The graveyard of unfinished side-projects
Nothing like a rainy Sunday to allow me to write another blog post. As I open my favourite writing application, there’s a folder called ‘graveyard’, mostly filled with side-projects I never finished.
The graveyard of unfinished side-projects keeps on growing. It’s a virus clouding my mind.
Why do unfinished projects cloud my mind so much? Why does a task I decided to stop, still bother me later?
According to my research, there are two psychological effects that are the cause here: the Zeigarnik effect and the Ovsiankina effect.
Recently, in my productive procrastination post, I touched upon the Zeigarnik effect. The effect describes that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
The Ovsiankina effect can be seen as a sibling effect of the Zeigarnik effect. Ovsiankina’s research focuses on the urge to resume a task. The effect states that an interrupted task creates a ‘quasi-need’, which is driving intrusive thoughts, urging us to resume the task, and potentially resulting in cognitive dissonance if the task is never finished.
So the task sits in our head, and our brain keeps asking us to come back to it. It triggers us.
- Visit this blog post
- Learn about Zeigarnik
- Learn about Ovsiankina
- Interact with this list
- Try to complete this list
The need for closure
So if we’re this eager to finish things, why is my graveyard still growing?
In social psychology, Kruglanski et al. state that our need for closure exerts via two tendencies: urgency and permanence.
The urgency tendency is the inclination to attain closure as quickly as possible. The permanence tendency is the tendency to maintain closure for as long as possible. We try to get closure so badly, that we sometimes even stop our critical thinking—just to get there. A great example is the importance we get from first impressions, by doing so we are opting for the easy path to closure.
That felt good, didn't it?
These effects can be used to our (dis)advantage. TV shows use cliffhangers to keep us triggered to resume watching. Many gamification effects rely on our need for closure—the ‘complete your profile’ pattern is a great example: showing a set of tasks to get a value to 100%.
Lack of closure
What if we do not seem to want closure?
Sometimes we avoid closure to avoid the negative effects associated with closing a task—or at least, the negative effects in our mind. Judgement. Facing our guilt.
Or we just do not want to put in the effort to attain closure. We could also avoid dealing with the unpleasantness of working on the task at all.
Lack of closure can also have advantages to us: freedom from a commitment, neutrality or ‘ignorance is bliss’. Keeping projects in draft states preserves ambiguity.
However, that’s not quite all for me. Some of my side projects were just never good enough to become a real thing. And is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, I’ve explored a specific direction, often I’ve learned something new, and frequently I lose interest. Sounds familiar?
What can we do?
A study by Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) shows that making a specific plan for an unfinished task removes its cognitive burden almost as well as finishing the task does. So we don’t actually have to finish the task. We just have to have a plan.
The other option is to kill it. Erase, or archive, as long as that counts as closure to us.
For me, the status of an unfinished side-project is ambiguous. When I archive it, the status is clear. I killed the project.
Having a graveyard is completely normal, most of us have one right now. It’s the stewing that clouds our mind.
So, stop stewing. Plan it, or kill it.
At least, this post is fini