Thayer Prime’s Post

Transcript

Good afternoon and happy Friday. I'm back with another work therapy tip. This one has been really helpful to me, mostly in doing university, but just generally in life. This is really helpful, especially if you're somebody who finds it hard to get on with larger tasks, or perhaps you have ADHD, or perhaps you even suspect you do, but it's undiagnosed. This is going to be really helpful. There's something called the Zeigarnik effect, and this is part of Gestalt psychotherapy and psychology. Which is where when you want to do a task, if the task is too big, your brain will generally kind of go, "Nope, not doing that. I'm going to go do the cleaning. I'm going to play this game. I'm going to scroll TikTok." But one thing we can do is we can start the task. We can just start a small chunk of it. Just tell ourselves 2 minutes. And by doing that and then either continuing or stepping away, we triggered the Zeigarnik effect. What that means, or what Zeigarnik discovered, was that our brains like to finish things that we haven't completed. So rather than working out how on earth do I start this massive visitation project, proposal, whatever it might be, if we just start by opening a slide and doing the title, we just start by opening a document and writing the first sentence and then walk away. Go make a cup of tea. Your brain will keep working in the background and want you to come back to it. So if you're stuck today, either at work or on anything at all, just have a think. What's the smallest amount I can do on that thing? Even if it feels like the tidiest thing ever, give it a go. See if you can trigger your zirconic effect. Have a great weekend.