Biases

Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect: Why Risk Mitigation and Safety Measures Become Ineffective

May 17, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect are two concepts relating to how humans react to risks.

Risk Homeostasis is the notion that our personal psychological frameworks comprise a target level of risk towards which we direct our efforts.

We measure risk on our own “risk thermostat.” Because the risk in our environment changes continuously, we are incessantly forced away from our target risk level, but revert toward it by counteracting those external influences.

If the perceived risk of a situation exceeds our target level, we undertake defensive actions to reduce the risk. And if the perceived risk is lower than our target level, we attempt to increase our risk back to our target level by exposing ourselves to dangerous actions.

Consequently, people take more risks when they’re forced to act more carefully. For instance, requiring motorcycle bikers to wear helmets may make them take more risks—to maintain their level of thrill, not to get into accidents.

Peltzman Effect is the notion that people respond to increased safety by adding new risks. The namesake, economist Sam Peltzman, argued in 1975 that when automobile safety rules were introduced, at least some of the benefits of the new safety rules were counterbalanced by changes in the behavior of drivers. Peltzman posited that making seatbelts mandatory for cars resulted in reducing the number of occupant fatalities, but increased pedestrian casualties and collision-related property damages.

Peltzman made a case that even though seatbelts reduced the risk of being severely injured in an accident, drivers compensated by driving aggressively and carelessly—driving closer to the car ahead of them, for instance—so as to save time or maintain their level of thrill, even at the risk of causing damage beyond themselves and their cars.

Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect remain controversial theories. Despite their apparent relevance, the prevailing evidence remains inadequate and inconclusive about how people behave less cautiously when they feel more protected and vice versa.

Further, Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect challenge the foundations of safety and injury-prevention policies. They assert that the only effective safety measures are those that alter individuals’ desired risk level. Anything that barely modifies the environment or regulates individuals’ behavior without affecting their target risk levels is useless.

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

March 13, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Appearances are Important

Your office and desk must seem organized. A messy office or a cluttered desk can not only impede your space and cramp your style, but also affect how your peers and superiors perceive you.

Clutter can drag you down, sap your energy, and reduce your efficiency. However, if clutter is your style, you should have every right to work the way you like to work.

A messy desk isn’t a professional flaw, but clutter may reflect of your competence. Untidiness can give an impression that your job may be too much for you to handle, or that you can’t get your thoughts and information organized.

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

As opposed to sorting through everything in your drawers, desktop, and filing systems, consider removing the whole lot somewhere else and only allowing the important things back.

Stephanie Winston, author of The Organized Executive, famously wrote that each clutter represents a decision not made. In this bestselling book, she recommends the “TRAF” system, a precursor to the “Inbox Zero” discipline that I’ve previously discussed on this blog. TRAF is an acronym for the four decisions you must make on each piece of paper that arrives at your desk. You can Toss it away, Refer or delegate it to someone else, Act on it, or File it if it absolutely deserves to be achieved. Don’t keep anything merely for reasons of habit or for sentimental reasons.
Don’t start tomorrow with today’s mess. Spending ten minutes at the end of your workday gearing your desk up for the next day can help you stay organized.

After you’ve taken steps to reorganize your office, sustain your system. Look for ways to further streamline and fine-tune your organization framework.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

Taking too much time to organize can be just as ineffective—don’t end up spending so much time organizing that you don’t have the time to do anything else. (This is one of the shortcomings of David Allen’s Getting This Done system.) Learn to put things away as soon as you’re done working on them.

Being organized not only means less time wasted looking for things, but also rewards you with a greater sense of control and a favorable professional image.

Lessons from Peter Drucker: Quit What You Suck At

March 1, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The essence of leadership is risk- and opportunity-assessment and resource allocation. It follows that one of the persistent responsibilities of leadership is to mull over each individual and organizational endeavor and investigate, “Do we produce results that are meaningful and profitable enough for us to justify investing our resources to this purpose?”

