The Secret To Getting ‘Important’ Things REALLY Done

Year 2018

We are continually bombarded with information every day, mostly which are either irrelevant or garbage. We choose to be distracted by it. Sure, some are incredibly valuable but discovering one entails spending time on social and other platforms — whose metrics are predicated on us spending time on them.

Now, I certainly don’t intend taking any more than 120 seconds of your time — given that we skim through articles anyway. Hence, I’m going to adopt a free-flow style and get to the point.

Without any further ado, the bottom line is this —

If you plan to get any work done, which is of high priority, within 
time constraints or plan to finish an important work, 
try employing the ‘Zeigarnik Effect’.

Umm, what is Zeigarnik Effect and how can you use it? Glad you asked.

Context:

I usually find it helpful to make a checklist of things that need to be done within a certain time frame — be it a day or a week or a month. I’m sure you have a list of things in their order of priority and importance that you would love to finish. But with such amazing distractions from Netflix to Pinterest, WSJ to (Ahem!) Medium, we put-off work until the last moment. This happens to me all the time. And ultimately, the quality of work suffers, at times.

I began to wonder if there is a simple elegant solution to be lazy yet be effective with the task at hand. What if I wanted to check out a video on Ytube yet be satisfied with the work I had on my list? What if there was a way to psychologically game my mind to get back to work, irrespective of any distractions?

Epiphany:

When it comes to psychology (and gratitude), I’m a radical fundamentalist. 

Practising Zen has helped shape my understanding of how the mind works — but not enough to eradicate the gnawing habit of procrastination. Thus, I did what I do in these situations — Dive into The Human Mind to find a solution. And a solution is what I found which I’m going to share in a sec.

*** A Second Passes By***

Solution :

While researching, I accidentally bumped into Bluma Zeigarnik, a Lithuanian psychologist who ‘observed the effect of interruption on memory processing in 1927’. Her findings, during her research, revealed that participants were able to recall details of interrupted tasks 90% better than those that they had been able to complete undisturbed. (For the interested, here is the link of her published findings.)

Hmm interesting! So I put it to test ( in my own way) over a period of 30 days. Outlined are the steps below:

1. Made a Checklist of the Highest Priority Tasks — Not more than 3 per day
2. Subclassified 3 tasks in the order of ‘Motivational’ importance — The one which I’m most pressed and excited to begin NOW.
3. Finish only 10% of the task (as opposed to a single sitting for hours)
4. Leave the task to be done the next day (deliberately putting it off)
5. Break of 60 minutes — I know! Sounds like a lot but hold on..
6. Begin with the second task and follow from Step 3.

Within a couple of days, I found myself with an itch I couldn't satisfactorily scratch. I kept thinking about the unfinished task and had this discomforting desire to get back to it. It felt like an unachieved goal. A sense of broken fulfillment.

Boom! Zeigarnik Effect at play. Which led to some surprising results..

Outcome:

Triggering the Zeigarnik Effect, I gamed my mind into returning back to the task at hand, much faster than my normal recourse. Compounding to it was the fact that the task seemed to be motivating enough to endure the pain on partial completion. This is keeping in mind that I still took my breaks — watching videos and news updates — which significantly reduced to half (from 60 minutes to 30 minutes) over the course of the month.

On the other hands, tasks that were not motivating ( I tested this too) enough didn’t help in fruitful completion.

In a matter of weeks, I have added more to the ‘Priority List’ with a 100% completion rate. My performance has x’ed by order of magnitude, even by embracing escapism as part of the process.

Takeaway:

If you find yourself in the same predicament as I did, try simply ‘walking away’ from the most important task at hand. Take a walk, get coffee, surf the net (or just surf) or listen to a podcast and you will find your mind begging you to get back at it. The important assumption is ensuring that the tasks you choose motivate you. Perhaps doing the laundry might not help. :)

Try it for a week and let me know if employing the Zeigarnik Effect helped you in anyway.

If it does, please share with your network & help others employ this simple yet effective hack to kill procrastination.

**********PS: This article is written employing the Zeigarnik Effect otherwise it would have never seen the light of day. **********