There are two ebooks I always meant to write. I never quite started them, or perhaps better put I started and stalled. I don’t remember why I stopped. What I can tell you is that they still surface. I’ll be doing something completely unrelated, washing a cup, walking to get coffee, and one of them will float up uninvited, like a tab I forgot was open. The finished work I’ve actually published almost never does this. It’s the things I didn’t finish that keep tapping me on the shoulder.
If you’ve ever lain awake at 2am rehearsing an email you haven’t sent, you know the feeling. And it turns out there’s a name for it.
I should say up front that I’m a curious reader here, not a psychologist. What follows is reflection on some research I’ve found genuinely useful, not advice about your own mind.
The phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect, and the story behind it is the kind I find hard to forget. While Bluma Zeigarnik was a student, her supervisor reportedly noticed that waiters could recall the details of an unpaid order with ease, then lost that recall the moment the bill was settled. She took the idea into the lab. In her 1927 study, she gave people a series of small tasks, interrupted them on roughly half, and then checked what they remembered. The interrupted, unfinished tasks were recalled markedly better than the ones they got to complete.
The usual explanation is that starting something creates a kind of mental tension that holds the task open. Finish it, and the tension releases and the task gets filed away. Interrupt it, and the loop stays open, quietly demanding to be closed. That rings true to me. The cup I washed releases nothing. The ebook I never wrote is still, somewhere, demanding to be closed.
There’s a close cousin of this worth naming, because it shows up in the same scenes. It’s called attention residue. While the Zeigarnik effect is about what you remember, attention residue is more about what it costs you while you’re trying to do something else. Professor Sophie Leroy coined the term in a 2009 study with a title I find quietly funny: “Why is it so hard to do my work?” Her finding was that when we switch from one task to another, a portion of our attention stays behind on the first one. It doesn’t make a clean break. It lingers, like a smell in a room after the thing that caused it has gone. And the residue is worst, she found, when the first task was left unfinished. Interrupt someone mid-puzzle, send them off to do something unrelated, and they perform measurably worse on the new task than someone who got to finish.
This reframes the two ebooks for me. I’d always assumed they were harmless background noise, the odd flicker while I washed the cup. But if Leroy is right, they were never confined to those idle moments. They were taxing the published work too, the things I did finish, skimming a little off the top of every paragraph I wrote instead. The open loop doesn’t just tap you on the shoulder at 2am. It sits in the room while you try to do everything else, charging a small rent you never see itemised.
Anyway, decades after Zeigarnik, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister at Florida State University put some of this to the test, working from the long-standing idea that unfulfilled goals tend to persist in the mind. They reported that “unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task … and poor performance on an unrelated anagram task.” So the open loop didn’t just nag in the abstract. In these specific lab tasks, it tended to leak into work that had nothing to do with it. This is one study rather than a settled consensus so I’d hold it as a clue, not a law.
Here is the part that changed how I think about the nag. In that same study, the researchers found that “allowing participants to formulate specific plans for their unfulfilled goals eliminated the various activation and interference effects.” The goal stayed unfinished. The plan was enough to quiet it, at least in those experiments. Not finishing the thing. Just deciding, concretely, when and how you’ll get to it.
That maps neatly onto something I do without thinking. When my head is too full to settle, writing the loose thing down, the actual next step, not just “deal with the ebook” but the small specific move, tends to take the edge off. The mind seems willing to let go of a thing once it trusts the thing has somewhere to go.
If the open loops in your head are heavier than just an unsent email, the kind that keep you up and won’t be written down, a qualified counsellor or therapist is worth talking to, far more than any blog post.
