The Zeigarnik Effect: How Unfinished Tasks Paralyze Us
People, much like animals, react painfully to unfinished tasks and are willing to go to great lengths to get rid of them. Imagine you’re expecting guests in the evening. You’ve tidied up your home, put away scattered items, planned entertainment, prepared food, and bought drinks. Everything is ready, and there’s still an hour before your guests arrive. It seems like the perfect time to do something else, but paradoxically, most people don’t perceive this time as free. You’re already “busy”—you’re hosting a party, even if it hasn’t started yet. That hour is already reserved in your mind, so you can’t use it for another task. Instead, you spend the time intensely waiting for your guests. Some people can’t even read a book in this situation and keep checking the clock, wishing the event would finally begin. This is a simple demonstration of fixation, as described in André Kukla’s book “Mental Traps.”
The stakes get higher when it comes to studying or work. When preparing for exams or planning work tasks, an hour is a huge amount of time. As Maxim Dorofeev wrote in “Jedi Techniques,” a small meeting scheduled in the middle of the day can easily ruin the whole day for some people, as they can’t get anything serious done either before or after it. Before the meeting, you need to fill the time somehow, since the upcoming event is nerve-wracking (the fixation effect), and afterward, it feels too late to start anything useful because you “need more time” (inefficient thinking that says serious work can only be done in large blocks). As a result, the day is lost, even though there’s no logical explanation for it.
Some people, rarely going on vacation or business trips, start preparing days in advance and postpone all tasks until after they return, since they’re already “busy,” almost gone. Others make long to-do lists, hoping it will discipline them, but in reality, the anxiety from each unfinished item accumulates until the pressure turns them into a bundle of nerves. All these surprising reactions stem from how we perceive unfinished business.
The History Behind the Effect
Humans aren’t the only creatures that behave illogically when faced with unfinished tasks. Animals exhibit what’s called “displaced activity.” Researchers found that if an animal can’t start or finish an action, or faces a conflict of motivations (for example, two wild dogs meet at the border of their territories and don’t know whether to attack or flee), they start performing meaningless substitute actions, like spinning in circles, grooming, or digging holes.
For humans, a conflict between important tasks or fear of making a decision leads to familiar procrastination—putting things off or replacing them with other activities like writing, scrolling social media, baking, or working out. But the fixation effect is specifically the inadequate behavior that arises when you can’t finish what you started. When you schedule a meeting, you mentally mark it as a task that needs to be completed—you’ve “started” it, but can’t finish or even begin to finish it right away, which causes anxiety. You’re not actually doing anything, but the waiting is exhausting. The tension is especially strong if the task is stretched out over time—like a series of dentist appointments or projects that depend on others (many people spend half a day waiting for a reply, unable to focus on anything else).
The behavior of people facing unfinished tasks was studied by Kurt Lewin and his team, including Maria Ovsyankina, Bluma Zeigarnik, Vera Mahler, and others. Their experiments showed that people have significant problems with unfinished tasks—even completely meaningless ones. That’s why many project managers strive to finish even hopeless or unprofitable projects instead of abandoning them; unfinished business creates inner dissatisfaction.
Lewin’s assistant, Maria Ovsyankina, conducted a simple experiment: she gave adults a boring, pointless task—assembling a figure from cut-out pieces. When the participant was halfway done, she interrupted them and asked them to do a second, unrelated task, covering the unfinished figure with a newspaper. After finishing the second task, 86% of participants wanted to return to the first interrupted task and complete it. The inability to do so increased their heart rate and caused other physiological effects. Ovsyankina changed the tasks, but the results were the same. Lewin was amazed: “Why do adults want to return to such a silly task as assembling figures? There’s no interest or reward!” He concluded that people have a need to finish any task, even a meaningless one. So, the many proverbs about finishing what you start aren’t just calls to virtue—they reflect our painful relationship with unfinished business.
Additionally, Bluma Zeigarnik discovered what’s now called the “Zeigarnik Effect.” Her experiments showed that people remember unfinished tasks much better than completed ones. Once we finish something, we quickly lose interest, but unfinished tasks linger in our memory much longer. Not only do we suffer from unfinished business, but we also can’t get it out of our heads. This explains why people finish reading bad books even when they don’t enjoy them. You can break the cycle by simply stopping. In his book “Intention, Will, and Need,” Lewin gives an example: “Someone started reading a silly newspaper novel but didn’t finish it. That novel may haunt them for years.”
How to Cope with Unfinished Tasks
Kurt Lewin, Vera Mahler, and other researchers tried to find ways to overcome the anxiety and suffering caused by unfinished tasks. In his book, Lewin included a chapter on “Substitute Completion,” describing how the tension from an unfinished task can be relieved by doing something similar. For example, interrupted drawing or storytelling stops bothering a person if they start drawing something else or telling a story in a different way. Lewin also noted the effectiveness of “surrogate completion,” where you delegate the task to someone else (and mentally check it off as “done”), or even just simulate doing it. For example, you note that you need to buy something, but instead of actually buying it, you go to the store, check it off your list, and that soothes your nerves. Interestingly, even watching someone else work on a similar task or finish it can create a sense of relief.
It’s important for modern people to realize that they’ll always have unfinished business, and that’s normal. In fact, some things should be left unfinished because they’re no longer relevant or didn’t live up to expectations. Many people feel guilty or uncomfortable remembering how they started playing the harmonica or studying Renaissance art and then quit. If a hobby doesn’t meet your expectations, there’s no need to torture yourself just to “finish what you started.”
Highlighting items in red on your to-do list may create panic, but it won’t help you finish tasks faster (except maybe at first, before you burn out or start procrastinating). This is especially true for long-term projects—learning a new language or professional field, creating your own games, comics, courses, or managing large-scale projects.
In these cases, you’ll have to live under the shadow of an unfinished project for a long time. Stuck and overwhelmed by what’s left undone, you may find yourself “in the process” even while lying on the couch—unable to rest, unable to do anything useful, and yet feeling tense. What helps is breaking the project into clear intermediate steps; reaching each one brings relief and a sense of progress.
It’s important to realize that many important tasks can be accomplished in 20–30 minute chunks, and you don’t have to wait for a long, uninterrupted block of time. Having a couple of hours without distractions is a luxury. But if you do something for half an hour a day, by the end of the week you’ll have accumulated a significant amount of time. Chances are, by using these “time scraps,” you’ll get a lot done while waiting for guests, meetings, or feedback on your work.
Maxim Dorofeev writes that because of the fixation effect, you won’t take the opportunity to do something else (“Oh, I can’t, I’m studying English/expecting guests/preparing for a meeting—let me just finish…”), and then you’ll suffer from a lack of time. Unfortunately, you can’t completely get rid of the inner tension, but you can make things easier by consciously switching to similar tasks and catching yourself in the act of pointless waiting.