are 100% true.<p>Sometimes I even have nightmares about bad experiences I had.
>The waiters seemed to remember complex orders that allowed them to deliver the right combination of food to the tables, yet the information vanished as the food was delivered.<p>That could use some elaboration. If she was just watching them, how did she know the information vanished?
For those who understand German, you can read it up on wikipedia:<p><a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik-Effekt" rel="nofollow">http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik-Effekt</a>