For years, I’ve been a start your writing first thing in the morning guy.
I get up around 4:30 AM most days. On good days, I feed the cats and hammer a few words into the word processor by 5, then braindump into my journal before planning the day.
I can jam out a good hour of writing before the rest of house rises. Maybe two, on a weekend, when the spouse-mouse gets to sleep in.
On a bad day, I try for 50 words or so. Just something to get my toe in.
Because here’s the thing: even if I don’t finish all the writing tasks on the list, starting the day with writing sets my focus. It’s easier to go back and finish the things.
If I skip those 50 words, getting to the keyboard will be a struggle. Other things take priority, and writing becomes one more task I need to find the time to do, rather than the thing I’ve already started and should get back to.
Lately, I’ve been pondering how much this start early, stay focused approach relates to the Zeigarnik effect.
Why Unfinished Tasks Stick In Your Memory
If you spend a lot of time splitting your focus between multiple projects or priorities, it’s worth getting familiar with the work of Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik (and it’s not just because her name is exceptional) and Maria Ovsiankina (ditto).
Back in the twenties, Zeigarnik did some of the first psychological studies into the relationship between your memory and unfinished tasks, and she even lends her name to a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik Effect.
The simplified version of the effect is this: tasks that are interrupted are more easily recalled than those that were completed. They linger in our memory.
The inspiration for Zeigarnik’s work started with servers in cafes and restaurants.
Her professor and mentor noted servers would memorize huge amounts of detail about customers, orders, and unpaid bills while serving, but the specific details vanished the moment delivery finished and the order paid for.
One could chat with a server for hours and they’d remember anyone, yet if you returned to the restaurant an hour after the meal to collect a forgotten hat, the same server would struggle to remember you, your table, or your order.
Zeigarnik wanted to explore this phenomenon and set out to do a series of experiments and quickly noticed a correlation between memory and unfinished tasks.
In one early experiment, she discovered 110 children out of 138 subjects had better recall of a puzzle they were working on when interrupted halfway through and then allowed to return to the task.
Open Loops
Productivity gurus have a different name for the Zeigarnik effect: open loops.
The stuff we start and leave unfinished stays with us, taking up brainpower and bits of mental energy. A big part of most productivity practices involves limiting and closing the number of open loops on your plate.
Not because they’re inherently a bad thing, but because you want to devote your open loops to the most critical tasks on your to-do list.
So when I kick off my day with writing and get even a few words into a story, I have an open loop in my head. I may be elsewhere, focused on doing the dishes or mentoring or shipping books around the world.
But part of my brain is still keeping the story alive, figuring out how to progress it. I can recall where I’m up to, and what might come next.
And I’m eager to get back to it.
This is where Maria Ovsiankina comes in, because she ran a series of experiments around the Zeigarnik effect and discovered that starting a task and interrupting it creates a need to go back and finish that task, even if there is no additional incentive or need to do so.
The open loop creates intrusive thoughts, getting stuck in the mind and potentially creating stress if you’re unable to get back to them.
Juggling Priorities
There’s a lot more detailed study and debate around both these phenomena, but if you’ve ever danced between multiple priorities, you have felt something akin to the Zeigarnik Effect in action.
We all get interrupted halfway through a task, whether through an intentional time limit (I can only work on this for an hour) or a clash of priorities (I want to write, but my partner rightly thinks I should unload the dishwasher like I promised).
On a good day, we can harness those interruptions to come back to the project refreshed, but on a bad day the Zeigarnik Effect will make us grouchy, stressed out, and prone to procrastination.
This is particularly true if your life involve multiple tasks or priorities that rely on your ability to engage in deep, focused work, and you frequently put down one complex task in order to start another.
Deep, focused work is tiring as hell, especially when done back-to-back.
More importantly, it’s consuming if you step away before you’re ready to — big projects used to haunt me when they were unfinished. The Ovsiankina impulse to get back to them and clear the decks was too strong.
I often manged badly. Getting up in the middle of the night and do a few extra hours work just to clear my head, lest insomnia kick my ass.
If I couldn’t do that, I’d get overwhelmed and grumpy… and that grumpiness soon turned into anxiety and depression.
Here’s the thing about writing and publishing: even when your full time, it’s a gig with a lot of small, bitty tasks that need doing. It’s never just writing the story, it’s submitting and publishing and marketing and interviews.