Jack Welch’s Strategy for General Electric: #1 or #2 Businesses Only

When Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric (GE) in 1981, he set out to make GE “the world’s most competitive enterprise.” However, the company was a hodgepodge of many businesses—some unrelated or irrelevant, several unprofitable, and a few at the brink of failure.

Management pioneer Peter Drucker famously advised Welch to ask of each constituent of the GE business portfolio he now presided over, “If you weren’t already this business, would you enter it today? And, if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?”

Welch’s responded with his legendary dictum that every GE division be—or become—the leading or the runner-up business in its respective industry, or plan to exit it completely.

Welch argued that in many markets, the number three, four, five, or six players suffered the most during cyclical downturns. On the contrary, number one or number two businesses could protect their market share by way of aggressive pricing approaches or by developing new products. Welch’s approach portended the emergence of oligopolies in many industries.

The resultant strategic focus eventually led to an immense restructuring of GE. Welch sold or discontinued dozens of divisions—including computers and time-shares. Over the next decade, he cut nearly one in four jobs at GE, warranting the nickname “Neutron Jack.”

By year 2000, GE had reached dominance or near dominance in most of its business markets across the globe.

Peter Drucker on Strategic Reprioritization

Explaining this method of strategic reprioritization, Drucker wrote in Post-Capitalist Society (1993,)

To turn around any institution—whether a business, a labor union, a university, a hospital, or a government—requires always the same three steps:

Abandonment of the things that do not work, the things that have never worked; the things that have outlived their usefulness and their capacity to contribute;

Concentration on the things that do work, the things that produce results, the things that improve the organization’s capacity to perform; and

Analysis of the half successes, half failures. A turnaround requires abandoning whatever does not perform and doing more of whatever does perform.

Drucker further elaborated on abandonment as the keystone for strategic reprioritization in his Five Most Important Questions (2015,)

To abandon anything is always bitterly resisted. People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete—the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are. They are most attached to what in an earlier book I called “investments in managerial ego.” Yet abandonment comes first. Until that has been accomplished, little else gets done. The acrimonious and emotional debate over what to abandon holds everybody in its grip. Abandoning anything is thus difficult, but only for a fairly short spell. Rebirth can begin once the dead are buried; six months later, everybody wonders, “Why did it take us so long?”

Idea for Impact: Assess What Endeavors Must Be Intensified or Abandoned

Don’t do—or continue to do—something just because it’s been a tradition, custom, or habit. Strengthen, abandon, or stay on. Align your efforts with your mission, your values, and the results you want to achieve.

If you abandon something important mistakenly, you can quickly pick up where you left off.

Invest your precious resources where the returns are rich.

Figure out what’s vital and stay focused, even if you have to cut your losses (read about sunk costs.)

Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

December 8, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you persistently experience an overpowering sense of being besieged with tasks and responsibilities, perhaps a personal productivity transformation technique suggested by Warren Buffett may help.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania shares a well-known anecdote about Buffett in her bestselling Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance:

The story goes like this: Buffett turns to his faithful pilot and says that he must have dreams greater than flying Buffett around to where he needs to go. The pilot confesses that, yes, he does. And then Buffett takes him through three steps.

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals.

Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five.

Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.

As I’ve written before (see the world’s shortest course in time management, and detailed three-step course on time logging, time analysis, time budgeting,) the most effective time management practice involves eliminating the non-essentials—those numerous things you can and want to do—and focusing on the very few things you must do.

Idea for Impact: Success comes at a cost: the most time-effective folks I know are significantly better at dropping their second-rate objectives.

Choose Your Role Models Carefully

November 17, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Heroes and role models are very useful—they embody a higher plateau of cognitive and emotional truth, knowledge, and accomplishment that you can aspire to.

But the modern world has a dangerous problem with hero-worship: pop artists, rappers, film stars, sportspersons, capitalists, and so on command attention and affection as never before. This 2013 Financial Times article noted, “Way back in 2008, the three most admired personalities in sport were probably Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius. They were portrayed not just as great athletes but as great men, role models….” And all these three popular heroes fell from grace.

