Willpower

secrets, most said they didn’t use special software or other elaborate tools. But a good many did say they followed the GTD system, which doesn’t require anything more complicated than pen, paper, and folders. As yet there’s no body of peer-reviewed research comparing GTDers with a control group. But there is evidence in the psychological literature of the mental stress that Allen observed. Psychologists have also been studying how to eliminate the monkey mind. They just use a different term for it.

The Zeigarnik Effect
    The discovery began, according to the legend among psychologists, with a lunch in the mid-1920s near the University of Berlin. A large group from the university went to a restaurant and placed their orders with a single waiter, who didn’t bother writing anything down. He simply nodded. Yet he served everyone’s food correctly, a feat of memory that impressed the group. They finished eating and left the restaurant, whereupon one person (the legend is unclear on exactly who) returned to retrieve an item that had been left behind. The person spotted the waiter and asked for help, hoping to benefit from his obviously excellent memory.
    But the waiter looked back blankly. He had no idea who the patron was, much less where the person had sat. When asked how he could have forgotten everything so quickly, the water explained that he remembered each order only until it was served.
    One of the scholars, a young Russian psychology student named Bluma Zeigarnik, and her mentor, the influential thinker Kurt Lewin, pondered this experience and wondered if it pointed to a more general principle. Did the human memory make a strong distinction between finished and unfinished tasks? They began observing people who were interrupted while doing jigsaw puzzles. This research, and many studies in the following decades, confirmed what became known as the Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.
    A good way to appreciate the Zeigarnik effect is to listen to a randomly chosen song and shut it off halfway through. The song is then likely to run through your mind on its own, at odd intervals. If you get to the end of the song, the mind checks it off, so to speak. If you stop it in the middle, however, the mind treats the song as unfinished business. As if to keep reminding you that there is a job to be done, the mind keeps inserting bits of the song into your stream of thought. That’s why when Bill Murray in Groundhog Day keeps shutting off “I Got You Babe” on his clock radio, the tune keeps going through our minds (and keeps driving him crazy). And that’s why this kind of ear worm is so often an awful tune rather than a pleasant one. We’re more likely to turn off the bad one in midsong, so it’s the one that returns to haunt us.
    Why would the mind inflict “I Got You Babe” on itself? Psychologists have generally assumed that earworms are an unfortunate byproduct of an otherwise useful function: the completion of tasks. How the Zeigarnik effect works has been explained by various theories over the years, including two rival hypotheses that dominated the debate. One hypothesis was that the unconscious mind is keeping track of your goals and working to make sure they’re accomplished, so these stray conscious thoughts are actually a reassuring sign that your unconscious will stay on the case until the job is done. The rival hypothesis was that the unconscious mind is seeking help from the conscious mind: Like a small child tugging at the sleeve of an adult to get attention and help, the unconscious mind is telling the conscious mind to finish the task.
    But now there’s a newer and better explanation for the Zeigarnik effect, thanks to some recent experiments conducted by E. J. Masicampo, a graduate student at Florida State working with Baumeister. In one study, he assigned some students to think about their most important final examination. Others, in a control condition, thought about the most important party pending on their social calendar. Among the ones who thought about the exam, half were also told to make specific plans of what, where, and when they would study. But nobody did any actual studying during the experiment.
    Then everyone performed a task that contained a subtle measure of the Zeigarnik effect. They were given word fragments and instructed to