You wake in the night ruminating on the 1,000 things on your task list
Does this sound familiar? You wake in the night and your thoughts are the equivalent of a rave in your head. You can catch pieces of them but there are so many you just hear snippets. Just as you form a plan to tackle one thing, it flashes onto the next one. They spin through your mind like a rolodex. You struggle to focus in the daytime when you know you could get so much done if you could just focus, and then feel even more frustrated the next night.
For business owners, this can become a familiar cycle. You spend the day trying to get through your workload, struggling to concentrate because there is so much to do, and then wake in the middle of the night worrying about everything you haven't finished. The very things you need to get on top of can end up making it harder to think clearly the following day.
The Zeigarnik effect: why unfinished tasks stay on your mind
This is related to the Zeigarnik effect, first discovered by Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. She noticed that waiters could remember minute details of the orders that hadn’t been completed, but once completed they couldn’t remember any of it.
The effect describes how unfinished tasks can remain more accessible in our memory than completed ones. In other words, our minds can keep returning to things we haven't finished, even when we would rather be thinking about something else.
But let's step back a bit – okay, a lot further – back to when the things we had to remember centred around our shelter, food and safety. Remembering unfinished tasks could have been important for survival. Finding food, securing shelter and dealing with threats were things we needed to remember and act on.
Today, however, those unfinished tasks are more likely to be emails, financial decisions, difficult conversations, deadlines and the endless list of things involved in running a business. The problem is that you aren't supposed to have 1,000 tasks that are open but just a few that were perfectly achievable. So you may have lain in bed with rain dripping through the roof you hadn't quite completed, but the next day you would have completed that task and moved on. Loop closed and let go.
The difference is that modern working life rarely gives us the satisfaction of finishing one thing before another arrives. Business owners in particular can have multiple projects, responsibilities and problems competing for their attention.
Why your brain won't switch off at night
We are surrounded by an extraordinary amount of information, demands and reminders. Add the responsibility of running a business and it is easy to see how your mind can become overloaded.
You can pretend that you can stay focused but you won't be able to because there are just too many things ‘open.’ So what can you do given you do probably have 1,000 things you are trying to stay focused on?
How to stop worrying about unfinished tasks
You need to close as many loops as possible. Bear with me, I know you are thinking that if you could have completed the tasks that you would have. However, you don't necessarily have to complete a task to make it easier to put it aside. You need to give your brain some reassurance that it won't be forgotten and that there is a plan for dealing with it.
Research into unfinished tasks and planning suggests that making a specific plan for when and how you will tackle something can help reduce the mental preoccupation associated with it. For example, writing down a set time and day you will complete the task can help you stop repeatedly rehearsing it in your head. It gives the task somewhere to go, rather than leaving it floating around in your thoughts.
This is where I become a fan of huge calendars or white boards – old school I know.
How planning my month helped me stop feeling overwhelmed
When I was once very overwhelmed I drew out a huge month calendar on my enormous white board and then I put in it every task I had to do – using what time I had available and taking into account social occasions, breaks etc. The enormous list in my head amounted to a full month of head down working. One month… all those things that kept me awake at night…one month.
I completed it. I felt a fabulous sense of achievement, I got shit done and I did work I had worried about for more than 6 months.
What had felt like an impossible amount of work was actually one month of work. I hadn't made the tasks disappear. I had simply stopped trying to hold every single one of them in my head at the same time.
Even now I diary block and map out my month. I do it digitally now and I move tasks around unexpected things (which you should also have factored in in your diary blocking anyway).
How to quieten your mind and close the open loops
So, how do you stop feeling full of spaghetti and treacle… close your loops.
Get the tasks out of your head and somewhere you can see them. Decide what needs doing, when you will do it and what can wait. Put those commitments into your diary, allowing some room for the unexpected.
You may not be able to finish everything today, but you can make a plan for what happens next. And sometimes, that is enough to help you switch off from work and get a better night's sleep