While admiring and drawing wisdom, meaning, and inspiration from heroes can be constructive, you must take “hero narratives” with a grain of salt. The Buddha warned us not to trust anybody or anything just because it seems logical or it resonates with our feelings. He advised that we test our hypotheses by the results they yield when put into practice and shield our minds against the risk of biases or other limitations of our ability to discern from our experiences wisely. According to the Kalama Sutta, an aphorism of the historical Buddha that has been preserved orally by his followers (translated from the Pali by the eminent American Buddhist monk and prolific author Thanissaro Bhikkhu,)

Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’—then you should enter & remain in them.

Idea for Impact: Don’t blindly place much faith in today’s experts and celebrities. Realize the truth yourself.

How to Guard Against Anything You May Inadvertently Overlook

October 23, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Checklists can help you learn about prospective oversights and mistakes, recognize them in context, and sharpen your decisions.

I am a big fan of Harvard surgeon and columnist Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (2009.) His bestseller is an engaging reminder of how the world has become so complex.

The use of the humble checklist can help you manage the myriad of complexities that underlie most contemporary professional (and personal) undertakings—where what you must do is too complex to carry out reliably from memory alone. Checklists “provide a kind of a cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

Gawande begins The Checklist Manifesto with an examination of the characteristics of errors from ignorance (mistakes you make because you don’t know enough—“much of the world and universe is—and will remain—outside our understanding and control”), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes you make because you don’t apply correctly what you know.) Most human and organizational failures involve the latter.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

The surgery room, Gawande’s own profession, is the principal setting for many of the book’s illustrative examples of how the introduction of checklists dramatically reduced the rate of complications from surgery. He also provides handy stories from other realms of human endeavor—aviation, structural engineering, and Wall Street-investing.

Getting Things Right, Every Time

Checklists are particularly valuable in situations where the stakes are high enough, but your impulsive thought process could lead to suboptimal decisions.

The benefits of checklists also feature prominently in the thought-provoking Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (2012.) The author, Credit Suisse Investment analyst and polymath Michael J. Mauboussin, argues that checklists are more effective in certain domains than in others:

A checklist’s applicability is largely a function of a domain’s stability. In stable environments, where cause and effect is pretty clear and things don’t change much, checklists are great. But in rapidly changing environments that are heavily circumstantial, creating a checklist is a lot more difficult. In those environments, checklists can help with certain aspects of the decision. For instance, an investor evaluating a stock may use a checklist to make sure that she builds her financial model properly.

A good checklist balances two opposing objectives. It should be general enough to allow for varying conditions, yet specific enough to guide action. Finding this balance means a checklist should not be too long; ideally, you should be able to fit it on one or two pages.

If you have yet to create a checklist, try it and see which issues surface. Concentrate on steps or procedures, and ask where decisions have gone off track before. And recognize that errors are often the result of neglecting a step, not from executing the other steps poorly.

In addition to creating checklists that are specific enough to guide action but general enough to handle changing circumstances, Mauboussin recommends keeping a journal to gather feedback from past decisions and performing “premortems” by envisioning that a imminent decision has already been proven wrong, and then identifying probable reasons for the failure.

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

The notion of making and using checklists is so plainly obvious that it seems impracticable that they could have so vast an effect.

Investor Charlie Munger, the well-respected beacon of wisdom and multi-disciplinary thinking, has said, “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.” And, “I’m a great believer in solving hard problems by using a checklist. You need to get all the likely and unlikely answers before you; otherwise it’s easy to miss something important.”

Idea for Impact: Checklists can prevent many things that could go wrong in the hands of human beings, given our many well-documented biases and foibles. Well-designed checklists not only make sure that all the can-be-relied upon elements are in place in complex decision-making, but also provide for flexibility and room for ad hoc judgment.

Gambler’s Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World

September 27, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Gambler’s Fallacy is the misleading belief that the probability of a specific occurrence in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events—that its probability will increase with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur.

Suppose that you roll a fair die 14 times and don’t get a six even once. According to the Gambler’s Fallacy, a six is “long overdue.” Thus, it must be a good wager for the 15th roll of the dice. This conjecture is irrational; the probability of a six is the same as for every other roll of the dice: that is, 1/6.

