Make a plan, and the nagging stops

You know the feeling. You sit down to read, and halfway down the page your mind says: you still haven't sorted the insurance.

For a long time I thought the only cure was to do the thing. It turns out there's a quieter cure that works sooner: decide exactly how and when you'll do it.

Psychologists have noticed for about a century that unfinished tasks stick in the mind. It's often called the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik's studies of interrupted tasks in the 1920s. An open loop keeps asking for attention.

E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister wanted to know whether finishing is the only way to close the loop. In a series of studies, they reminded people of an important goal they hadn't yet completed. As expected, those goals got in the way. People had more stray thoughts about them while reading something unrelated, words linked to the goal came to mind more easily, and they did worse on a word puzzle.

Then came the useful part. When people made a specific plan for the unfinished goal, those effects disappeared. They hadn't done any of the task. They had only decided how they would do it. The paper's title says it well: "Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals" (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011). And the more seriously people made their plans, the better they worked.

So my mind isn't nagging me to finish. It's nagging me to decide. Once there's a real plan, it can let go for now.

But it has to be a real plan. "Sort out the insurance sometime" doesn't count. My test is three small words: what, when, where.

• What: compare two quotes and pick one.
• When: Wednesday, half past seven, after dinner.
• Where: at the kitchen table, with last year's papers.

It's close to the if-then plans in Name the obstacle, not just the dream: "If it's Wednesday after dinner, then I open the papers."

Scrum teams handle this at scale. Ideas and requests that can't be done now don't float around in people's heads. They go into the Product Backlog, which the Scrum Guide describes as "an emergent, ordered list" of what is needed (The Scrum Guide, Schwaber and Sutherland, 2020). The items near the top are refined until they're clear enough to start. Once a piece of work is written down and has its place in the order, nobody has to carry it around in their head during the sprint.

For me, a written list is the difference between twenty open loops and one page. The top three items each get a what, a when and a where. The rest can wait, because they're safely named.

When my head is noisy in the evening, I do this:

• write every open loop down, one line each, exactly as it nags me;
• circle the two or three that nag the loudest;
• give each of those a what, a when and a where;
• put the times in my calendar;
• close the notebook.

If you already do the evening habit from One worry, one line, this is its practical twin. That one names the worry. This one names the plan.

And if the list is long, sort it first with the four names in Four names for a worry. Some loops turn out to be Accepted and don't need a plan at all.

A plan isn't a spell. If Wednesday comes and I skip it, the nagging comes back, and it should. The research shows that a plan can quiet the mind. It doesn't show that a plan does the job. That part is still mine, and the tick on the Name it sheet is where I check it.

There's a second limit worth naming. A plan made just to get rid of the nagging, with no intention of keeping it, is a way of lying to myself. The studies point the other way: the more earnest the plan, the more it helped. So I only write times I mean.

I'm not a doctor, and this isn't therapy. It's a way of seeing that helps me. If you are struggling, please talk to someone you trust or a professional.

Your mind isn't asking you to finish tonight. It's asking you to decide. Name the what, the when and the where.