What Viennese Waiters Can Teach You About To-Do Lists

Ever heard of the Zeigarnik Effect? It helps explain why you feel overwhelmed.

Bluma Zeigarnik first discovered this effect in the 1920's while sipping coffee in a Viennese coffee shop. She noted that a waiter she was observing was able to recall endless numbers of orders unless he had completed them. The definition of the Zeigarnik Effect is: the psychological tendency to remember an uncompleted task rather than a completed one. About twice as likely, in fact. If you doubt this, when was the last time you lay awake at night thinking about all the things you had completed that day?

Psychologists postulate that the tension created trying to remember what needs to be done helps you remember the tasks. Are you looking for more tension in your life? When your to-do list starts to rival the length of a 747 parts list, remind yourself that the average person can only accomplish ten tasks in an eight hour day. That total of ten tasks includes the ones that get added unexpectedly during the day (interruptions). When was the last time you had a day that went exactly as you scheduled it? So decrease your tension by scheduling less than ten tasks a day to allow for the unexpected.

A useful tool to help you discover how many interruptions you can expect in a day is an interruption log. Why not just use your memory? Because it's human nature to skew the data. When customer service reps were surveyed, they overwhelmingly responded that over 90% of the calls they received were negative and abusive. But after keeping a call log, it was determined that less than 10% of the calls were negative! We just have a stronger memory of the negative, because it stirs our emotions. Keeping the log helps you see the true patterns. Then you can identify your average number of interruptions. Subtract that average from ten, and you have a realistic number of tasks you can schedule in a day and still have a home life. [Download a free log from the “Links & Resources” page at OrganizingRx.com]

One final tip: When faced with an overwhelming task list, it’s tempting to consider multi-tasking. Let me tell you about the multi-tasking penalty. The Journal of Experimental Psychology had a paper showing it takes 4 times as long to process a task when you are multi-tasking (doing several tasks) than it would if you focused on each task one at a time.

Conclusion
What are you going to do as a result of what you read today? Start giving yourself a break with an attainable to-do list.