Chance Events Don’t Have Memories

In practical terms, the Gambler’s Fallacy is the hunch that if you play long enough, you will eventually win. For example, if you toss a fair coin and flip heads five times in a row, the Gambler’s Fallacy suggests that the next toss may well flip a tail because it is “due.” In actuality, the results of previous coin flips have no bearing on future coin flips. Therefore, it is poor reasoning to assume that the probability of flipping tails on the next coin-toss is better than one-half.

A classic example of the Gambler’s Fallacy is when parents who’ve had children of the same sex anticipate that their next child ought to be of the opposite sex. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was the first to document the Gambler’s Fallacy. In Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1796,) Laplace identified an instance of expectant fathers trying to predict the probability of having sons. These men assumed that the ratio of boys to girls born must be fifty-fifty. If adjacent villages had high male birth rates in the recent past, they could predict more birth of girls in their own village.

There Isn’t a Lady Luck or an “Invisible Hand” in Charge of Your Game

The Gambler’s Fallacy is what makes gambling so addictive. Gamblers normally think that gambling is an intrinsically fair-minded system in which any losses they’ll incur will eventually be corrected by a winning streak.

In buying lottery tickets, as in gambling, perseverance will not pay. However, human nature is such that gamblers have an irrational hunch that if they keep playing, they will eventually win, even if the odds of winning a lottery are remote. However, the odds of winning the jackpot remain unchanged … every time people buy lottery tickets. Playing week after week doesn’t change their chances. What’s more, the odds remain the same even for people who have previously won the lottery.

Gambler’s Fallacy Coaxed People to Lose Millions in Monte Carlo in 1913

The Gambler’s Fallacy is also called the Monte Carlo Fallacy because of an extraordinary event that happened in the renowned Monte Carlo Casino in the Principality of Monaco.

On 18-August-1913, black fell 26 times in a row at a roulette table. Seeing that that the roulette ball had fallen on black for quite some time, gamblers kept pushing more money onto the table assuming that, after the sequence of blacks, a red was “due” at each subsequent spin of the roulette wheel. The sequence of blacks that occurred that night is an unusual statistical occurrence, but it is still among the possibilities, as is any other sequence of red or black. As you may guess, gamblers at that roulette table lost millions of francs that night.

Gambler’s Fallacy is The False Assumption That Probability is Affected by Past Events

The Gambler’s Fallacy is frequently in force in casual judgments, casinos, sporting events, and, alas, in everyday business and personal decision-making. This common fallacy is manifest by the belief that a random event is more likely to occur because it has not happened for a time (or a random event is less likely to occur because it recently happened.)

While growing up in India, I often heard farmers discuss rainwater observing that, if the season’s rainfall was below average, they worry about protecting their crops during imminent protracted rains because the rainfall needs to “catch-up to a seasonal average.”
In soccer / football, kickers and goalkeepers are frequently prone to the Gambler’s Fallacy during penalty shootouts. For instance, after a series of three kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers are more likely to dive in the opposite direction at the fourth kick.
In the episode “Stress Relief” of the fifth season of the American TV series The Office, when the character Jim Halpert learns that his fiancee Pam Beesley’s parents are divorcing, he quotes the common statistic that 50% of marriages wind up in divorce. Halpert then comments that, because his parents are not divorced, it is only reasonable that Pam’s parents are getting divorced.

The Gambler’s Fallacy is a Powerful and Seductive Illusion of Control Over Events That are Not Controllable

Don’t be misled by the Gambler’s Fallacy. Be aware of the certainty of statistical independence. The occurrence of one random event has no statistical bearing upon the occurrence of the other random event. In other words, the probability of the occurrence of a random event is never influenced by a previous, or series of previous, arbitrary events.

Idea for Impact: Be skeptical of most judgments about probabilities. Never rely exclusively on your intuitive sense in evaluating probable events. In general, relying exclusively on your gut feeling or your hunches in assessing probabilities is usually not a reason to trust the assessment, but to distrust it.

