Would you rather spend 90% of your life thinking about groceries and other trivial things or about what matter most to you? This is a deceptively trivial question. While most of use would give the same answer, our daily lives are often the exact opposite. Bluma Zeigarnik's accidental discovery of the effect shed some light on how our memory works: Unfinished business and open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory, regardless of their importance, until they are taken care of. Like with many great discoveries, serendipity had its part to play. While there is some debate as to what exactly happened on the day the effect was discovered, all versions involve Zeigarnik and a waiter. >"There is a story related to Zeigarnik's experiment. Lewin and his friends were in a restaurant in Berlin, in the sort of prolonged conversation which always surrounded Lewin. It was a long time since they had ordered and the waiter hovered in the distance. Lewin called him over, asked what he owed, was told instantly and paid, but the conversation went on. Presently Lewin had an insight. He called the waiter back and asked him how much he had been paid. The waiter no longer knew". (Boring 1957, p.734). And here's another variation, written exactly sixty years apart. >"Here, we have to thank Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik for her insight and observational skills. The story goes that she went for lunch with her colleagues and was very impressed by the waiter's ability to remember correctly who ordered what without the need to write anything down. It is said that she had to go back to the restaurant to get the jacket she left there. Much to her surprise, the waiter she admired just minutes ago for his great memory didn't even recognise her. Questioned about what seemed to her a contradiction, he explained that all the waiters had no problem remembering the orders and matching them with the guests at the table. But the very second diners left the restaurant, the waiters all forgot them completely and focused on the next group." (Ahrens 2017, p.67) So, unfinished business stays at the surface of our attention. But our attention isn't infinite. In fact, there is a strong consensus among psychologists around a maximum of about seven things that we can hold in our head at the same time (Miller 1956). Combine that with the fact that at any moment we tend to have at least a hundred semi-urgent mostly menial things that need to be taken care of, and the result is simple: Your bandwidth is hijacked by garbage. So many things demand our attention that we tend to forget what’s actually important because the things that matter typically don’t beg for attention. Those competing thoughts and priorities make it anywhere from hard to impossible to get anything done if we don't address the issue at its core. For a long time, trying to willpower my way through this felt a lot like competing in a marathon while running in water when others are running on the ground. Not the best experience. Fortunately, Zeigarnik's follow-up research after her discovery also shows that to free short-term memory from the noise of open tasks we don't actually need to finish them. We only need to process them in such a way we are convinced they will be taken care of. Writing them down in an organized fashion is enough so that nagging thoughts aren't nagging anymore. This works much like Dumbledore's pensieve in Harry Potter. By maintaining an orderly to-do list, we are able to free our mind from the mundane stuff and reclaim our attention and focus for the things that matter. Discussing what's an orderly to-do list (or project management system if you prefer fancy words) is beyond the scope of this article. I'll just say that it needs to be simple and centralized. Post-its all over the place don't work, because you have to remember what the post-its are and where they are. There are many unproductive ways to organize ourselves, and _feeling_ organized because you are taking steps to get on top of things doesn't mean you are. I've been there. If you want to dig this further, [[Getting Things Done by David Allen|Getting Things Done]] by David Allen is a solid resource to get you started. One of the traps it's easy to fall into once you start to _be_ organized is to try and put everything under control. Looking at people like Tiago Forte sends shivers down my spine. Not everything in your life deserves to be trapped in a Notion page. Now that you've got some bandwidth on your hands and you're not thinking of groceries while kissing your loved one, or distracted by that email your boss sent you that day while you're playing guitar, things are much better. We can, however, take this one step further and reverse the process. What if you were thinking about your loved one while doing the groceries? Reviewing your math lessons while in the shower? Play the piano in your head while doomscrolling your inbox on Monday? So instead of trying to get everything under control, why not leverage the fact open tasks tend to stay there in the background of our attention? After all, some things _are_ worthy of your constant attention, and many things that we do don't require our full attention. Deliberately keeping important matters open and unfinished will help you learn and make progress where it matters. Richard Feynman famously maintained a list of his twelve current favorite problems so that his mind knew where to wander and so that he could test new information against them. Such questions included _"What is the unifying principle underlying light, radio, magnetism, and electricity?"_ and _"How can I accurately keep track of time in my head?"