59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot by Richard Wiseman Read Free Book Online Page A

escaping the negative aspects of your current situation.
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    4. Going public
    Whom are you going to tell about your goal and sub-goals? Perhaps your friends, family, or colleagues. Could you describe it on a blog or display it somewhere prominent in your house or at the office?
    PROCRASTINATION AND THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT
Research suggests that about 20 percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. 7 Presumably this figure underestimates the scale of the problem, given that it can be based only on people who completed the questionnaires on time. Regardless of the actual figure, it is obvious that procrastination can be a major problem, causing people to fail to pay bills on time, not complete projects by deadlines, and make inadequate preparation for important exams and interviews. Procrastination is a surprisingly complex phenomenon that can stem from a variety of causes, including fear of failure, perfectionism, low levels of self-control, a tendency to see projects as a whole rather than breaking them into smaller parts, being prone to boredom, the feeling that life is too short to worry about seemingly unimportant tasks, and an inability to accurately estimate how long it takes to do things.
However, the good news is that the problem can be overcome using a technique first uncovered during an informal observation of waiters.
According to research lore, in the 1920s a young Russian psychology graduate named Bluma Zeigarnik found herself in a Viennese café, taking tea with her supervisor. Being students of human nature, they were watching how the waiters and customers behaved, and they happened to notice a curious phenomenon. When a customer asked for the check, the waiters could easily remember the food that had been ordered. However, if the customer paid the check and then queried it a few moments later, the waiters had to struggle to remember anything about the order. It seemed that the act of paying for the meal brought a sense of closure as far as the waiters were concerned, and erased the order from their memories.
Zeigarnik was curious, and she returned to the laboratory to test an idea. She asked people to do a number of simple tasks (such as stacking wooden blocks or placing toys in a box), but sometimes she stopped the participants before they had finished the assigned task. At the end of the experiment, the participants were told to describe all of the tasks. As with her observations of waiters, Zeigarnik found that the unfinished tasks stuck in people’s minds and so were far easier to remember. 8
According to Zeigarnik, starting any activity causes your mind to experience a kind of psychic anxiety. Once the activity is completed, your mind breathes an unconscious sigh of relief, and all is forgotten. However, if you are somehow thwarted from completing the activity, your anxious mind quietly nags away until you finish what you started.
What has this got to do with procrastination? Procrastinators frequently put off starting certain activities because they are overwhelmed by the size of the job in front of them. However, if they can be persuaded, or can persuade themselves, to work on the activity for “just a few minutes,” they often feel an urge to see it through to completion. Research shows that the “just a few minutes” rule is a highly effective way of beating procrastination and could help people finish the most arduous of tasks. 9 It is also a perfect application of Zeigarnik’s work—those few minutes of initial activity create an anxious brain that refuses to rest until the job is finished.
Zeigarnik’s work on the psychology of unfinished activity is just one example of her fascinating research. On another occasion she attempted to restore movement to patients paralyzed by hysteria by having a stooge dressed in a military uniform suddenly enter the room and order the patient to stand. Unfortunately, the results of that study have been lost in the mists of