Let Go of Sunk Costs

July 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When people put their weight behind an idea or a belief, they become invested in it. They are likely to fight its corner rather than discard that idea or renounce their prior decision.

This tendency to throw good resources after bad, rather than cut losses, is the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Quitting is Not Always Wrong

People frequently become stuck with poor decisions that they keep holding on to in hopes that they will eventually prove their efforts worthwhile. Here’s Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the bestselling exposition of human irrationality) in an interview with financial journalist Morgan Housel:

When I work I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea. It’s a good attitude for a researcher. The main trap that young researchers fall into is sunk costs. They get to work on a project that doesn’t work and that is not promising but they keep at it. I think too much persistence can be bad for you in the intellectual world.

Don’t Become Biased Against Quitting

Sunk cost fallacy is why people who have already wasted money on tickets to an awful movie continue to watch it to the end and waste their time instead of walking out of the cinema hall. It’s the urge to justify previous decisions using the next one—for example, when people force themselves to munch their way through an unsavory meal at a restaurant or when people waste time in dead-end romantic relationships because they’ve already devoted so much time to the relationships and irrationally hope things will improve someway.

Some leaders continue a project once an initial investment is made and found flawed because stopping the project would be tantamount to conceding that previously-allocated resources have been wasted. For this reason, the sunk cost fallacy is also called the ‘Concorde Effect’ after the Anglo-French supersonic jet. In the ’60s, even though there was never a sufficient demand from airlines for the Concorde, the British and French governments continued to subsidize the development and production of the Concorde instead of admitting that they had wasted billions on a non-viable undertaking. The airline industry had long understood that the economics of supersonic transport were dubious, which had forced Americans to abandon their preliminary studies of supersonic jets.

Idea for Impact: Let to Cut Your Losses When Something’s Not Working

Sunk costs are backward-looking decisions. Don’t become excessively focused on a specific goal or outcome—you’ll become inflexible and unyielding. You’ll narrow your options and make yourself feel more limited and inhibited.

Don’t get attached to ideas and become affected by the sunk cost fallacy as your projects develop. Remain objective, identify the warning signs of losing propositions, and abandon lost causes where sensible. As the American cartoonist Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame once said, “No problem is so formidable that you cannot walk away from it.”

Hofstadter’s Law: Why Everything Takes Longer Than Anticipated

March 24, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Think of your weekend days. You typically wake up and think of all the free time at hand. You plan a day of leisure. You intend to run some errands and get a few things done around the house. Yet, at the end of the day, you’ve done barely half of what you originally set out to do.

People Habitually Underestimate the Time Tasks Take

Almost everything that humankind has ever wished for—from renewing a driver’s license to achieving peace between countries at war—seems to have not completed within the time originally planned.

As the following case studies will illustrate, interruptions, deferrals, and delays characteristically result in cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and disputes.

Sydney’s Opera House was originally forecast in 1957 to be completed in 1963. The magnificent performing arts complex formally opened only in 1973 and cost 15 times the original budget.
When Boeing first launched its 787 Dreamliner aircraft in 2004, it ambitiously planned for first flight in September 2007. After six delays in the design and prototype phases, the 787 first flew only in December 2009. First aircraft delivery was scheduled for 2008, but didn’t happen until September 2011, more than three years behind schedule. Then, after a series of early in-service technical and operational problems, Boeing embarked on serious drawn-out repairs on 787s. Following yet more production delays, the 787 started flying full-fledged only in 2013. The innumerable delays and cost overruns associated with the 787 program became a financial nightmare for Boeing’s investors. Boeing took nine years to get the Dreamliner off the drawing board and into mature service at a total development cost of $32 billion—twice as long as the company’s original estimation and more than five times more expensive.
Less than 50 days before the start of last year’s Summer Olympic Games in Brazil, the state of Rio de Janeiro declared a “state of public calamity” citing severe delays and acute cost overruns. The New York Times reported, “The city is a huge construction site. Bricks and pipes are piled everywhere; a few workers lazily push wheelbarrows as if the Games were scheduled for 2017.”