_. For this to work, however, we need to have this space in the first place. Another appealing trap is to optimize our time and listen to podcasts while walking down the street or doing the groceries. Those menial tasks don't require our full attention, so this seemingly makes sense. First, this is problematic, because those new activities will contribute to [[Attention Residue|attention residue]], building up the list of open tasks and unfinished business. Second, activities that do not require our full attention are precisely where intuition is born. The mind is free to wander towards whatever feels nagging, because it's the easiest thing to do. Now that you've prepped yourself to be nagged by important matters, it would be a pity to throw it all away. We can let our mind breathe during ordinary moments like driving the car or grocery shopping, as to allow meaningful questions and their answers to appear when our mind has the space it needs to wander away. > "If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music." > ([[The Bed of Procrustes - Nassim Nicholas Taleb|Taleb, 2010]]) Beyond the moments that we have, like taking a shower or washing the dishes, we can create more by taking breaks. I can attest from my modest experience that I tend to get stuck on problems, and that it's when I take a break that insight tends to occur, not while I'm working up a headache in front of my screen. How many times have I found an answer at the coffee machine or on my way to lunch? Taking walks and naps is also a surprisingly effective way of making progress. My great-grandfather was a master carpenter (_compagnon charpentier_ in French), designing and crafting stairs. Whenever he was stuck on a project, he'd take a nap at his desk. Not once did he fail to find _a_ solution. It's not just him, though. Charles Darwin had a _thinking path_ that he would walk daily, sometimes for hours. Albert Einstein would walk to his office at Princeton University, referring to the time it gave him as an opportunity to 'incubate' his ideas. Thomas Edison was a famous proponent of the 'power nap'. The list goes on. One way I create breaks for myself is with a timer. Often, when I'm working, I set it to twenty-five minutes, and stop as soon as it rings, in the middle of whatever I am doing. I then force myself to take a break that is _at least_ seven minutes, during which I do mundane things (sometimes it's just typing practice or unloading the dishwasher), take a nap or go for walk. I make sure what I started during the break is done when I'm ready to get back to work, and I start the twenty-five minutes timer all over again. This has three main benefits. First, it is torture to stop in the middle of something, your mind can't switch tasks right away. Context switching generates attention residue, as your mind can't free short-term memory at a moment's notice. So while you're physically switching tasks, the mind keeps processing whatever you were doing earlier. Essentially, you are digesting information during your break. This is why you should not try to optimize your time and perform intensive tasks during breaks, whether they're actual breaks or mundane tasks. Reading an interesting book, or performing tasks that you cannot finish during a break will add up to your attention residue. This is why if you take a break when you find it suitable, it's best to do something that you can do in a relaxed, lazy way. In that sense, naps and walks work perfectly. Second, twenty-five minutes bursts of work agree with me because it gives a sense of urgency and focus. Any more and I'm finding myself wandering away from what I set out to do. It allows me to mentally postpone everything else for as long as the timer is ticking. The right amount of time is whatever allows you to stay on course without deviating. Third, this frames what you're working on as a reward, which it is, otherwise you would not be doing it in the first place. Of course, I'm no robot and don't follow this blindly; sometimes I'll still get until the end of the sentence I'm writing or reading, like I'm doing right now as my timer rings, and sometimes I will set my timer on twenty-eight minutes. Cheating myself to do more of what matters to me makes me want to do more of it. Good enough for me. This pattern can be repeated at any level. If this works at the scale of minutes and hours, it also does at the scale of weeks and months. A while ago, I started observing a Sunday Shabbat, where I transform myself into a _flâneur_. I avoid anything with the aftertaste of effort like the plague. If I find myself walking as if I was in a hurry, like all Parisians do, I slow down. I rarely answer the phone. I read in parks or in bed. If something feels pressing or urgent, that's a Monday problem. You get the idea. Tackling the deceivingly simple issue of taming your short-term memory is crucial. Dealing with nagging thoughts will allow you to do meaningful work. Turning the work that matters to you into nagging thoughts will allow you to take that meaningful work further. Untamed, the Zeigarnik effect will prevent you from making progress in a meaningful direction, day after day, because conflicting priorities are the path of less resistance. You will pay the compounded effect of those competing thoughts over your lifetime. Mastering it will give you an unfair advantage over those that are stuck in it. You will be able to make progress on things that truly matter to you. Wouldn't it be sad to spend half of this life's waking time thinking about your grocery list and what you said yesterday to a colleague? If a thought is harassing you, write down somewhere something to do about it, and get back to what matters. Slowly but surely, this will allow you to expand the domain of things you can take care of, because they will not burden you while you're not taking care of them. You will grow your ability to reconcile the handling of the legions of fires burning in the background, no matter their size, while working on things that deeply matter to you. > "There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go" > _― Seneca_