Why You Feel Behind...Even When You're Not
Waiters, unpaid bills, and the reason you can't relax on the weekend.
I’ve felt a bit behind lately.
Believe it or not, this is supposed to be a weekly newsletter. The last couple of months...welp it just hasn’t been. And when I do the math, it makes sense.
Last fall, my wife and I started a consulting business. With that comes clients, builds, workshops, training, biz dev, and on and on. And because I can’t help myself, I keep taking on new things.
I work with the Seattle pro ultimate frisbee team. And now I’ve signed on as sponsorship coordinator for the national women’s pro ultimate frisbee team. And yes, that is very much a thing.
I write the AI Morning Minute, a daily newsletter about AI that somehow goes out every single morning (Oh hey, wanna subscribe?!) I run workshops. I am starting a mastermind for local businesses with a friend of mine. And last week, my wife and I launched postARTing, a public art project that involves mailing strangers handmade postcards, which I think will be lovely but also flirts a tiny bit with madness.
It’s all great. But it’s a lot. Like a lot a lot.
Late nights. Coding. Meetings. Pitches and explainers. Building training. Some days I can’t tell where one thing ends and the next thing starts. Make no mistake, I love all of it, and therein lies the problem.
Cause yeah, I feel pretty behind. But I’m not. Not really. I’ve shipped plenty of things. But shipped things go quiet, and unfinished things get loud. The half-done ones. The barely-started ones. The ones still sitting there with no ending yet. An open loop, it turns out, is the loudest thing in your head.
And this often just feels like a me problem. It’s not. It’s a this-is-how-your-brain-works problem, and a scientist clocked it back in the 1920s.
So this week, let’s talk about the Zeigarnik Effect, what it is, why your brain won’t stop reminding you about the things you haven’t finished, and how you can close enough loops to feel like yourself again.
The Waiters Who Couldn’t Forget
In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a busy Vienna cafe with her professor. They noticed something a bit peculiar about the waiters. The waiters could remember complicated orders perfectly, no notepad, no problem, right up until the bill was paid.
The instant money changed hands, the order vanished from their memory. Ask them about a table from ten minutes ago and they’d draw a blank.
Paid meant done. Done meant gone.
Being an experimental psychopathologist (and Russian) Zeigarnik took that hunch into the lab. She gave people a string of little tasks, puzzles, simple problems, things to build. Some they finished. Others she interrupted partway through. Then she asked them what they remembered.
People recalled the interrupted tasks about twice as well as the finished ones. Not because the unfinished tasks were harder or more interesting. Just because they weren’t done.
That’s the Zeigarnik effect in one sentence. Your brain holds an unfinished task in a kind of active memory state, tense and a little impatient, like it’s tapping its foot. The task keeps a low hum going in the background. Finish it, and that hum stops. The brain files it away and moves on. Leave it open, and the hum keeps running whether you want it to or not.
This is why you can lie in bed at night and your brain, helpful as ever, decides 11:47pm is the perfect time to remind you about the email you didn’t send. It’s not trying to torture you. It’s just holding the loop open, because to your brain, open means unresolved, and unresolved means keep poking at it.
The waiters didn’t have better memories. They just had a clean line between done and not done. Most of us don’t have that luxury. We’ve got a dozen tables that never paid the bill.
Why Ten Loops Feels Like Drowning
Your brain does not rank its open to dos. It just kinda holds onto them.
The text you forgot to answer sits at the same volume as the project that’s three months behind. Your brain isn’t sorting by importance. It’s just keeping a tally of everything that isn’t finished, and playing all of it at once. Neat right?
So one open loop is fine. You barely notice it. Two is also kinda fine. But stack up ten or twelve, and they don’t add up so much as blur together into one low, constant noise. That noise has a feeling and that feeling is panicky little oh my gosh how am I always this far behind feeling.
And the cruel twist is that the noise has nothing to do with how much you’ve actually gotten done. I’ve done a ton of work these last few months. But finished work goes silent the second it’s done, so it stops counting in your head. You don’t get credit for all the things you have done. It’s like cleaning the whole kitchen and standing there staring at the one solitary, stinking, stupid pan still left in the sink and feeling like a failure.
This is why busy, capable people who get a ton done can still feel like a loser. Because their brain only bills them for the unfinished parts, and they’ve got a lot of unfinished parts running in parallel. It’s absolutely brutal to feel so accomplished and still feel like you’re not measuring up. Like…get used to disappointment, apparently.
Have you ever sat down to relax and felt a low, nagging guilt you couldn’t name? You weren’t even necessarily anxious about any one thing. But you were feeling the weight of all the unfinished somethings out there in your world. Even if they weren’t urgent or actionable. They were still just there.
That’s the real cost, and it’s not the hours the work takes. It’s the hours it takes back after you’ve stopped. The dinner you’re half-present for or the movie you watch twice because the first time didn’t land. The job isn’t stealing your time on the clock. It’s billing you for all the time you thought was yours.
The Trick Is Convincing Your Brain
The good news here is that you don’t actually have to finish everything to make the noise stop. Which is a relief, because finishing everything was never on the table.
Because the epilogue to Zeigarnik’s work is that researchers found that you can quiet an open loop without completing the task. You just have to make a specific plan for it. In one set of studies, people stuck on an unfinished task kept getting distracted by it, until they wrote down exactly when and how they’d handle it. The plan freed up the same mental space that finishing would have.
And that’s the neat little trick. Your brain isn’t demanding that the task be done. It just really wants to know that it’s handled. Those are very different things, and the difference, dear reader, is your path to relief.
So next time your brain won’t shut up about all the things that are outstanding, try these:
Write it down. Get it down on paper or in a doc or just somewhere. Extract it from your brain. A task you’re only tracking in your head stays loud, because your mind doesn’t believe you’ve actually got it handled. Write it somewhere you trust and it goes quiet, because now the system is holding it instead of you.
Pick your next, specific move. Half of what’s nagging you is loud because it’s vague. “Launch the thing” is a terrible to do list item. “Email Sam the draft by Friday” is a closed instruction your brain can work with. You don’t need the full roadmap. You just need the next real step, written like you actually mean to do it. Your todo list should be filled with actionable, measurable tasks.
Decide what success looks like. Some of this stuff is loud because it has no ending. It could always be bigger, better, more. So decide what finished looks like up front, and let that be the bar. A newsletter that goes out beats a perfect one that doesn’t.
Hi there!
As I mentioned, a little over a week ago we launched postARTing, where a real artist makes you an original handmade postcard and it gets mailed to you. If that sounds like something you’d be into, pop on over and sign up to see what this is all about.
In Conclusion
I am writing this very late on a Monday night as I wallow in a giant pile of unfinished things.
The consulting business still needs me. The mastermind isn’t built. The postcards aren’t in the mail. Most of it is still hanging there, and most of it will stay that way for a bit.
But by god, this newsletter is getting finished. It’s going out. That’s one table that finally paid its bill, and you would not believe how quiet my head got the second I decided it would.
You don’t have to finish everything. Just pick one loud thing and give it some kind of ending. The relief isn’t in clearing the list. It’s in proving to your brain, one finished thing at a time, that you can be trusted to handle the rest.
So try this. Pick the one thing that’s been nagging you the loudest. Not the biggest, the LOUDEST. And write down the details about it. Or make a plan. Or figure out what done looks like.
Bluma watched a room full of waiters do this without trying. The second a table settled up, their heads cleared. Yours will too. You just have to let something settle up.
Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)