Couple that with the bigger problem: most writers and publishers aren’t working at it full time. It’s a priority among a sea of priorities, some of which put limits on our time.
So it pays to figure out how to play smart with your brain.
Tricking Your Brain Into Working For You
The nice thing about the Zeigarnik Effect is this: your brain’s management of open loops is insanely easy to trick.
If you’re walking away from a half-finished project, all it takes is jotting down when you’ll be resuming work and it’ll satisfy the part of your brain that wants to keep focused on it. Loop closed, temporarily, until you’re ready to re-open.
Better yet, it can work even if you don’t have the specific time in mind — one reason writing to-do lists is so soothing to our psyche is that the very act of writing them down closes open loops.
It’s also the reason to-do lists are so easy to ignore once they’re done — your brain files the entry away as “finished” now, and your subconscious is no longer gnawing at the unfinished stump of the task.
You can see echoes of this in many productivity systems, particularly the “next action” approach to tracking projects in one of the venerable heavyweights of the division, David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
Knowing how to put the brain in park is an essential skill for any writer, but as I hinted at the start of this essay, sometimes leaving an open loop on a complex project is hugely beneficial.
If I’m stuck on a scene in a novel, for example, it’s usually because I’m taking too few chances or writing to a cliche.
Leaving the work half-finished at the start or end of the day gives my subconscious an opportunity to draw unexpected connections, and by the next time I sit down to write, there will be a new slant or twist to make the scene.
The Second Half Of My Morning Routine
On a good day, I start with writing. On a great day, I follow my writing session with 15 minutes of brain-dump journaling.
I do this because open loops are incredibly useful to me in certain situations. In others, I want to close that loop off if the next major task on my list isn’t related to writing or I’m splitting my focus between multiple projects.
Ergo, I start my day with writing. I open the loop and use it to provide my through-line.
But I also brain dump major projects.
Whenever I need to set a project aside for a while—to get it out of my head so I can focus on other stuff—my first port of call is writing things down.
I usually start with a particular phrase: “here’s some interesting ideas for/problem I’m struggling with around <>”.
Then I’ll fill a page based on that prompt, or something like it. Occasionally, I’ll go a little further, but I try to keep it contained and simple — one page or fifteen minutes of focus.
Never more than half an hour or three pages of scribbled notes. The important thing is that it happens before I sit down to plan the coming day.
The brain dump journal may look like a brainstorming space, but that’s just an illusion. In truth, it’s a cheat that’s designed to let me have my cake and eat it too.
Leaving the project unfinished gives my subconscious time to noodle over the possibilities while I’m not meant to be working, and it’s rare I sit down in the morning without some fresh insight or connection that I hadn’t considered the day before.
Brain dumping before I start work for the day — or even planning/reviewing my work for the day — captures those insights and puts the project in “park” to clear my focus for the day ahead.
Writing things down closes the loop so it doesn’t drag on our focus.
This is especially useful when I’m making the switch from a fiction project to non-fiction, or from writing to editorial or mentoring work.
That would be perk enough, but over the years I’ve noticed projects that are ‘parked’ in the journal unfinished are typically easier to pick up after a break, even if I’ve left them to lie fallow for a week or more.
Sometimes I may have to go back and read the entry associated with it to collect the loose threads, but once that’s done, I can pick up where I left off and hit the ground running.
Just like the kids in Zeigarnik’s early experiment, the interruption improves my recall of the contours and specifics of the problem.
The One-Two Punch: Write First, Then Journal
The brain dump journal is a powerful tool for anyone splitting their focus between too many goals or identities, but not always an easy one to maintain.
Handwriting in a journal always felt like a luxury before I knew the psychology behind it, which meant it got set aside when things got too hectic and I wanted to focus on productive work.
It took diving into the work of Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina to wrap my head around why the journal was useful and essential, which made it easier to justify the habit when things get hectic.
Admittedly, you don’t need to embrace the journal — the process of interruption and “parking” projects by writing a next step can work just as effectively — but I’ve discovered that a kicking off with a writing session and a brain ump session l makes for a great lynchpin for the rest of my day.
Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:
- Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
- Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brian Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing drawn from some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
- One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writer festivals, and non-profit organisations.
