"Well begun is half done"

There's a scene in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins when the main character, Mary Poppins, played superbly by Julie Andrews, tells the two Banks children that they are going to play a game called "Well begun is half-done" (otherwise known as "Clean up the nursery").  The dialogue leads into the song, "A Spoonful of Sugar".  As it turns out, the phrase "Well begun is half-done" is an ancient Greek proverb which is traditionally thought to have come from Aristotle's work, Politics and suggests that a good beginning makes a good ending.  In other words, the stronger the start to a job or task, the better the finish.  I don't think I can argue with that logic, and I certainly won't try to outdo Aristotle!  Instead, I wanted to focus on the second half of the proverb, specifically the last two words - "half done".

Have you ever found yourself overly preoccupied or obsessed with a job that is left unfinished (i.e., "half done") on your "To Do" list?  It's a well-described phenomenon that was originally described by the psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, and it's called, appropriately enough, the Zeigarnik effect.  Zeigarnik first became interested in this phenomenon after her colleague (and a famous psychologist in his own right), Kurt Lewin noticed that his waiter remembered still unpaid orders better than those for customers who had already paid their bill.  In fact, once customers paid their bill, the waiter had completely forgotten what they had ordered.  Zeigarnik designed a series of experiments to study this further, publishing her research in the journal Psychologische Forschung in 1927 (the original article was published in German, though a translated version can be found without too much difficulty on the Internet).

The Zeigarnik effect is frequently leveraged in gamification (for example, progress trackers that show a how close users are to completely a task) and with the use of checklists.  Television shows also take advantage of the Zeigarnik effect when they have "cliffhangers" at the end of an episode or season.  Students often find that they forget a lot of the material that they studied (maybe even pulling an all-nighter) before an exam, once the exam is finished - again, that's the Zeigarnik effect at work!  

While leveraging the Zeigarnik effect can increase productivity, there is also a downside.  Unfinished tasks or activities can have a powerful effect, but if we are not careful, the Zeigarnik effect may force our minds to focus only on the unfinished task (which may not be the most important task to finish).  Useful strategies to avoid this counterproductive effect include time blocking, to-do lists, and prioritization.  

Like many cognitive biases, simply being aware of the pros and cons of the Zeigarnik effect is crucial.  "Well begun is half done," but remember too that "a job half done is as good as none."