Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

“Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.”

Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.

A good way to appreciate the Zeigarnik effect is to listen to a randomly chosen song and shut it off halfway through. The song is then likely to run through your mind on its own, at odd intervals. If you get to the end of the song, the mind checks it off, so to speak.

Once again, making a plan made a difference. Those who’d written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel—unless they’d made a specific plan to complete the task, in which case they reported relatively little mind wandering and scored quite well on the reading comprehension test. Even though they hadn’t finished the task or made any palpable progress, the simple act of making a plan had cleared their minds and eliminated the Zeigarnik effect. But the Zeigarnik effect remained for the students without a plan. Their thoughts wandered from the novel to their undone tasks, and afterward they scored worse on the comprehension test.

So it turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done.

Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.

That’s how Allen’s system deals with the problem that he calls monkey mind. If, like his typical client, you’ve got at least 150 items on your to-do list, the Zeigarnik effect could leave you leaping from task to task, and it won’t be sedated by vague good intentions. If you’ve got a memo that has to be read before a meeting Thursday morning, the unconscious wants to know exactly what needs to be done next, and under what circumstances. But once you make that plan—once you put the meeting memo in the tickler file for Wednesday, once you specify the very next action to be taken on the project—you can relax. You don’t have to finish the job right away. You’ve still got 150 things on the to-do list, but for the moment the monkey is still, and the water is calm.