Tap into the “Hemingway effect” to finish what you start

Commencing a task without completing it can boost your productivity.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway had a curious approach to productivity, now known as the “Hemingway effect.” The secret to his success was recognizing the right time to call it a day: When Hemingway would arrive at an interesting juncture in his story and already knew how he wanted the next part of the tale to unfold, he would stop working, step away from his typewriter, and let his subconscious get to work.

While this approach might sound like the logic of an eccentric alcoholic novelist, scientific research supports Hemingway’s method: As psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik ate lunch at a restaurant in the 1920s, she was impressed by the waitstaff’s ability to memorize diners’ orders without writing them down. When Zeigarnik probed deeper, she discovered that the servers couldn’t remember those same orders as soon as the customers had left the restaurant. Zeigarnik’s subsequent research examining the intersection of tasks and memory discovered that incomplete tasks trigger an inner “psychological tension,” prompting subjects to easily recall...