Hofstadter’s Law: We Chronically Underestimate the Time Things Take

Hofstadter's Law: We Chronically Underestimate the Time Things Take The American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter conceived an ironic and recursive rule to characterize the observation that everything takes longer than planned.

Hofstadter’s Law states, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law”

Hofstadter first discussed this law in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a book popular among American computer programmers.

Underestimating Task-Time Means Constantly Rushing to Finish Things

According to planning fallacy, when people predict the time it takes to complete a task, they make their estimations by considering the various steps they have to take, but fail to imagine the pessimistic conditions where things could go wrong.

In other words, thanks to optimism bias, people are generally too optimistic about the time it takes for them to complete a task, even when they are explicitly asked to think about potential obstacles.

Hofstadter’s Law also alludes to,

Superiority Bias where people overrate their own positive qualities and abilities—and underrate their negative qualities—when compared with others. “This takes three hours for the average Joe, but I am smarter, and I can do it in two hours.”
Beneffectance Bias where people perceive themselves as selectively accountable for the desired—but not the undesired—outcomes. “Last week, this took me 45 minutes, but the delay was because of conditions beyond my control. Today, I have full control; so I should take just 20 minutes.”

Idea for Impact: The problem with unforeseen delays is that you can’t foresee them, no matter how comprehensively you plan

Though somewhat silly in its recursive character, Hofstadter’s Law observes that, irrespective of how carefully you plan, every project will be prone to something unanticipated that will hinder its timely completion. The law’s recursiveness affirms that, even if you know a project may overrun and build that expectation into your planning, the project will overrun even your new estimated finish time.

Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress

March 14, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

People Remember Incomplete Tasks Better than Completed Tasks

When you listen to a song that’s unexpectedly cut off in the middle, your mind will repeatedly inject your thought stream with bits of the song in an attempt to remind you that you’re not yet “done” listening. But, once you listen to that song completely, your mind moves on.

Psychologists identify this tendency for interrupted tasks—and thoughts—to be evoked better than completed tasks the Zeigarnik Effect.

Ruminating about Unfinished Tasks Causes Anxiety

This phenomenon was first reported in the 1920s by the Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. Working with her research advisor Kurt Lewin at the University of Berlin, Zeigarnik observed that restaurant waiters seemed to remember a complex order just so long as the order was in the process of being prepared and served, but not after it was finished.

Zeigarnik Effect and Cliffhangers

Zeigarnik effect is in force when an episode of a TV series ends with a cliffhanger leaving the audience in suspense until the next episode. Teachers who conclude their lectures by posing a perplexing question stimulate the class to think about the answer until the next class.

In another prominent use of the cliffhanger and the Zeigarnik Effect as a literary device, the English novelist Charles Dickens released most of his novels in the form of serial publications, i.e. in monthly or weekly installments. Dickens’s cliffhangers initiated such anticipation in reader’s minds that his American fans would gather at New York City’s docks for the latest installment to arrive by ship from England. The installment format also allowed Dickens to rework his character development and his plots depending on audiences’ reactions.

Zeigarnik Effect and Cliffhangers

Zeigarnik Effect and the Need for Closure: Task Management

Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik’s research showed that the human mind hates unfinished tasks. Zeigarnik theorized that incomplete tasks incite “psychic tension” in you, which can be a persuasive impetus to complete the task. As long as you leave the task unfinished, your brain is in an uncomfortable position. Thoughts of the task serve to remind your brain of what it needs to do to get “comfortable” once again. As soon as you complete the task, this tension is alleviated, and in so doing, your brain lets the mind to release thoughts of the task from consciousness.

In other words, much mental effort is required when your tasks are interrupted or are still in the process of being completed.

From a time-management perspective, uncompleted tasks and unmet goals have a propensity for popping into your mind and worrying you persistently until the task is completed and the goal reached.

Emptying Your Mind of Nagging Tasks to Get Things Done

According to John Tierney and Roy Baumeister’s Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, further research in cognitive psychology has suggested that the Zeigarnik effect exists not just until you actually finish a task but also until you make concrete plans related to the task.

… turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. 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.

According to Willpower, one research study asked students to think about an important exam. Half of the students were asked to put in writing specific plans of what/where/when they would study. Later, all students were asked to do a word association test. The group of students that did not write any study plans produced more word associations related to studying because studying was still on their mind; the group who did write down their study plans did not exhibit a comparable bias during the word association test.

Emptying Your Mind of Nagging Tasks to Get Things Done

The Zeigarnik Effect is the central theorem in David Allen’s legendary “Getting Things Done” method for task-management works.

Allen reasons that the dominant cause of everyday anxiety is that you are never truly sure of all the ‘things’ you’re supposed to do. You know you’ve got things to take care of and haven’t. Therefore, your mind keeps incoherently revisiting all that’s important but not yet completed. These “open loops” occupy much of your cognitive effort and debilitate your attention, causing anxiety, sapping your energy, and draining your willpower.

The primary benefit of using Allen’s Getting Things Done system is to reduce anxiety by emptying your mind of nagging tasks, filing away (or writing down) everything that must be done, placing them into a processing system, and scheduling chunks of time to single-mindedly do important things.

Human Mind Hates Unfinished Tasks

According to the Zeigarnik Effect, unresolved and interrupted tasks thieve the attention of your brain until you have a clear—if subconscious—proposal of what you’re going to deal with them.

Just the simple act of capturing a task that reaches your head can achieve that sense of completion. Even if you haven’t completed the task, you’ll know that you’ve accomplished what could be done up to the moment.

Here’s three clever ways to use the Zeigarnik Effect to your advantage:

Use the Two-minute ‘Do-It-Now’ Rule. See my previous article on this task management discipline—in a nutshell: act immediately upon a contemplated task if it can be completed in less than two minutes. Don’t add it to your to-do list.
Make a Concrete Plan. Whenever you have a task in mind, stop doing whatever you’re doing, take a blank sheet of paper, and invest one minute to plan and record how you intend to tackle the task. If you intend to write an essay, write an outline; if it’s a report, start the list of contents.
Use To-Do Lists Judiciously. Establish and peruse a trusted system to capture your projects and tasks, and the commitments you have to yourself and others. According to David Allen’s Getting Things Done, your human brain is an ineffective and unreliable repository of all the things you try to cram into it. All this “stuff” collectively clutters your headspace. Getting all your stuff out of your head and into a trusted system can bring about a profound sense of relief.

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Biases

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Appearances are Important

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

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Jack Welch’s Strategy for General Electric: #1 or #2 Businesses Only

Peter Drucker on Strategic Reprioritization

Idea for Impact: Assess What Endeavors Must Be Intensified or Abandoned

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The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Getting Things Right, Every Time

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

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Chance Events Don’t Have Memories

There Isn’t a Lady Luck or an “Invisible Hand” in Charge of Your Game

Gambler’s Fallacy Coaxed People to Lose Millions in Monte Carlo in 1913

Gambler’s Fallacy is The False Assumption That Probability is Affected by Past Events

The Gambler’s Fallacy is a Powerful and Seductive Illusion of Control Over Events That are Not Controllable

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Quitting is Not Always Wrong

Don’t Become Biased Against Quitting

Idea for Impact: Let to Cut Your Losses When Something’s Not Working

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People Habitually Underestimate the Time Tasks Take

Hofstadter’s Law: We Chronically Underestimate the Time Things Take

Underestimating Task-Time Means Constantly Rushing to Finish Things

Idea for Impact: The problem with unforeseen delays is that you can’t foresee them, no matter how comprehensively you plan

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People Remember Incomplete Tasks Better than Completed Tasks

Ruminating about Unfinished Tasks Causes Anxiety

Zeigarnik Effect and Cliffhangers

Zeigarnik Effect and the Need for Closure: Task Management

Emptying Your Mind of Nagging Tasks to Get Things Done

Emptying Your Mind of Nagging Tasks to Get Things Done

Human Mind Hates Unfinished Tasks

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